Title: Identifying an Optimal Offshore Wind-Powered Seawater Treatment Process for Co-Located Lithium & Hydrogen Extraction
Abstract:
Developing renewable energy systems for offshore hydrogen production and mineral extraction is a critical solution to international transportation decarbonization goals. In addition to optimizing efficiency and costs and generating clean electricity, these systems can produce hydrogen and critical minerals, such as lithium, from seawater with fewer emissions. This presentation discusses the development, exploration, and selection of an optimal system architecture configuration for a novel system that uses electricity generated by offshore wind to power the co-extraction of lithium and hydrogen from seawater.
The first part of the talk will review the system architecture design decisions used to develop the four alternative system architecture configurations explored for this co-extraction system. An overview of the industry standards and quantitative analysis used to select the technologies that comprise each configuration and develop the system requirements is also provided.
The second part of the talk will focus on the specific technologies selected for each configuration. The selections were varied to investigate the impact of additional pretreatment and passive or powered resource extraction technologies on performance across configurations. The justification for these variations and the metrics identified to analyze and compare cross-configuration performance are discussed.
The final part of the talk presents results from WaterTAP, the open-source techno-economic analysis tool and water treatment model library used to model, simulate, and explore the cost and energy optimization of the four configurations and calculate their performance metrics. The techno-economic trade-offs presented by each configuration are highlighted, and the optimal configuration is identified and discussed. The techno-economic performance of the optimal configuration is then compared to that of conventional lithium and hydrogen production pathways. The optimal configuration will be utilized in the next phase of system architecture development, exploring optimal siting for this co-extraction system.