Herausforderungen und Chancen f\"ur die Lithiumgewinnung aus geothermalen Systemen in Deutschland

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the potential for lithium extraction from geothermal systems in Germany, analyzing technological options, market demand, and estimating a capacity of around 4,000 tons annually.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive assessment of lithium extraction technologies and scenarios specific to Germany's geothermal resources, highlighting strategic importance and potential capacity.

Findings

Estimated extractable lithium carbonate: 4,000 tons/year

Compared and evaluated various extraction technologies

Identified challenges and opportunities for domestic lithium supply

Abstract

The work presented here offers an approach to estimate the technological status of lithium extraction from geothermal waters in Germany based on current scientific studies, as well as to evaluate the associated challenges. For this purpose, the predicted worldwide lithium market, as well as the enormously increasing German demand due to the planned development of a domestic battery cell production are presented. From the strongly growing demand, a complete dependence on poorly diversified global market, a highly strategic importance of a possible domestic source can be derived. In particular, the study compares and evaluates different technologies for lithium extraction from thermal waters such as liquid-liquid extraction, inorganic sorbents, electrochemical methods, and membrane technologies in terms of their applicability in geothermal systems. Based on the technology comparison and the current expansion of geothermal energy in Germany, different scenarios for the extractable amount of lithium carbonate from geothermal systems in Germany and the French side of the Upper Rhine Graben were calculated. Thus, taking into account all currently active wells, a total extraction capacity of about 4,000 tons of lithium carbonate per year can be predicted.