Geothermal power plants can help us make batteries

No, we are not kidding.

Geothermal energy is heat energy from the earth’s crust.

Some regions of the world (think Iceland) are blessed with massive geothermal activity right under their surface. Such regions are ideal for setting up geothermal power that can use the hot water from under the earth to run a turbine and generate power.

The interesting thing about the hot geothermal waters is that, these also contain small amounts of many metals, and that includes Lithium. And Lithium is the sought after metal today because it forms the main material in Li-ion batteries that power everything from our electronics to electric vehicles.

This provides the geothermal power plants an excellent opportunity to double up as an important source of raw material for energy storage, in addition to generating clean power!

By the way

The concentration of Lithium in geothermal waters is not very high – about half a gram per liter of brine – but given that Lithium could fetch good prices (US $55/Kg as of Feb 2023) in a fast growing market, and a large geothermal power plant could be processing over a million liters of brine per hour, there is indeed an interesting business case for extracting Lithium from geothermal power plants.