On her summer tour, Annalena Baerbock was shown the lithium extraction plant at the Bruchsal geothermal power station. European production of the light metal, which is so important for electromobility, would make Germany less dependent on China.
Resilience is the motto of Annalena Baerbock's summer tour, during which she also visited companies on the Upper Rhine. One way to make Germany less dependent on exports and thus more resilient is to produce important raw materials domestically. For example, the light metal lithium, important for batteries in electric vehicles, laptops, mobile phones and power storage units. Currently, a large part of this highly sought-after material comes from Australia, Chile, China and Argentina, and it is often extracted under conditions that are harmful to the environment and questionable in terms of human rights.
But lithium is naturally dissolved in the deep water of the Upper Rhine Graben. In the lithium extraction plant at the Bruchsal geothermal power station, scientists are researching environmentally friendly and economical ways to dissolve the light metal from the water that is pumped up anyway. UnLimited is the name of the joint research project of several institutions from science and practice: EnBW, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), BESTEC, HYDROSION and the University of Göttingen.
On Wednesday, 19 July, the Foreign Minister was shown the plant at the Bruchsal geothermal power station and reported on its successes, according to the Badische Neueste Nachrichten. She asked how much the plant could supply: "If it works, that's 800 to 900 tonnes per year. That's 20,000 car batteries," the BNN quotes project manager Elif Kaymakci and supervisory board member Thomas Kölbel as saying.
The Bruchsal geothermal plant pumps 2.4 million litres of thermal water a day from a depth of around 2,500 metres and returns it after extracting the heat. The lithium could practically be produced as a waste product of electricity and heat generation. In the meantime, the researchers have also found suitable absorbents and built a pilot plant. Since the beginning of the year, they have already been able to extract one kilogramme of lithium.
The researchers are firmly convinced that the results are scalable. A quarter of Europe's demand could be met from deep geothermal waters. Baerbock is impressed, as is her colleague Thekla Walker, Green state minister for the environment, climate and energy. She also praises the city of Bruchsal for its commitment: "The city of Bruchsal has set out with foresight and energy in the matter of the heat transition," the BNN quotes.