Lithium: Why this environmental nightmare is still the king of batteries🔋🧪

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Take a moment to look at the smartphone in your hand, the laptop on your desk, or the electric vehicle parked silently in the driveway down the street. Inside, each of these marvels of modern engineering beats the exact same chemical hard. It possesses a electrochemical power so aggressive that it has entirely reshaped human civilization. This is lithium. Over the past three decades, we have fundamentally built our future on this single element. In 1991, the commercialization of the first rechargeable lithium ion batteries unfettered humanity from the wall socket, setting off a technological revolution that would eventually be recognized with the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But this heavy reliance brings up a crucial question. Why lithium? Why, out of all the 118 elements in the periodic table, are we so hopelessly dependent on atomic number three? Why can't we just swap it out for something cheaper, more abundant, or easier to mine, like sodium, magnesium, or aluminum? Welcome to Cube Chemistry, where we'll discuss all the elements of the periodic table and also do experiments. So, if you like this video and want to see more, make sure to like, hype, subscribe, and hit the notification bell so you will never have to miss another episode. Also, make sure to fill in the poll in the post section of the channel for next week as we will be discussing another element again. So, inside this cube, we seem to have something that looks like a silvery gray metal. And if you were hold a piece of pure lithium metal in your hand, which you shouldn't do with thick protective gloves, for reasons we'll get to later, your brain would instantly tell you that something is wrong. It feels simply too light for a metal. And also, it is very soft. And since it is so soft, I am wondering, can you lick it? Well, if we look at the periodic licking table from Jeff at everydaycience.com, we can see the following. Lithium is a soft silvery metal at room temperature and no temperature problem here. But your saliva is mostly water and lithium reacts with water. The magic only keeps the cube from decaying away. It does nothing to stop the chemistry. Contact with your wet tongue produces lithium hydroxide, a costic base that burns mucous membranes. Absorbed lithium ions are also a mood stabilizing drug useful at precise clinical doses. And these are also toxic. So no, you should not be licking it and no, snorting it would also be a bad idea. Now to understand lithium, we must first look at the stars. The story of lithium does not begin in the earth's crust. It begins 13.8 billion years ago in the unimaginable hot and dense crucible of the big bang. Now during the first few minutes of the universe existence, an era known as the big bang nucleioynthesis, BNN, the cosmos was essentially a massive nuclear fusion reactor. In these fleeting moments, the very first atomic nuclei were forged.

[00:02:46]The universe was flooded with hydrogen and helium, the two lightest elements which made up over 99% of all matter.

[00:02:52]But alongside them, trace amounts of just two other elements managed to form before the universe cooled too rapidly for further fusion. Brillium and lithium. Now, the primarily stable isotope of lithium, lithium 7, was created indirectly. Helium 3 and helium 4 fused together to create burillium 7, which subsequently captured an electron and decayed into lithium 7. Because lithium's nucleus is incredibly fragile, possessing one of the lowest binding energies per nucleon of all the stable nucleides, it is easily destroyed by the intense nuclear fusion inside standard stars. Consequently, even though it is a very light element, it is exceptionally rare in the cosmos compared to heavier elements like carbon and oxygen. Now, this brings us to one of the most profound unresolved mysteries in modern astrophysics, the cosmological lithium problem. Because lithium is destroyed by stars, astronomers look at the oldest, most pristine stars in the galaxy, known as metal pore, population 2, halo stars.

[00:03:55]To measure how much lithium was actually created during the big bang. Now, according to our most precise models of big bang nucleiosynthesis, combined with data from the cosmic microwave background, we know exactly how much lithium should exist in the universe.

[00:04:09]Yet when an astronomers measure these ancient halo stars, a measurement baseline known as the spikeau, they consistently find that the universe contains three or four times less lithium than the laws of physics predict. Now whether this discrepancy points to undiscovered dark matter interactions, parallel universes, or a fundamental misunderstanding of early stellar mechanics remain unknown. What we do know is that the lithium powering your smartphone today is a cosmic survivor. Fast forward to the year 1800.

[00:04:40]The setting is a small island of Ut situated in the rocky archipelago just outside of Stockholm, Sweden. A Brazilian chemist, minologist, and statesman named Jose Bonafatio de Andrada Eilva was exploring a local iron ore mine when he stumbled upon two completely undocumented crystalline minerals. He named the first one petalite owing its distinct leaf like cleavage structure from the Greek word petalon meaning leaf and the second one spotine. For nearly two decades these strange rock set at laboratories their exact chemical makeup a mystery. Now that changed in 1817 when a brilliant young Swedish chemist named Yoan Agugust Arvetson began analyzing the petaly ore.

