Many brines contain more than one recovered product. For instance, the shallow brine beneath
Searles Lake,
California, is or has been a source of
borax,
potash,
bromine,
lithium,
phosphate,
soda ash, and
sodium sulfate.
Salt Salt (
sodium chloride) has been a valuable commodity since prehistoric times, and its extraction from seawater also goes back to prehistory. Salt is extracted from seawater in many countries around the world, but the majority of salt put on the market today is mined from solid
evaporite deposits. Salt is produced as a byproduct of potash extraction from
Dead Sea brine at one plant in
Israel (
Dead Sea Works), and another in
Jordan (Arab Salt Works). The total salt precipitated in solar evaporation at the Dead Sea plants is tens of millions of tons annually, but very little of the salt is marketed. Today, salt from groundwater brines is generally a byproduct of the process of extracting other dissolved substances from brines and constitutes only a small part of world salt production. In the United States, salt is recovered from surface brine at the
Great Salt Lake, Utah, and from a shallow subsurface brine at
Searles Lake, California.
Sodium sulfate In 1997 about two-thirds of world
sodium sulfate production was recovered from brine. Two plants in the US, at Searles Lake, California, and
Seagraves, Texas, recovered sodium sulfate from shallow brines beneath dry lakes.
Soda ash Soda ash (
sodium carbonate) is recovered from shallow subsurface brines at Searles Lake, California. Soda ash was formerly extracted at
El Caracol, Ecatepec, in
Mexico City, from the remnant of
Lake Texcoco.
Colloidal silica Brines brought to the surface by geothermal energy production often contain concentrations of dissolved silica of about 500 parts per million. A number of geothermal plants have pilot-tested recovery of
colloidal silica, including those at Wairakei, New Zealand, Mammoth Lakes, California, and the Salton Sea, California. To date, colloidal silica from brine has not achieved commercial production. As of 1996, the Dead Sea was estimated to contain 2.05 million tons of potassium chloride, the largest brine reserve of potassium other than the ocean. The shallow brine beneath the
Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is thought to contain the world's largest lithium resource, often estimated to be half or more of the world's resource. As of 2015, no commercial extraction has taken place, other than a pilot plant. Commercial deposits of shallow lithium brines beneath dry lakebeds have the following characteristics in common: • Arid climate • Closed basin with a dry or seasonal lake • Tectonically driven subsidence • Igneous or geothermal activity • Lithium-rich source rock • Permeable aquifers • Enough time to concentrate brine In 2010 Simbol Materials received a $3 million grant from the
U.S. Department of Energy for a pilot project aimed at showing the financial feasibility of extracting high-quality lithium from
geothermal brine. It uses brine from the 49.9 megawatt Featherstone geothermal power plant in California's
Imperial Valley. Simbol passes the plant's extracted fluid through a series of membranes, filters and adsorption materials to extract lithium. In 2016, MGX Minerals developed a proprietary design process (U.S. Provisional Patent #62/419,011) to potentially recover lithium and other valuable minerals from highly mineralized oilfield brine. The company has acquired development rights to over approximately 1.7 million acres of brine-bearing formations in Canada and Utah. According to MGX, the
Saskatchewan Research Council, an independent laboratory, verified the MGX Minerals petrolithium extraction technology in April 2017. Lithium mining from geothermal boreholes is a groving project in Europe. Potential sites are Cornwall (UK), and Cesano (Italy). All these sites have a lithium concentration of 200 mg/L or higher. Origin is due to interaction with mica minerals in the granite and/or in the rocks of the local basement.
Boron Boron is recovered from shallow brines beneath Searles Lake, California, by Searles Valley Minerals. Although boron is the primary product,
potassium and other salts are also recovered as byproducts. The brine beneath the Salar de Olaroz, Argentina, is a commercial source of boron, lithium, and potassium.
Japan By far the largest source of iodine from brine is Japan, where iodine-rich water is co-produced with natural gas. Iodine extraction began in 1934. In 2013 seven companies were reported to be extracting iodine. Japanese iodine brines are produced from mostly marine sediments ranging in age from
Pliocene to
Pleistocene. The main producing area is the Southern Kanto gas field on the east-central coast of
Honshu. The iodine content of the brine can be as high as 160ppm.
