Fracking as a Means to Meet EV Battery Demand?

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Electrifying the transportation sector is a key lever toward reducing global carbon emissions aligned with consensus targets to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Vehicle electrification at scale requires a substantial increase in the use of critical minerals (such as lithium for electric vehicle batteries) compared to today’s levels, so finding additional sources of lithium to meet demand is essential. New research found that wastewater produced in hydraulic fracturing operations in Pennsylvania contains large quantities of lithium, enough to meet the lithium demand equivalent to nearly 100,000 Tesla Model 3s. Current management practices of hydraulic fracturing wastewater and uncertainties about the recoverability of lithium from the wastewater streams could limit this as a viable source, but US governmental incentives could spur enough innovation to make its recovery viable at an industrially important scale.

Background on Lithium and its Uses 

If you’re anything like me, you probably didn’t think about the word lithium until around 1991 when Nirvana released their hit album Nevermind. “Lithium” was the third single from that album, peaking at 64 on the US Billboard charts.

Global chatter around “lithium” has dramatically increased in recent years, though, owed mainly to its importance in high-performance batteries used in electric vehicles (EVs). Let’s take a look at how “lithium” and “EV battery” have trended based on US Google searches:

As we’ve discussed before at Sustainability at the Frontier, the transportation sector creates around 20% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and electrifying the transportation sector is an important lever to reduce the reliance on gas- and diesel-powered vehicles and, therefore, GHG emissions. Although numerous innovations contributed to the increased deployment of EVs globally, arguably the development of the lithium-ion battery has had the greatest impact. We won’t go into the entire history here (this is a nice writeup), but the short story is that early lithium-ion batteries were developed beginning in the 1970s by a chemist at Exxon-Mobil, and further developments by two other scientists in the 1980s and 1990s more or less got us where we are today (the trio was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry). The big innovations provided by lithium-ion batteries were their rechargeability and relatively lighter weight compared to other battery chemistries, making them suitable for a range of applications.

In 2024, around 87% of lithium used in production will go into a battery, which is astounding, and far more than any other use of lithium. Data from the United States Geological Survey’s Mineral Commodity Summary for Lithium shows the different areas where lithium is used:

We’ve now established how the bulk of lithium used in industrial production goes to batteries, but we’re still in the early stages of large-scale electrification of the transportation sector. This begs the question - what will the demand for lithium look like in the future? The International Energy Agency estimates that when compared to lithium demand in the year 2020, 42 times more lithium will be needed by 2040:

Data from the US Geological Survey indicate that most of the 180,000 tons of lithium produced annually globally come from just 22 mineral, mining, or brine operations, none of which are in the United States. Because lithium demand is expected to spike in the future, researchers and other practitioners in the field are working to understand how the demand will be met. As a related aside, the US Inflation Reduction Act, Defense Production Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law all in some way support the clean energy transition (including battery technology) and there are massive financial incentives intended to spur more domestic production of lithium, in part to address potential supply risks from other countries that currently dominate global lithium production (here’s some great analysis on the topic by researchers at Columbia University).

With this massive uptick in lithium demand in mind and a new push for more domestic (US) production of lithium, let’s turn to a newly-published study from National Energy Technology Laboratory researchers in the journal Scientific Reports that highlights a somewhat surprising potential domestic (US) source of lithium to help meet demand: produced water from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) operations in Pennsylvania.

New Study - Estimates of Lithium from Fracking Operations in Pennsylvania 

Before digging into the details of the study, let’s examine some basics about how fracking works. Here’s my one-sentence description: A well is drilled into the earth where oil and natural gas exist, after which fluid and sand are injected under pressure to release the oil and gas - the oil and gas is collected. The resulting water (a mixture of the injected water and waters already present in the area of injection called produced water) is brought to the surface. Here’s a short clip depicting this process:

In addition to great cheesesteaks, Hershey Park, and the Crayola crayon factory, Pennsylvania is also home to a large swath of the Marcellus Shale formation, which is where about 20% of US natural gas production derives and is expected to be a key source of oil and natural gas supply for the foreseeable future.

Researchers in this new study point out that the Marcellus Shale was formed during the Devonian Period in geologic time - around 400 million years ago - and the formation contains volcanic ash relatively rich in lithium. So when fracking operations occur, the produced water contains many mineral remnants, including lithium. The researchers further acknowledge that, for the most part, there are few beneficial uses for the produced water made during fracking operations - nearly all produced water undergoes some treatment process and then is recycled as injection fluid - so they set out to explore just how much lithium may be there. If the amount of lithium is substantial, it could create a silver lining (a new domestic source of lithium that can be used in EV batteries) from oil and gas operations (which are big targets for reduction as part of decarbonizing the energy sector).