[00:05:23]Arf Vetson was working in the Stockholm laboratory of Yens Jakob Brazilius one of the founding fathers of modern chemistry. Now through meticulous precipitation test Arvetson broke down the petalyte mineral. He determined that it consisted of roughly 80% silica 70% aluminina. However, this left 3% of the rock's mass completely unaccounted for.

[00:05:45]Now, Arvetson realized this missing 3% was an alkaline substance, but it didn't behave like any known element. Now, unlike potassium, it did not precipitate in tartaric acid. Unlike magnesium, it had different solubility properties.

[00:06:00]Arvetson had discovered a brand new alkaline metal. Now, when it came to name this new element, Arvetzen and his mentor Bzelius looked at the history of chemistry. The two other known alkaline metals of the time, sodium and potassium, had originally been discovered in organic material, specifically from plant ashes and animal blood. Now, because this new element was the very first alkaline metal to be discovered inside a solid in organic rock, Burelius proposed the name lithon or lethina. This name was derived directly from the ancient Greek word lethos, which translates simply to stone or rock. The pure metallic form of the element was subsequently named lithium.

[00:06:44]Now while Arvverson successfully identified the element, he failed to isolate it into pure metal. The electrical batteries of his era simply weren't powerful enough to break the strong chemical bonds holding the lithium salts together. It wasn't until 1821 that the English chemist William Thomas Bind managed to isolate a microscopic trace of pure silvery lithium metal by running a powerful electrical current through lithium oxide. Now decades later in 1855, the German chemist Robert Benson and the British chemist August Matson finally achieved grams scale production by applying electrolysis to molten lithium chloride at 450° C, laying the foundation for all future industrial applications. Now, as we saw in the cube, lithium is a solid metal, yet it possesses a density of only about.5 g per cubic cm under standard conditions.

[00:07:38]To put that into perspective, it is about half as dense as liquid water. If you drop a chunk of solid iron into a glass of water, it sinks like a stone.

[00:07:48]Now, if you drop a chunk of lithium into water, it bobs on the surface like a cork. In fact, lithium is so extremely light that it even floats on top of the heavy mineral oils that chemists normally use to store other light reactive metals. Because of this pure lithium must be stored submerged in specialized lightweight petroleum jelly or kept in a strictly controlled airtight vacuum environment. Now despite being incredibly light, lithium's atomic structure is uniquely tight for an alkaline metal. Because its atomic radius is so small that electrostatic attraction between its veence electron and its nucleus is highly concentrated.

[00:08:28]This gives lithium the most robust metallic lettuce structure in its group, resulting in a melting and boiling point that are exceptionally high compared to its chemical cousins. Lithium melts at 180.5° C or 356.9° F and bo at an intense 1342° C or 2448° F. Both the highest of the alkaline metals. Now, furthermore, a lithium possesses the highest specific heat capacity of any solid element on the periodic table. This means it can absorb a massive amount of thermal energy before its own temperature rises significantly. Now, because of this incredible ability to sponge up heat, liquid lithium is heavily researched as a highly effective coolant for experimental high temperature nuclear reactors and aerospace propulsion systems. Now, chemically, lithium is a paradox. It only possesses one single veence electron which it desperately wants to give away to achieve a stable atomic state. Now this makes it incredibly reactive in its pure form.

[00:09:34]Lithium is a beautiful shiny silvery white metal that is soft enough to slice like butter with a standard kitchen knife. However, the moment that fresh shiny surface is exposed to the ambient air, it under goes rapid oxidation.

[00:09:49]Within seconds, the brilliant silver tarnishes, reacting with atmospheric oxygen to form a dull, dark gray crust of lithium oxide, which eventually turns black as it absorbs moisture. Now, when lithium is introduced to water, the reaction is violent and highly exothermic, though surprisingly less explosive than its heavier cousins, sodium and potassium. The lithium denses and fizzes rapidly on the water's surface, tearing the H2O molecules apart. This reaction produces a highly costic corrosive solution of lithium hydroxide while simultaneously venting off highly flammable hydrogen gas. The reaction looks something like this. But perhaps the most bizarre chemical quirk of lithium is its relationship with nitrogen. Nitrogen gas makes up about 78% of the air we breathe and is notoriously unreactive. Yet, lithium is one of the only metallic elements in existent that can react directly with diatomic nitrogen gas at room temperature. If you leave a piece of lithium exposed in nitrogen, it will spontaneously form lithium nitride, creating a dark purple black protective layer over the metal. Now, because of its frantic desire to react with water and oxygen and nitrogen, you will never find a pure chunk of metallic lithium lying around in nature. It is the 33rd most abundant element in the Earth's crust. But it is always chemically locked away, bound tightly to other elements in the form of salts and silicate minerals. Today, the global hunt for lithium focuses almost entirely on two major geological sources. Hard rock pemmetites and subterranean brines.

