KAUST team devises electrically-driven membrane process for seawater lithium mining Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia have developed a continuous electrically-driven membrane process which successfully enriches lithium from seawater samples of the Red Sea by 43,000 times (i.e., from 0.21 to 9013.43 ppm) with a nominal Li/Mg selectivity >45 million. They precipitated lithium phosphate with a purity of 99.94% directly from the enriched solution, thereby meeting the purity requirements for application in the lithium battery industry. Preliminary economic analysis shows that the process can be made profitable when coupled with the Chlor-alkali industry. An open-access paper on their work is published in the RSC journal