It turns out that Pennsylvania’s regulations require oil and gas operators to track and report various types of data, including (i) the volume of produced water that flows from each fracking well, (ii) analytical data on chemicals found in the produced water, and (iii) other operational, locational, and characteristic data for each well. You can go here and explore the data for yourself. To answer their key research question, the study authors had to figure out:

1. What’s the lithium concentration in fracking wells throughout Pennsylvania, and how does that vary? To answer this question, they examined 595 chemical analysis reports from 515 different fracking wells.

2. How much produced water is made per well, and how does that change over time? They examined data from more than 2,500 wells to answer this question and some statistical modeling to account for the decline in water produced over time.

Here’s a figure showing their specific focus areas:

Their key result: The average lithium concentration in produced water was 127 and 205 milligrams per liter (mg/L) in Southwest and Northeast Pennsylvania, respectively. If you’re not used to dealing with chemical concentrations, let’s put that result in context: drop a single marble into a 2-liter bottle filled with water. The marble roughly represents the amount of lithium in the produced water analyzed in this study.

The investigators further found that the average annual creation of produced water in the study area was just short of 9 billion liters. Based on the concentration of lithium, coupled with the amount of produced water created, the researchers calculated a likely theoretical recovery amount of lithium of 1,160 metric tons per year. Here’s a figure putting that lithium quantity in context:

This is a pretty staggering and compelling result, but there are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Remember our 2040 lithium demand discussion - we expect demand to increase dramatically over the next 15+ years, so the amount of lithium available recovery would comprise a smaller proportion of total future US demand.

2. This is a theoretical maximum amount. If we put in a process to recover all of the available lithium from all fracking wells in PA, and if recovery efficiency was 100%, we’d yield 1,160 metric tons per year. In reality, we’d expect only a subset of wells to be covered, and recovery efficiencies would likely be less than 100% in those locations.

How Might Lithium Harvesting from Produced Waters Reach a Meaningful Scale?

Regardless of the contextual notes we provided about how the computed lithium available represents a theoretical maximum and that demand for lithium will increase in the future, the finding from this work is compelling and suggests that this pathway may be feasible for lithium extraction in some cases. The researchers point out that the lithium concentration and produced water volumes in some areas are similar to existing production-scale lithium extraction operations (e.g., in Chile). However, they also point out how much of the fracking operations in the Marcellus Shale region have been optimized over time to maximize the reuse of produced water for further fracking - inserting a new process to explicitly extract lithium could create additional cost or logistical burdens.

Current recovery processes for lithium contained in water typically involve evaporating some of the water and then extracting the lithium. Some emerging technologies—yet to be proven at a commercial scale—more directly target lithium recovery, and dozens of projects are demonstrating the technology and creating critical information like operational efficiency, cost, and more. It remains to be seen whether technological development can overcome some existing barriers to recovering lithium from previously underexplored sources like produced water from fracking.

Final Insights and Takeaways

Here are a couple of concluding insights and takeaways to consider:

1. Value of Open Data. The research highlighted here is yet another example of an unexpected positive benefit from open data systems. Do you think Pennsylvania regulators required oil and gas production operations to monitor chemicals in produced water because they thought there was a trove of valuable stuff in produced water? Highly doubtful. However, requiring the analytical data to be open and available to the public allowed this research team to draw some fascinating and industrially important conclusions. There are many other examples (e.g., I’ve published numerous research papers that leveraged expansive data sets made publicly available because of the US Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program). So, an action for readers who are in corporate sustainability or are active researchers could be: what problems you’re trying to solve now might be helped by harvesting existing open data sources today?

2. New Clean Energy Incentives as Drivers for Innovation. The core of the work highlighted here falls under the broad umbrella of “beneficial use,” which is a term often used to describe finding a productive outlet for something that may otherwise be considered a waste product (other examples include using crushed recycled glass or ground-up shingles in asphalt mixtures, using combustion ashes in concrete, and many more). The influx of US government support and incentives for clean energy, coupled with the urgency to decarbonize, is creating new opportunities in unexpected areas and ways. Time will tell if the promise of meeting some of our growing lithium demand will be met via fracking water recovery.

3. Results in Context - Fracking to Get Lithium. I’ve deliberately avoided a question you may be asking: “Wait, is there an implicit suggestion that we should be fracking so that we may recover the lithium needed to meet demand?” It’s anybody’s guess how the energy mix will look in the US in the future, but projections suggest fracking will be a major part of the energy mix for several years, although its proportion has declined. I think one way to look at it is that - if lithium recovery technologies prove successful, are economically competitive, do not create severely negative environmental consequences, etc. - then produced water from fracking may represent a compelling new lithium source. But keep in mind that it’s not the only new source beyond mining. Another encouraging note (again, spurred in part by several of the US federal bills that support the clean energy transition) is that major investment is also happening in battery recycling technologies that can use or otherwise harvest the lithium and other valuable minerals after a battery reaches the end of its initial useful life. A nice outcome may be that lithium extraction from produced water, along with other novel technologies and sources, creates a bridge until we have enough lithium in products that are then effectively recovered and reused through battery recycling technologies.

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