[00:11:29]Millions of years ago, as volcanic magma slowly pushed its way up into the earth's crust, it began to cool. The cooling process allowed large complex crystals to grow, forming coarse grained ignous rocks called pegmatides. Because lithium atoms are so small and light, they are essentially squeezed out of the early crystallizing minerals and concentrated in the very last remnants of the cooling magma. Now within these pegmatite rocks, lithium is trapped in a handful of vital ores. The undisputed king of these minerals is sponduain, a dense crystalline proxine mineral that can theoretically hold over 8% lithium oxide. Other notable lithium bearing rocks include the very mineral that started it all, petalite, as well as lepidolyte as seen here as a piece from my own collection. A beautiful purple u lithium mika. Currently the undisputed heavyweight champion of hard rock lithium mining is Australia. Massive open pit mining operations such as the green bushes, lithium operations, Mount Marion and the Pilgora are carved directly into the ancient Aran tectonic plates of Western Australia. The Yilgarn and the Pilbura cratons. Now after the rock is blasted and hauled out of the earth, the vast majority of this sponge concentrate is loaded onto cargo ships and sent to China where then goes complex chemical refining. Other significant hard rock deposits are actively mined or under development in Zimbabwe, Brazil, Canada, and China.

[00:13:05]Now, the second and arguably more famous source of lithium is liquid brine. Over thousands of years, rain and weathering slowly wash trace amount of lithium salts out of exposed mountain rocks. Now normally rivers carry these dissolved salts straight to the ocean which is why seawater contains trace amounts of lithium about4 to 25 parts per million.

[00:13:28]However in certain high alitude mountain regions the rivers don't reach the sea.

[00:13:34]Instead they flow into closed landlock bessins. Now in this arid bessins the intense sun evaporates the water over centuries leaving behind hyperconentrated salty underground lakes known as brines. By far the largest concentrations of the brines is found in regions of the Andes mountains known as the lithium triangle which straddles the borders of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia.

[00:13:59]Beneath vast other worldly white flats such as the salar deakama in Chile, the salar de umbre muerte in Argentina and the salar deuni in Bolivia lies a slurry of ancient water containing immense concentrations of lithium often exceeding thousand parts per million.

[00:14:19]Today, these brines account for a massive percentage of the world's accessible lithium reserves. Finding lithium is only half the battle. Ripping it away from the other elements it's chemically bound to is a brutal, expensive, and environmentally taxing process. Now, whether you start with a solid rock or a liquid brine, the ultimate goal is to process the raw material into one of two highly purified batterygrade chemical powders, lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide.

[00:14:49]Extracting lithium from a rock like spodumine is an incredibly energyintensive process that requires massive amount of heat and corrosive chemicals. Natural spongine known as alpha spongumine is highly stable and practically impervious to chemical attack to unlock the lithium trapped inside. Mining engineers have to fundamentally alter the eomic structure of the rock. First, the ore is crushed into a fine powder and fed into a massive rotary kiln where it is roasted at an extreme temperature of,50° uh C or 1922° F. The intense thermal shock causes the crystalline lettuce to physically expand and change the shape, transforming the inert alpha spoimeine into a porous, highly reactive phase known as beta spoime. Now, once cooled, this newly reactive powder is mixed with highly concentrated corrosive sulfuric acid and sent into a furnace to be acidbaked at 250° C or 482° F. Inside the acidic inferno, a violent chemical swap occurs. The hydrogen ions from the acid, forced their way into the rock, kicking the lithium ions out and binding them with sulfate, creating water soluble lithium sulfate. Now, the acid slurry is then washed with water and treated with hydrated lime and calcium carbonate to neutralize the acid and filter out unwanted impurities like iron, aluminum, and magnesium. Finally, sodium carbonate, soda ash, is added to the purified solution, forming the lithium to precipitate out as pure solid lithium carbonate. Now, if the market demands lithium hydroxide, which is increasingly preferred for modern high performance electric vehicle batteries, the solution is instead reacted with sodium hydroxide, kicking off a complex crystallization process. Now, this entire hot rock process is fast and highly reliable, taking only a few days from start to finish. However, it comes with a steep environmental cost. The massive furnaces require immense amounts of fossil fuels, resulting in the emission of 5 to 15 tons of CO2 for every single ton of lithium produced.

