Review of Lithium Production and Recovery from Minerals, Brines, and Lithium-Ion Batteries

ABSTRACT

Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are widely employed in portable electric devices, electric vehicles (EVs), and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), indicating a potential increasing demand for LIBs over the next decade. Lithium, a critical element in LIBs, might encounter a potential supply crisis in the future. The irregular distribution of lithium mineral resources in countries and the unequal concentration in brine reserves also causes lithium extraction to be of critical importance. Today lithium is mainly recovered from minerals (especially spodumene) by acid, alkaline, and chlorination processes, and from brines by crystallization, solvent extraction, and ion-exchange processes. Regarding the secondary resources, i.e., recycling the spent LIBs, the recycling process consists of dismantling the LIBs, in some cases the separation of the cathode and anode materials, leaching of shredded material, and separation and recovery of metals. Nonetheless, the industry standard for recycling of LIBs currently is the pyrometallurgy processes, mostly are focused on the base metals recovery, such as cobalt and nickel, rather than lithium. Varying compositions of batteries for different applications require the development of a suitable and sustainable recycling process to recover metals from all types of LIBs. This paper provides a comprehensive review of lithium recovery processes that have already been studied and are currently in industrial practice, in the hope of providing some inspirations to explore new technologies for sustainable recovery of lithium from minerals, brines and LIBs.

KEYWORDS:

• Lithium
• lithium extraction
• recycling
• primary ores
• brines
• LIBs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Fei Meng expresses his gratitude to China Scholarship Council (CSC No. 201706050112) for the financial support he received for his study at the Queen’s University. Authors would like to thank Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC - RGPIN-2015-05718) for financial support.