  The work presented here offers an approach to estimate the technological
status of lithium extraction from geothermal waters in Germany based on current
scientific studies, as well as to evaluate the associated challenges. For this
purpose, the predicted worldwide lithium market, as well as the enormously
increasing German demand due to the planned development of a domestic battery
cell production are presented. From the strongly growing demand, a complete
dependence on poorly diversified global market, a highly strategic importance
of a possible domestic source can be derived. In particular, the study compares
and evaluates different technologies for lithium extraction from thermal waters
such as liquid-liquid extraction, inorganic sorbents, electrochemical methods,
and membrane technologies in terms of their applicability in geothermal
systems. Based on the technology comparison and the current expansion of
geothermal energy in Germany, different scenarios for the extractable amount of
lithium carbonate from geothermal systems in Germany and the French side of the
Upper Rhine Graben were calculated. Thus, taking into account all currently
active wells, a total extraction capacity of about 4,000 tons of lithium
carbonate per year can be predicted.