[00:17:08]Furthermore, the process generates mountains of hazardous silicut waste and requires strict management of the corrosive sulfuric acid. Now, in the high altitude deserts of the lithium triangle, engineers rely on a completely different mechanism, the power of the sun. The traditional brine extraction process requires pumping billions of lers of lithium-rich salt water from underground aquifers into a series of massive shallow man-made evaporation ponds. Now, because the climate is so dry, the intense solar radiation slowly evaporates the water. Over a painstakingly slow period of 12 to 36 months, the brine becomes more and more concentrated. As the water disappears, heavier unwanted salts like sodium chloride and potassium chloride crystallize and drop to the bottom of the ponds. Engineers continually pump the increasingly concentrated brine into adjacent ponds, adding chemicals like hydrated lime along the way to precipitate out the stubborn impurities like magnesium and boron. Once the brine reaches an optimal lithium concentration of about 6%, it is pumped into chemical refinery. There it underos a final filtration before soda ash is added to precipitate out the desired lithium carbonate. Now, while solar evaporation requires very little energy and has much lower carbon footprint than hard rock mining, it suffers from two massive drawbacks. First, the process is agonizingly slow and highly vulnerable to weather disruptions. Second, the recovery rates are poor, often leaving 30 to 50% of the lithium behind, and the sheer volume of water evaporated is staggering, leading to devastating localized water shortages. Now to solve the slow speed and massive water waste of evaporation ponds, the industry is rapidly pivoting towards the revolutionary suite of technologies known as direct lithium extraction, DLE.

[00:19:06]Instead of relying on the sun, DLE systems pump the raw brine directly into highly engineered closed loop processing units. Now, inside these units, specialized ion exchange resins, absorbance or selective membranes act like microscopic tweezers, grabbing onto the lithium ions while ignoring the other salts in the water. Once the lithium is captured, the remaining spend brine is immediately pumped back underground into the basin aquifer. The elite technology shrinks the production timeline from 18 months down to mere hours, dramatically increases recovery rates to 80 to 90% and practically eliminates the devastating water loss associated with open air evaporation.

[00:19:51]Now, with so much difficulty involved in extracting and refining this metal, one might assume that the tech industry would eagerly pivot to a different, easier to obtain element. Why are we so stubbornly addicted to lithium? Why are lithium batteries so incredibly hard to replace? The answer lies in two fundamental metrics of battery physics.

[00:20:12]Specific energy, energy per unit of weight, and energy density, energy per unit of volume. The amount of energy a battery can store is defined by a simple equation and that's this one where E is energy and V is the operating voltage and Q is the total electrical charge capacity. Therefore, to build the ultimate battery, you need a chemical element that provides the highest possible voltage while weighing as little as physically possible. Now, this is where lithium asserts its absolute undisputed dominance. Every atom in a battery that doesn't contribute directly to power generation is essentially dead weight that your electrical vehicle has to haul around. Because lithium is the lightest solid element on the periodic table, possessing an atomic mass of just 6.94 g per mole, it offers an astonishingly high charge to weight ratio. You can pick an immense number of lithium atoms into a confined space without adding significant mass. Beyond being incredibly light, lithium possesses a frantic chemical desire to shed its single veence electron. In electrochemistry, this is measured as the standard oxidation potential.

[00:21:31]Lithium holds the highest electrochemical potential of any metal rated at a staggering minus3.04 volts against a standard hydrogen electrode. This powerful thermodynamic drive means that a lithium ion cell can operate at extremely high voltages, typically between 3.6 and 3.85 85 volts per single cell which directly multiplies the total energy output. Now the physical mechanics of how a rechargeable lithium ion battery actually charges and discharges is equally important. Inside your smartphone battery, lithium ions physically travel back and forth between the positive cathode, usually a metal oxide like lithium cobalt oxide and negative anode, typically made of graphite through a liquid electrolyte.

