Fishlike Nanorobots Could Become America’s Answer to China’s Lithium Grip
- Texas A&M researchers, backed by $1 million in Department of Energy funding, are developing fishlike nanorobots that pull lithium directly from seawater.
- China controls a quarter of global lithium mining and 60 percent of EV-battery-grade refining capacity, giving Beijing major leverage over the energy transition.
- The nanorobot project is one of 19 DOE-funded efforts, alongside a separate Argonne National Laboratory membrane technology, aimed at building a domestic lithium supply chain.
Lithium has become a hot-button geopolitical issue as the critical mineral has become omnipresent and all-important in the tech and energy sectors. Chances are very good that you have more than one device powered by a lithium-ion battery within arm’s reach at this very moment, and chances are equally as good that that battery was made in China. At present, China has a near-chokehold on global lithium supplies and refining capacity, granting Beijing significant geopolitical leverage. Moreover, as the world continues its trajectory toward a clean energy transition, now catalyzed by the war in Iran, control over lithium supply chains will only become more critical for global energy security.
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) has said that lithium demand for battery-making alone will likely increase by a factor of ten in the decade between 2020 and 2030, and a 2023 report from Popular Mechanics calculated that “an electrified economy in 2030 will likely need anywhere from 250,000 to 450,000 tonnes of lithium.” This represents a massive boom in production and refining capacities worldwide. For reference, “In 2021, the world produced only 105—not 105,000—tonnes.”
At present, Chinese companies control one quarter of the world’s lithium mining capacity and 60 percent of the world’s refining capacity for EV-battery-grade lithium. More than three-quarters of the world’s lithium-ion batteries are produced in China today. And, what is more, by next year, China will overtake Australia to become the single largest lithium miner in the world. All of this leads to a dangerous imbalance in global supply chains, creating supply chain precarity and granting Beijing enormous geopolitical leverage.
It is therefore in the United States’ best interest, economically and geopolitically, to diversify battery supply chains and homeshore the production of primary materials in order to break China’s chokehold. The United States is home to considerable natural lithium deposits, with new major deposits being discovered all the time, most notably in Nevada and Arkansas. The country already has one functioning lithium mine, the Silver Peak mine in Nevada’s Esmeralda County. But lithium extraction is a dirty business, with considerable environmental downsides including intensive water demand and the production of hazardous heavy metals.
But a new method of lithium extraction may allow the United States to build up a domestic lithium sector while also sidestepping these considerable negative externalities. Researchers at Texas A&M University in College Station have begun to develop fishlike nano-robots capable of extracting lithium directly from seawater, where the ‘white gold’ naturally exists in abundance. The project is supported by one million dollars in funding from the US Department of Energy.
“Our goal is to develop a technology that supports a more reliable domestic lithium supply chain while reducing the environmental footprint associated with traditional extraction methods,” says Jingjing (Jenny) Qiu, a leader of the project. “Unlike traditional mining that digs up land or pumps brine from underground and requires massive amounts of energy, these autonomous micro/nanorobots move freely through seawater to harvest lithium with virtually zero infrastructure footprint,” Qiu went on to say.
This initiative is one of 19 projects that the Department of Energy is funding in order to build up domestic lithium supply chains in a bid to stay competitive with China and to maintain domestic energy autonomy and security. It’s also not the only initiative focused on tapping into the enormous wealth of critical minerals present in seawater. Another project from the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago uses a membrane made of vermiculite to “[filter] lithium ions with remarkable efficiency, offering a potential domestic alternative to traditional mining,” according to Interesting Engineering.
