SALT LAKE CITY — The lithium bonanza continues at the largest saline system in the West, but a new company says it can harvest the mineral in a way that doesn't contribute to ecological collapse.
"We think we can do this without evaporating anything," said Raef Sully, chief operating officer for Lilac Solutions, "and putting the same volume back that we take out." "It's orders of magnitude less" than the water sought from the Great Salt Lake, Sully said. "The net of that is a slightly larger amount of water going back into the lake than we extract."
The reason the Waterleaf outfit requires all that water, Sully said, is because the concentrations at the Great Salt Lake are relatively small — 50 parts per million versus 1,000 parts per million or more found in brines harvested in South America, where Lilac is also testing its technology. "What we would like to do is be part of an energy transition away from fossil fuels," Sully said. "But to get that lithium, there are concerns about how it's done today and the environmental footprint it has. We'd like to think our technology has the opportunity to reduce that dramatically."