[00:22:20]Now when you plug your phone into the wall, the electrical current forces the lithium ions out of the cathos crystal structure across the electrolyte and into the graphite anode. This process of slipping inside the atomic layers of the host material is called intercolation.

[00:22:38]Now because the lithium ion is exceptionally tiny with an ionic radius of roughly.76 angstrom, it can effortlessly slide in and out of the graphite and cathode crystal lettuce thousands of times without causing a significant physical deformation or structural damage. This unique property is what allows your phone battery to be charged and discharged daily for years on end. Now, given the rising geopolitical tensions and the environmental concerns surrounding lithium, billions of dollars are currently being poured into developing alternative non- lithium battery chemistries. The most prominent challengers are sodium ion, nesium ion, and aluminum ion systems. Now, while these elements are vastly more abundant and cheaper to mine, they all crash violently into limitations of physics when compared to lithium. Sodium sit just beneath lithium on the periodic table, making it a very close chemical cousin. It is the sixth most abundant element on the Earth's crust, cost virtually nothing to extract from seawater, and utilize a supply chains entirely independent of the lithium bottleneck. Recently, sodium ion batteries have seen explosive hype with major companies like CL investing heavily in their commercialization.

[00:23:54]However, sodium suffers from a severe physics penalty. First, sodium is more than three times heavier than lithium, boasting an atomic mass of 23 g per mole. This heavy atomic weight inherently caps its gravimetric energy density. Second, the sodium ion is significantly larger than the lithium ion, measuring roughly 1.02 angstroms. Now, this largest size makes it physically sluggish, slowing down ion diffusion rates. More critically, when these bulky sodium ions try to force their way into standard battery cathodes, they act like a wedge, warping the crystal lettuce and degrading the material much faster. And because of this, sodium ion batteries generally top out at around 5,000 charged cycles compared to the 8 to 10,000 cycles achievable by advanced lithium ion cells. Finally, thermodynamically, sodium simply doesn't pack the same punch as lithium. its redux potential is lower, meaning sodium ion cells operate at a 10 to 25% lower average cell voltage. When you combine the heavier mass with the lower voltage, the result is a battery with an energy density roughly 30% lower than its lithium counterpart. Today, standard lithium ion batteries easily push 250 to 350 W hours per kilogram, whereas commercial sodium ion batteries struggle to break the 160 W hours per kilogram. Now, this doesn't mean that sodium is useless for stationary applications like massive grid storage facilities where weight and volume are relevant. Sodium is a brilliant, cheap, and safe alternative.

[00:25:33]But for applications where every single gram matters, such as high performance electric vehicles, consumer electronics, and aerospace, sodium simply cannot compete. If you replaced an EV's lithium battery with a sodium one, you would either slash its driving range by a third, or you would have to make the car significantly heavier and larger to hold the same amount of energy. Now, if lighter is better, why not use an atom that can carry more than one electron?

[00:26:02]This is the promise of multivalent batteries using magnesium or aluminum.

[00:26:07]Now, because a single magnesium ion can carry two positive charges and aluminum three, you theoretically double or triple the amount of electrical charge shuttled across the battery per ion.

[00:26:20]Unfortunately, the real world of electrochemistry is cruel. That double positive charge makes the magnesium ion incredibly sticky. As it travels through the liquid electrolyte, it interacts violently with the surrounding molecules, making its movement agonizingly sluggish. Now the sluggishness cripples the charge and discharge rates. Furthermore, extracting the magnesium ion from the electrolyte and forcing it into the solid electrode requires so much excess energy that it triggers parasitic side reactions, destroying the battery from the inside out. Now, to make matters worse, the overall operating voltage of an experimental magnesium battery hovers around a meager 1.3 volts, two to three times lower than a lithium cell, wiping out its theoretical capacity advantage entirely. Ironically, the technology most likely to dethrone the current lithium ion batteries is simply better lithium batteries. The industry is currently racing to perfect solidstate batteries, SSBs. Traditional lithium ion batteries are held back by their highly flammable liquid electrolytes. If pushed too hard, microscopic metallic spikes called dendrites can grow across the liquid, shortcircuiting the batteries and causing thermal runaway fires. Now, by replacing this liquid with a rigid solid ceramic or sulfide material, engineers can physically block dendrite growth. Now, once dendrites are eliminated, you no longer need the bulky heavy graphite anode. Instead, you can use an anode made of pure solid lithium metal. This architectural leap dramatically slashes the weight and volume of the cell, potentially pushing energy densities past 500 W hour per kilogram, a paradigm shift that could enable long range electric trucking and even commercial electric aircraft. Now, while the modern energy transition dominates the headlines, lithium has been quietly operating behind the scenes in traditional heavy industries for nearly a century. Its extreme physical and chemical properties solve highly specific engineering bottlenecks in fields ranging from aerospace to culinary arts. Now, one of the most fascinating applications of lithium occurred completely by accident in 1953.

