AN ANCIENT VOLCANO BENEATH NEVADA and Oregon could hold the largest deposit of lithium ever found, scientists revealed last summer in a peer-reviewed paper published in Science Advances.
This section of land-called Thacker Beginning to extract the lithium in earnest would change the landscape for everything from electric-vehicle batteries to lithium-ion smartphone batteries, and could even hasten the switch toward renewable energy plants that rely on grid storage. But setting up a mine to extract the massive deposit of lithium in Thacker Pass is not a simple task: It will require a wholly new process to separate the lithium from its natural clay deposit.
Volcanic Beginnings // In 1817, Swedish chemist Johan August Arfwedson first discovered lithium in nature as the mineral petalite, in which it is just one of 16 atoms per molecule. Other abundant naturally occurring mineral sources include lepidolite, spodumene, and amblygonite, which range from about 10 percent to 40 percent lithium. Minerals like these are mined, and typically electrified, in order to separate out the commercial form of lithium: lithium carbonate.
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