News

Germany's automotive industry heavyweights, the Volkswagen Group and Mercedes-Benz, want to cooperate more closely with Canada in the future. During Chancellor Olaf Scholz's (SPD) visit to Canada, both companies signed declarations of intent on electromobility in Toronto on Tuesday.

In addition to the existing "News" section, so-called one-pagers can now also be accessed on the UnLimited website. These feature short essays by the individual project partners with a scientific-technical focus - summarized on one page.

From now on, the "Question and Answer (Q&A)" section can be found on the UnLimited homepage. In addition to general questions about the UnLimited project, the questionnaire deals with technical, ecological, and economic questions about lithium extraction from deep geothermal waters.

Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection, the partners in the UnLimited research project are developing and testing an extraction process for the co-production of lithium from hot deep waters in Germany. One year after the start of the project, operations to implement the DLE technology at selected test sites are up and running.

Lithium represents one of the key raw materials for implementing the transportation transition. Due to its specific properties, the light metal is not substitutable in current lithium-ion batteries, regardless of the battery composition. The total demand for lithium is currently still covered by the primary supply from mining production. Thus, the secondary sector does not play a role in this context so far. Looking ahead to 2040, this will change.

To better identify future price and supply risks in the supply of lithium, the German Mineral Resources Agency (DERA) held a digital industry workshop on this topic at the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) on June 23, 2022, together with industry representatives.

As part of the UnLimited research project, a lithium workshop around extraction techniques of lithium from geothermal brines was held at Geotherm 2022 last Friday, June 3.

Under the headline "Geothermal lithium: dream or reality?" an international workshop on lithium extraction from deep geothermal waters took place at the GW-SDG in Paris on May 19, 2022.

To characterize the fluid residence times in the reservoir, an artificial marking of the thermal water circuit started at the UnLimited test site in Bruchsal at the end of February 2022. For this purpose, a defined amount of a conservative tracer was injected at the reinjection well. The dimensioning and evaluation of the artificial fluid tracer is carried out by the Unlimited research team of the University of Göttingen.

The UnLimited research project invites you to participate in the workshop "Extraction technologies from geothermal brines for lithium recovery" at this year's Geotherm in Offenburg. The focus will be on the technical approaches and processes of lithium extraction from geothermal brines, as well as further processing. Participation in the workshop is free of charge for all Geotherm visitors.