[00:28:38]Dr. Stanley Donald Stuki, a research chemist working for Corning Glass Works in New York, was experimenting with a photochemically etchable glass called photoform. He had placed a sample plate into a high temperature furnace, intending to heat it up to 600° C.

[00:28:57]However, the furnace's temperature controller jammed in the on position, and the internal heat skyrocketed to a blistering 900° C. Believing he had completely ruined the experiment and melted the glass into puddle, Stuki opened the furnace door. Now, to his utter shock, the plate had not melted.

[00:29:15]It had transformed into a solid, opaque, milky white slab. In a rush to retrieve the sample, his tongues slipped. The glowing hot plate plummeted towards the concrete floor, but it didn't shatter.

[00:29:28]Instead, it bounced, emitting a sharp metallic clang like a piece of steel.

[00:29:34]Now, Stuki had inadvertently discovered a completely new family of material, glass ceramics. The extreme heat had caused the lithium inside the glass formulation to internally nucleate, growing billions of microscopic lithium alumininoicate crystals, a solid solution of beta spotamine directly within the glass matrix. Now, because these specific lithium crystals possess an astonishingly low and occasionally negative coefficient of thermal expansion, the resulting material could withstand massive thermal shocks without expanding, contracting, or fracturing.

[00:30:11]This miraculous material was commercialized in 1958 as Corning wear, the legendary line of heatresistant kitchen dishes that could be taken directly from a freezing ice box and placed onto a red hot stove without breaking. Today, this exact same lithium infused glass ceramic technology is utilized in sleek induction cooktops, precision mirrors for orbital telescopes, and the thermal protection rayomes, nose cones on supersonic missiles. During the aviation boom of the 1940s, engineers realized that traditional sodium and calcium based mechanical greases could not survive the extreme temperature fluctuations of high altitude flight. The solution was lithium. By reacting lithium hydroxide with a fatty acid, specifically 12 hydroxy steeric acid base oil, chemists created a lithium soap thickener. Now, at a microscopic level, this lithium soap self assembles into complex sponge-like fibrous structures that trap and hold the lubricating oil. When a mechanical part like an aircraft wheel bearing begins to spin rapidly, the sheer force causes the grease viscosity to drop, allowing it to lubricate the moving metal seamlessly. The moment the spinning stops, the lithium fibers reconnect and the grease solidifies back into place. Lithium greases boast incredibly high melting points, dropping points between 190 and 220° C, superior resistance to oxidation, and unlike sodium greases, they are virtually impervious to water wash out. Because of these extreme durability factors, lithium greases currently dominate roughly 75% of the global industrial lubricant market, keeping everything from automotive axles to heavy mining equipment and critical aerospace components spinning smoothly. In hermetically sealed environments like deep sea submarines and orbital spacecraft, the accumulation of exhaled carbon dioxide is a lethal threat. To keep crews alive, life support engineers rely on the aggressive chemical reactivity of lithium hydroxide. Lithium hydroxide powder acts as a remarkable efficient lightweight desicant. When ambient air is blown through the lithium hydroxide canisters, the chemical violently binds with the carbon dioxide molecules, triggering an exothermic reaction that locks the carbon away into solid lithium carbonate while releasing liquid water as a byproduct. Now, because lithium is so light, lithium hydroxide canisters offer the absolute maximum CO2 scrubbing capacity for their weight. A critical metric when every ounce launched into orbit cost thousands of dollars. This exact lithium technology famously saved the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts who had to rapidly juryrike square lithium hydroxide canisters into round holes to survive their crippled journey back to Earth. Now, of all the applications of lithium, none are as fascinating or historically significant as its role in human medicine. For the first century after its discovery, lithium was treated as something of a pseudocientific cure all, occasionally added to mineral water tonics to treat everything from gout to melancholia. But in 1948, an Australian psychiatrist named John Frederick Joseph Cade conducted a series of crude backyard experiments that would accidentally spark the modern revolution of psychoppharmacology. Now, following his service as a medical officer and a brutal three-year internment in the Chungi prisoner of war camp during World War II, Dr. Kate returned to Australia to work at a repatriation hospital for veterans in Bundura, a suburb of Melbourne. Kate had a highly unconventional theory for the era. He believed that severe mental illness, specifically the manic phases of manic depressive illnesses, bipolar disorder, were not purely psychological, but rather the result of a biological chemical intoxication. He theorized that a normal byproduct of human metabolism was accumulating an excess in the blood of manic patients acting as an indogenous toxin which has subsequently being flushed out in their urine.

