Pennsylvania could be a lithium goldmine, if the tech catches up

(The Center Square) — The hunt for critical minerals in Pennsylvania is on.

A multi-billion-dollar industry is at hand — if innovators can make the technology work and scale up from the lab to the field.

With lithium — used in solar energy, batteries, and other electronics — the commonwealth may have an opportunity to salvage the metal from oil and gas wastewater. If it works, Pennsylvania could see an economic boom that cleans up the environment.

“From my point of view, lithium is the highest value and the least-addressed market,” said Patrick Ho, CEO of Forager Station, a startup working on extraction technology. “There’s a lot of other rare earth minerals and metals that are super important, but in terms of just sheer bang for your buck, lithium is a pretty good one.”

Ho is working on an electrochemical process to capture lithium in wastewater and separate it from calcium and magnesium, which can gum up the works. Appalachia has “very hard water,” he noted, making lithium extraction difficult and driving up the cost of the process. But getting past that problem means opportunity.

“We’re still lab-scale. In terms of theory, very solid, lots of experimental work, but no product,” Ho said. “What I’m working on is trying to figure out who’s the initial customer, whose water is most amenable to treating, how do I take that water and reach the target lithium specification that a customer would be willing to accept.”

Ho has a contract with the DEVCOM Army Research Lab in Maryland and is pursuing other collaborations and grants; if lithium development in Appalachia takes off and the tech works, more interest will flood into the region.

“The potential resource in Appalachia: The most credible source I’ve found, their estimates are 3-8 million tons of lithium,” Ho said.

Currently, the United States produces less than 1,000 tons of lithium annually.

“Pennsylvania — and Appalachia — is the last major undeveloped lithium region in the United States,” Ho said.

Much of the focus on lithium has been in western states like California, Nevada, and Utah. States like Pennsylvania will have to play catch-up to compete.

“The technical challenge is how do we make this economically viable because it’s a very hard problem. The difficulty of the Appalachian waters is much higher than the Great Salt Lake,” Ho said. “The hard water problem is the real big one: It drives the cost for existing technology through the roof.”

But Appalachia has one advantage: the environmental impact could be much better than how lithium gets extracted in the west.

“One of the main benefits is that it’s a lot more environmentally friendly than currently existing lithium-extraction processes,” Ho said.

Pulling lithium from things like fracking wastewater could promote the cleanup and reuse of abandoned wells, he argued, turning a burden into a benefit. The primary focus, he said, is on wastewater.

Other projects focused on critical minerals have looked to recover them from industrial waste like acid mine drainage and coal ash with state and federal support.