Sustainable Lithium Extraction: The Brine Method That Recovers 95%

Materials Science · Clean Energy

The world is about to need more lithium than anyone currently knows how to mine.

A new extraction method out of Australia might buy us more time than another mine ever could.

Lithium brine evaporation ponds, like these at the Salar de Atacama, can take months or years to yield usable lithium — and lose up to half of it in the process.

The Lithium Gap Nobody's Talking About

Every conversation about the electric-vehicle transition eventually runs into the same quiet problem: the batteries need lithium, and the world doesn't currently have an obvious way to mine enough of it. The International Energy Agency projects that lithium demand for EVs alone could reach around 665,000 tonnes by 2035. Planned and existing mining projects, by contrast, are on track to produce roughly 450,000 tonnes.

That's not a small shortfall to close with a few new mines. It's a structural gap between how fast the world wants to electrify and how fast the current lithium supply chain can actually keep up — and it's arriving at the same time renewable-energy storage is placing its own, separate demands on lithium battery production.

A new method developed at Monash University in Melbourne doesn't close that gap by itself, but it attacks one of the most stubborn inefficiencies inside it: how much lithium gets left behind, unrecovered, in the very process meant to extract it.

That distinction matters more than it might first appear. Most public conversation about the lithium shortage focuses on where to dig new mines, or how quickly permits can be approved. Far less attention goes to a simpler question: of the lithium sitting in brine deposits the industry already has access to, how much of it is actually being recovered? The answer, it turns out, is a lot less than it could be — and closing that recovery gap doesn't require opening a single new mine.

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Why the World Suddenly Needs So Much More Lithium

Electric vehicles accounted for more than a quarter of all global car sales last year, according to the International Energy Agency, and that share is still climbing. Every one of those vehicles needs a battery, and nearly every one of those batteries needs lithium at its core.

Zhikao Li, a chemical and biological engineer at Monash University, points out that EV demand isn't the only pressure building on lithium supply. Grid-scale battery storage for renewable electricity — the systems that let solar and wind power keep the lights on after sunset or when the wind drops — draws on the same lithium supply chain, competing for the same limited output.

Put those two demand curves together, and it becomes clear why simply "mining more" isn't a fast enough answer on its own. The industry needs to get more lithium out of the resources it already has access to, not just find new deposits to dig up.

Grid storage in particular is easy to underestimate, because it's largely invisible to ordinary consumers in a way that EVs are not. Nobody sees the battery banks smoothing out a solar farm's output after sunset, or backing up a wind installation during a lull. But utilities are building those systems out aggressively precisely because intermittent renewable power is only as useful as the storage sitting behind it, and lithium-ion remains the default chemistry most grid operators reach for.

Every EV battery pack rolling off a production line like this one represents another claim on the world's limited lithium supply.

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Inside the World's Slowest Chemistry Lab

Roughly a quarter of the world's projected lithium supply is expected to come from brine deposits in Chile and Argentina, where producers pump naturally occurring lithium-rich brine out of underground aquifers and into vast, shallow evaporation ponds.

From there, the process is almost entirely passive. Sunlight and wind slowly concentrate the brine over a period that can stretch from months into years, until the lithium-rich salts left behind are dense enough to be recovered and processed further.

It works, but not efficiently. Brine is a cocktail of many different dissolved salts, each with its own solubility, and as water evaporates away, the least soluble salts crystallize out first. Lithium salts are some of the last to separate — which means by the time they're ready to be collected, a lot of time, water, and land have already been spent getting there.

Scale is part of what makes this process so land- and water-intensive. A single evaporation-pond operation can sprawl across many square kilometers of desert, arranged as a sequence of connected ponds that each concentrate the brine a little further than the last. Operators typically manage several ponds of varying ages at once, since a full evaporation cycle can take longer than a single season to complete. It's a patient, almost agricultural process being used to produce one of the most in-demand industrial metals on the planet.

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The Hidden Cost of Pumping Salt Water Into the Desert

Because lithium is one of the last salts to crystallize out of the brine, up to half of it can simply be left behind in the ponds by the time the process is considered finished. Producers then need extra fresh water just to purify what lithium they did manage to recover.

That fresh-water requirement is where the environmental cost really compounds. Huanting Wang, who is developing alternative extraction methods at Monash, is blunt about the core limitation: existing processes depend heavily on fresh water, and the whole process is slow to begin with.

Ehsan Vahidi, who studies metallurgical engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno, points out why that's especially concerning here: brine deposits tend to sit in arid or semi-arid regions where fresh water is already scarce to begin with. Researchers studying the broader impact of brine mining also point to real consequences for local Indigenous communities and the wetland ecosystems that depend on the same water sources.

These aren't abstract concerns confined to research papers. Communities living near major brine operations in South America have raised long-standing questions about falling water tables and the health of nearby wetlands that support local wildlife and traditional livelihoods. None of that makes lithium mining unique among extractive industries — most large-scale resource extraction carries some environmental cost — but it does mean that any method capable of recovering more lithium per liter of brine, using less fresh water in the process, has a genuine claim to being more than just an efficiency upgrade.