[00:34:32]Operating out of an abandoned unequipped wooden panty shed on the hospital grounds, Kate began a grim experiment.

[00:34:38]He collected urine samples from manic patients, schizophrenic patients, and depressed patients and healthy controls and injected the fluid directly into the abdominal cavities of guinea pigs to measure the comparative toxicity. Kade observed that the urine from the manic patients were substantially more lethal, killing the guinea pigs at much smaller doses, inducing violent tremors, atexia, status epilepticus, and death. To identify the specific killer molecule, Kate began systematically injecting the guinea pigs with the common chemical constituents of urine. He quickly discovered that a high doses of ura replicated the exact same mode of convuls of death. However, chemical analysis showed that manic patients did not actually have higher concentrations of ura in their urine compared to healthy people. Baffled Kate hypothesized that there must be a second compound present in the manic urine that was enhancing the toxicity of ura. He suspected uric acid, but uric acid is highly insoluble in water, making it difficult to inject. To solve this purely logistical problem, Kate searched for the most highly soluble salt variant of uric acid available. He chose lithium urate. Now, what happened next? Defied all expectations. When Kate injected the guinea pigs with the deadly cocktail of ura mixed with lithium urate, the animals did not die. In fact, they didn't even convulse. The lithium urate had completely protected them from the lethal toxicity of the ura. With the keen eye of a true scientist, Kate realized the uric acid was irrelevant.

[00:36:16]The protective variable was the lithium.

[00:36:18]To confirm this, he injected the guinea pigs with large doses of simple cheap salt lithium carbonate. The result was astonishing. After receiving the lithium carbonate, the previously hyperactive and skittish guinea pigs became incredibly calm, dosile, and lethargic.

[00:36:37]They would lay on their backs and stare blankly for a few hours before slowly returning to normal. And while modern toxicologists firmly believe that Kate had essentially just given the guinea pigs acute dose dependent lithium poisoning inducing severe hypothermia and atia, Kate interpreted this dramatic calmness as a profound neuroseditative tranquilizing effect. Believing he had discovered a chemical cure for mania and after ingesting the lithium salt himself to verify that they were safe for human consumption, Kade launched an open clinical trial on 10 manic patients in 1948. His first patient was a 51-year-old wisen man who had been trapped in a state of chronic chaotic and destructive manic excitement for five straight years in a locked back ward. Kate began administrating oral lithium treatment. Within 3 days, the patient became settled, tidy, and dramatically less disinhibited. Now, the man who was deemed a permanent ward of the state was deemed fully recovered, discharged from the hospital, and successfully returned his former job.

[00:37:42]Kate noted similarly miraculous rapid recoveries across his other nine manic patients. Kate published his landmark findings in the medical journal of Australia in 1949. Because lithium is a natural occurring earth element, it could not be patented by pharmaceutical companies leading to severe lack of financial initiative to fund larger trials. Furthermore, high doses of lithium can be highly toxic to the kidneys and thyroid, requiring careful blood monitoring. As a result, the medical establishment largely ignored or resisted the discovery for over a decade. It wasn't until a Danish psychiatrist, Dr. Morgan Sha, conducted rigorous placeboc controlled double blind trials in the 1950s and60s that the global medical community finally accepted the truth due to his food and drug administration finally approved lithium for the treatment of bipolar disorder in 1970. Now today we find ourselves in the midst of a global transition from civilization powered by burning of fossil fuels to one powered by silent flow of electrons. At the absolute center of this transition sits lithium often dubbed white petroleum. It has become the most strategical critical mineral of the 21st century. But this transition comes with a heavy geopolitical and an environmental toll.

[00:39:07]The extraction of lithium is not a clean process. It's a brutal industrial disruption of the natural world. While lithium is geographically scattered across the globe, the ability to process and refine it is heavily consolidated.

