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the Salton Sea are available (Harrison 2014). EnergySource and Berkshire Hathaway have operating power plants at the Salton Sea and are planning lithium extraction demonstrations. Limited public information is available; however, detailed U.S. patent documents (e.g., Marston and Garska 2019) describe in detail the process proposed by EnergySource. Information from these Salton-Sea-focused projects together provide a template for a potential process for commercial lithium extraction from geothermal brine and expected costs. Lithium extraction at the Salton Sea will exploit lithium-rich fluids downstream from the power generation process. Figure 4 is a schematic of the power generation process for a typical Salton Sea power plant (Featherstone et al. 1995). Lithium extraction benefits from crystallizer and clarifier processes to remove silica and iron as pre-treatment for the power generation process. The feedstock for lithium extraction comes from downstream of the secondary clarifier. Figure 4. Simple schematic of power generation process at Salton Sea Figure from Featherstone et al. (1995) Simbol (Harrison 2014), SRI International (Ventura et al. 2020), EnergySource (Marston and Garska 2019), and Berkshire Hathaway Energy (BHER Minerals 2020) have proposed lithium- selective sorbents for lithium extraction from Salton Sea geothermal brines. Estimated costs based on detailed process modeling (Ventura et al. 2020) are $3,845/mt LCE, and Berkshire Hathaway Energy has a target price for their demonstration of <$4,000/mt LCE. EnergySource has not publicly provided costs, but their reported project development and construction costs (~$350 million), combined with internal rate of return in the range reported by companies proposing DLE (Table 3) and projected Li2CO3 price of $12,000/mt, suggests a cost near $4,000/mt LCE for planned production of 16,500 mt LCE per year (EnergySource 2021). Details provided next are based on EnergySource’s detailed process descriptions from patent applications (Marston and Garska 2019). Though other processes that might be commercialized at the Salton Sea will vary in design (e.g., BHER Minerals 2020), they will share many of the same process steps and likely have costs near $4,000/mt LCE. The impact of EnergySource’s proposed project, and the impact potential of the Salton Sea KGRA in total, is significant. 15 This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications.PDF Image | Lithium Extraction from Geothermal Brines
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Product and Development Focus for Infinity Turbine
ORC Waste Heat Turbine and ORC System Build Plans: All turbine plans are $10,000 each. This allows you to build a system and then consider licensing for production after you have completed and tested a unit.Redox Flow Battery Technology: With the advent of the new USA tax credits for producing and selling batteries ($35/kW) we are focussing on a simple flow battery using shipping containers as the modular electrolyte storage units with tax credits up to $140,000 per system. Our main focus is on the salt battery. This battery can be used for both thermal and electrical storage applications. We call it the Cogeneration Battery or Cogen Battery. One project is converting salt (brine) based water conditioners to simultaneously produce power. In addition, there are many opportunities to extract Lithium from brine (salt lakes, groundwater, and producer water).Salt water or brine are huge sources for lithium. Most of the worlds lithium is acquired from a brine source. It's even in seawater in a low concentration. Brine is also a byproduct of huge powerplants, which can now use that as an electrolyte and a huge flow battery (which allows storage at the source).We welcome any business and equipment inquiries, as well as licensing our turbines for manufacturing.CONTACT TEL: 608-238-6001 Email: greg@infinityturbine.com (Standard Web Page)