Anadarko Basin, Oklahoma Since 1977, iodine has been extracted from brine in the Morrow Sandstone of
Pennsylvanian age, at locations in the
Anadarko Basin. of northwest Oklahoma. The brine occurs at depths of 6,000 to 10,000 feet, and contains about 300ppm iodine.
Bromine All the world's
bromine production is derived from brine. The majority is recovered from Dead Sea brine at plants in Israel and Jordan, where bromine is a byproduct of potash recovery. Plants in the United States (
see: Bromine production in the United States), China, Turkmenistan, and Ukraine, recover bromine from subsurface brines. In India and Japan, bromine is recovered as a byproduct of sea salt production.
Magnesium and magnesium compounds The first commercial production of magnesium from seawater was recorded in 1923, when some solar salt plants around San Francisco Bay, California, extracted magnesium from the bitterns left after salt precipitation. The
Dow Chemical Company began producing magnesium on a small scale in 1916, from deep subsurface brine in the
Michigan Basin. In 1933, Dow began using an ion exchange process to concentrate the magnesium in its brine. In 1941, prompted by the need for magnesium for aircraft during World War II, Dow started a large plant at
Freeport, Texas, to extract magnesium from the sea. A number of other plants to extract magnesium from brine were built in the US, including one near the Freeport plant at
Velasco. At the end of World War II, all shut down except the plant at Freeport, Texas, although the Velasco plant was reactivated during the Korean War. The magnesium plant at Freeport operated until 1998, when Dow announced that it would not rebuild the unit following hurricane damage. Because metallic magnesium is extracted from brine by an electrolytic process, the economics are sensitive to the cost of electricity. Dow had located their facility on the Texas coast to take advantage of cheap natural gas for electrical generation. In 1951, Norsk Hydro started a magnesium-from-seawater plant at Heroya, Norway, supplied by inexpensive hydroelectricity. The two seawater magnesium plants, in Texas and Norway, provided more than half the world's primary magnesium through the 1950s and 1960s. As of 2014, the only producer of primary magnesium metal in the United States was U.S. Magnesium LLC, which extracted the metal from surface brine of the Great Salt Lake, at its plant in
Rowley, Utah. The Dead Sea Works in Israel produces
magnesium as a byproduct of potash extraction.
Zinc Starting in 2002, CalEnergy extracted zinc from brines at its geothermal energy plants at the Salton Sea, California. At full production, the company hoped to produce 30,000 metric tons of 99.99% pure zinc per year, yielding about as much profit as the company made from geothermal energy. But the zinc recovery unit did not perform as anticipated, and zinc recovery halted in 2004.
Tungsten Some near-surface brines in the western United States contain anomalously high concentrations of dissolved
tungsten. Should recovery ever prove economic, some brines could be significant sources of tungsten. For instance, brines beneath Searles Lake, California, with concentrations of about tungsten ( WO3), contain about 8.5 million short tons of tungsten. Although 90% of the dissolved tungsten is technically recoverable by
ion exchange resins, recovery is uneconomic.
Uranium In 2012 research for the US Department of Energy, building on Japanese research from the 1990s, tested a method for
extracting uranium from seawater, which, they concluded, could extract uranium at a cost of US$660/kg. While this was still five times the cost of uranium from ore, the amount of uranium dissolved in seawater would be enough to provide nuclear fuel for thousands of years at current rates of consumption. Bernard L. Cohen showed that all the world's energy requirements for 5 billion years could be provided by breeder reactors fueled by uranium extracted from seawater without the cost of electricity rising by as much as 1% due to fuel costs. (Considering that rivers refill the oceans continuously and extraction would slightly lower the concentration and thus the rate lost to deposits)
Gold Attempts to extract
gold from seawater were common in the early 20th century. A number of people claimed to be able to economically recover gold from seawater, but they were all either mistaken or acted in an intentional deception.
Prescott Jernegan ran a gold-from-seawater swindle in the
United States in the 1890s. A British fraudster ran the same scam in
England in the early 1900s.
Fritz Haber (the German inventor of the
Haber process) did research on the extraction of gold from seawater in an effort to help pay
Germany's
reparations following World War I. Based on published values of 2 to 64ppb of gold in seawater, a commercially successful extraction seemed possible. After analysis of 4,000 water samples yielding an average of 0.004ppb, it became clear to Haber that the extraction would not be possible, and he stopped the project. ==References==