[00:39:21]Currently, China exerts an overwhelming strategic dominance over the entire lithium ion battery supply chain.

[00:39:27]Through aggressive stateback investments, joint ventures, and belt and road initiatives, China corporations control minority stakes in mines across the South American lithium triangle and Western Australia. More importantly, China controls between 60 to 70% of the world's total lithium chemical refining capacity, manufacturing roughly 75% of all battery cells and wields commanding market shares in advanced anode and cathode production. This absolute dominance has alarmed western nations, sparking a new era of geopolitical rivalry and resource nationalism. Now, the environmental footprint of extracting this metal is arguably the industry's darkest secret. While hard rock spamine mining in Australia physically scars the earth and emits massive amounts of CO2 through fossil fuel powered roasting, it is the brine evaporation operation in South America that are causing the most immediate ecological crisis. The deserts of the lithium triangle are some of the driest, most fragile ecosystems on the planet.

[00:40:31]Now, to extract lithium, mining corporations pump staggering, unfathomable volumes of ancient subterranean water to the surface to sit in evaporation ponds. Like discussed before, in 2023 alone, lithium operators in Argentina's Puna region extracted over 3.7 billion L of water, more than 31 times the total annual water consumption of the local human population. In Chile's Salard de Atakama, this aggressive, relentless draw down of the regional water table has actively contributed to the desiccation and death of the delicate high alitude meadows and freshwater lagoons. Now, this profound hydraological damage directly threatens the survival of unique endemic species tailored to the salt flats, including the iconic Andian flamingo and the rare karach fish. Now to prevent the green energy revolution from devastating the earth's surface, the industry is racing to commercialize closed loop battery recycling. Rather than mining fresh lithium from the ground, engineers are developing ways to mine it from dead electric vehicles. Now currently the industry relies on two traditional methods, both with significant flaws.

[00:41:49]Pyetallergy. Now, this involves throwing whole batteries into a massive furnace and melting them at 1,600° C. Now, while it successfully recovers valuable cobalt and nickel, it burns immense amounts of fossil fuels. And worse, the lightweight lithium along with the aluminum and the manganesees is completely lost, burned away into a useless waste slag.

[00:42:11]Hydromemetaly. Now, this method shreds the batteries into a fine black mass and uses highly corrosive acids to chemically leech out all the metals, including lithium. Now, while it boasts a high recovery rate and a lower carbon footprint, it generates massive volumes of hazardous liquid chemical waste that require intense expensive wastewater treatment facilities. Now, the holy grail of sustainability lies in a third emerging technology, direct recycling.

[00:42:42]Instead of melting or dissolving the battery, direct recycling uses advanced robotics and gentle physical separation to carefully extract the intact microscopic cathode structures.

[00:42:53]Engineers then rethiate or heal the degregated cathode material directly restoring its original chemical composition. Direct recycling boasts the lowest carbon footprint, the lowest processing cost, and can theoretically recover up to 98% of the batteries active materials with a minimal toxic waste. Now, instead of a chemistry question of the week or a viewers question of the week, we will end this episode with two honorable mentions of where lithium is where you wouldn't expect it. When 7Up was first created in 1929, it actually contained a compound called lithium citrate. At the time, lithium was used in small doses as a mood stabilizer. So, the drink was originally marketed as something that could lift your spirits, literally. The original name of the drink was even Bip label lithinated lemon lime soda.

[00:43:47]However, lithium was later removed from the formula in 1948 when regulations around medical ingredients in soft drink became stricter. Today, 7 no longer contains lithium, but its early recipe is a fascinating reminder of how differently people once viewed both chemistry and health. Now, lithium is also one of the famous songs by Nirvana, released in 1991 on their breakthrough album, Nevermind, written by Kurt Cobain. The song explores themes of mental health, emotional swings, and the search for stability ideas loosely connected to Lithium's use as a treatment for bipolar disorder.

[00:44:24]Musically, the song is known for its quiet versus loud dynamic, shifting between calm verses and explosive choruses. The contrast mirrors the emotional instability described in the lyrics, making Lithium not only a title, but a metaphor for trying to find balance in a chaotic state of mind. Now, if you have a question for us that you want answered, put it in the comments and maybe we will discuss your question in the upcoming week. Now, we would like to thank the members that support our channel. Thanks for doing that. We really appreciate you. Now, if you think we missed anything, tell us in the comments. And if you want to know more about another alkalion metal, make sure to look at this video about sodium next.