Electrochemical technologies for lithium recovery from liquid resources: A review

With the rapid increase of various electronic products with lithium-ion batteries in our daily life, it is difficult to provide enough supplement to satisfy the growing demand of the market only through exploiting limited lithium resources on land. Consequently, lithium recovery from salt-lake brines, geothermal brines, wastewater from the treatment of wasted batteries, or even sea water has attracted great interest all around the world due to the abundant reserves and low price. Nowadays, various conventional technologies such as solar evaporation-precipitation way have been widely applied to extract lithium from the aqueous solution. Unfortunately, they are always time-consuming, uncontrollable with the secondary pollution generation. Recently, various electrochemical technologies have been received considerable attention for lithium recovery owing to their time-saving, little environmental impact as well as high efficiency. Herein, progresses for lithium recovery using the electrochemical technologies were outlined and discussed based on the previous studies reported in the literatures. The principles, advantages and challenges of electrochemical technologies were critically reviewed. Even though these methods are technically feasible, they are still limited by the poor technical maturity for the large-scale lithium recovery. Thence, more efforts should be made in the future development of electrochemical technologies for improving lithium selectivity as well as material stability, and simultaneously reducing some energy consumption and investing and operating costs. It could provide guidance on the development and design of more attractive electrochemical methods for lithium recovery from liquid resources, which will contribute to achieving the sustainable and renewable society.