Lithium recovery using aqueous sources
AssigneeSchlumberger Technology Corporation
InventorsGary W. Sams, Dominic Vincent Perroni, Prasanna Nirgudkar, Florence Binet, Rod William Shampine, Sandeep Verma, Wenlin Zhang
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Abstract
Described herein are methods of recovering lithium from dilute lithium sources. The methods include concentrating a dilute aqueous lithium source to yield an extraction feed having an extraction lithium concentration; extracting lithium from the extraction feed using direct lithium extraction in an extraction stage to yield a lithium intermediate; concentrating a stream obtained from the lithium intermediate in a concentration stage to yield a lithium concentrate; and converting lithium in the lithium concentrate to lithium hydroxide.
Claims16
A method of recovering lithium from a lithium source, comprising:
- extracting lithium from an extraction feed using direct lithium extraction in an extraction stage to yield a lithium intermediate;
- concentrating the lithium intermediate or a derivative thereof in an impurity preparation stage to yield an impurity stage feed, wherein the impurity preparation stage comprises a counter-flow reverse osmosis process to concentrate the lithium intermediate;
- and
- treating the impurity stage feed or a derivative thereof in an impurity stage to selectively remove impurities and to form a purified lithium stream, wherein the removed impurities include at least one of divalent impurities and transition metals.
A method of recovering lithium from an extraction feed, comprising:
- separating lithium from the extraction feed using a lithium selective electrochemical separation process;
- and
- concentrating lithium using a concentration process comprising counter-flow reverse osmosis operation,
- further comprising, prior to concentrating lithium using a counter-flow reverse osmosis process, forming a preconcentrated lithium stream and a low TDS stream using a reverse osmosis process, routing the preconcentrated lithium stream to the counter-flow reverse osmosis operation, and recycling the low TDS stream, including recycling the low TDS stream to the lithium selective electrochemical separation process.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.