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A Different Way to Pull Lithium From Brine

Direct lithium extraction, often shortened to DLE, is the umbrella term for a newer family of approaches that research teams and companies have been racing to commercialize. Instead of waiting on sun and wind to slowly concentrate a pond over months or years, these systems use membranes, solvents, and electrochemical processes to selectively pull lithium ions straight out of the brine.

The appeal is straightforward: faster turnaround, a smaller physical footprint, and — depending on the specific method — the possibility of using far less fresh water than traditional evaporation ponds require. The challenge has always been proving that a given DLE approach can actually deliver on those promises at a cost the industry is willing to pay.

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The Acetone Trick That Recovers 95% of the Lithium

Wang's team at Monash took a distinctive path toward that goal. Rather than trying to pull lithium ions directly out of liquid brine, they let the brine evaporate first, the same way traditional ponds do, until it formed a solid mixture of salts.

From there, instead of relying on further evaporation to separate the lithium salts out, the team used a mixture of acetone and ethanol to selectively dissolve just the lithium salts, leaving most of the other compounds in the mixture behind. In a laboratory study published last month, the researchers reported recovering around 95% of the lithium present in their samples — a dramatic improvement over the roughly 50% that traditional evaporation-only methods can leave stranded.

That's the part of this story that matters most: the fix isn't a wholesale replacement of the evaporation step, which is already cheap and simple. It's a smarter finishing move applied after it, targeting exactly the inefficiency that costs the industry the most lithium.

Direct lithium extraction pilot equipment — the kind of compact, chemistry-driven setup the Monash team's method could eventually be scaled into.

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Closing the Loop: Water and Solvents That Don't Go to Waste

The Monash team's own comparison suggests their method substantially reduces fresh-water use relative to traditional processes. Part of that comes from needing less purification water afterward, since more of the lithium is actually recovered the first time around.

The researchers also point to a further efficiency: the process could be paired with solar-powered systems that capture and condense the water evaporated during the initial brine-drying step, allowing it to be recycled rather than lost to the atmosphere entirely. The acetone and ethanol used in the dissolution step are also recoverable and reusable, rather than being consumed and discarded with each batch.

None of this eliminates water use from lithium mining altogether — no extraction method realistically can. But closing these particular loops chips away at exactly the resource constraint that makes brine mining most controversial in the arid regions where it happens.

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From Salt Flats to Industrial Waste Streams

One of the more interesting long-term possibilities Wang raises is that this technique could eventually be used to recover lithium from industrial waste streams and mining residues — material that, under current methods, is simply discarded as unusable.

If that turns out to be practical at scale, it would represent a genuinely different kind of lithium supply: not a new deposit pulled out of the ground, but lithium recovered from waste that's already been generated by other industrial processes. That's a meaningfully different resource profile than opening another salt flat to mining, both economically and environmentally.

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What Other Scientists Are Saying

Peter Sherrell, a materials scientist at RMIT University in Melbourne who wasn't involved in the work, sees real advantages in the approach — particularly the high rate of lithium recovery, and the fact that the solvents involved can be recovered and reused rather than consumed outright.

But he's careful not to overstate where things currently stand. Whether industry will actually invest in scaling the technology up to real-world deployment, he notes, remains an open question. A laboratory result — even a genuinely impressive one — is still a meaningful step away from a commercial mining operation built around it.

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The Global Stakes: Chile, Argentina, and Beyond

The countries with the most to gain or lose from how this technology develops are exactly the ones already producing the bulk of the world's brine-sourced lithium. Chile and Argentina's combined share of roughly a quarter of global lithium supply means that even incremental efficiency gains at existing operations could meaningfully shift the broader supply picture.

These regions are also where the environmental and social stakes are highest, given how directly evaporation-pond mining competes with local communities and ecosystems for scarce fresh water. A method that recovers more lithium while using less water meaningfully isn't just a laboratory efficiency story in these places — it's a direct answer to some of the loudest criticisms currently aimed at the industry.

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What Comes Next for Sustainable Lithium

The path from a peer-reviewed laboratory result to an industrial-scale mining process is rarely short, and lithium extraction is no exception. Questions around cost at scale, solvent supply chains, and how the process performs on the messier, less-controlled brine chemistry found in real deposits — rather than laboratory samples — will need real-world answers before this becomes standard practice.

Even so, the direction of travel across the lithium extraction field right now is unmistakable: away from purely passive, evaporation-only methods, and toward hybrid approaches that combine the low cost of evaporation with a more deliberate, chemistry-driven finishing step. Wang's acetone-based method is one entry in a wider field of DLE research racing toward the same goal from several different angles.

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Manohar Insight

What strikes me most about this story isn't the 95% recovery figure by itself, impressive as it is. It's that the fix targets the least glamorous part of the process — what happens to the salt after the pond has already done its slow, sun-powered work — rather than trying to reinvent brine mining from the ground up.

That's often where the most practical breakthroughs in resource extraction actually come from: not a wholesale replacement of an existing, cheap process, but a smarter finishing step bolted onto it. Evaporation ponds aren't going away any time soon — they're inexpensive and technologically simple. What changes is how much gets left behind once the pond has done its job.

If methods like this scale successfully, the next decade of lithium supply may depend less on finding new salt flats to mine, and more on stopping the industry from wasting the lithium it's already pulling out of the ground.