Properly handling lithium batteries with water is essential for safety. Understanding the importance of proper use, handling, and storage helps prevent accidents and ensures worker safety. Water can have detrimental effects on lithium batteries, posing safety risks and compromising battery performance.
Safety Precautions: To prevent water damage to lithium batteries, it is important to handle them with care and avoid exposing them to water. Proper storage, handling, and protection from moisture are essential to maintain the integrity and safety of lithium batteries.
Lithium is a critical raw material for the energy transition and the salar brine deposits of South America host ∼70% of global resources. However, there are concerns regarding water use, and the associated impacts, of lithium production from these deposits.
Part of that optimization is in the liquid electrolyte: standard lithium-based batteries use organic solvents mixed with salts to shuttle charge around. Theoretically, batteries can use water as the solvent, but they usually don’t.
Water use during manufacturing is relatively small at this life cycle stage compared to upstream extractive processes and consumes just 7% of the overall embodied water in a lithium-ion battery (Dai et al., 2019).
The AWARE method is one of the most suitable for assessing the fresh water use impacts of lithium production, however utilising it to assess the water-related impacts of lithium production from salar deposits is challenging due to: Consideration of reinjection, both as a return flow of water to the salar and potential impacts.