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Lithium mining

Interested in lithium mining? Where does lithium come from? Why is this miracle cure for bipolar symptoms so natural, cheap and plentiful?

While it is true that lithium is a simple, naturally occurring salt, significant quantities of lithium are never found freely in nature but must be mined from stable minerals or salts. (This is because lithium is EXTREMELY reactive, especially with water.)

Lithium does occur naturally in food and water and lithium is therefore also present in the human body. However, these are just very small trace amounts with no known function or effect.

The lithium used in medicine and industry comes mainly from rocks and brine.

Lithium mining is often open cut mining.

Although lithium does not appear freely it is not rare – in fact, lithium is the 31st thirty-first most abundant element on earth. In particular, it is contained in the minerals spodumene, lepidolite, petalite, and amblygonite. However, lithium forms a minor part of almost all igneous rocks and is also found in many natural brines.

(Igneous rocks are formed when magma cools and solidifies. In other words it is pre-existing rock which has melted and reformed, for example volcanic rock. Brine is water saturated with salt.)

Less than 9% of all lithium is mined for pharmaceutical use, such as treating bipolar symptoms.

The two main sources of lithium in the world at present are:

• lithium mined as the mineral spodumene in Kings Mountain, North Carolina in the US, and

• lithium extracted from brine pumped up from a salt desert in the Andes Mountains in Chile.

A lot of lithium mining is Brazilian brine mining.

Processing of lithium for medical use is different from that intended for industrial use. Medical lithium is always used in the form of lithium salt – either lithium carbonate or lithium citrate. According to the latest (2007) US Geological Survey:

"the only active lithium carbonate plant in the United States was at a brine operation in Nevada. Subsurface brines have become the dominant raw material for lithium carbonate production worldwide because of lower production costs as compared with the mining and processing costs for hard-rock ores. Two brine operations in Chile dominate the world market."

The effective component is the lithium ion and this is what must be extracted.

The mining company FMC Corporation obtain their pharmaceutical lithium from an Argentine salar (salty, high altitude wetland) containing high uniform concentrations of lithium with low levels of other contaminants. FMC claim to have perfected and commercialized a selective purification process which extracts lithium chloride from the salar brine in a nearly pure form with minimal processing.

Read more about how lithium is mined in the USGS 2006 Minerals Yearbook.

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