BrineCHEMISTRY TO FLOWSHEET: DLE SCREENING

Direct lithium extraction (DLE) from geothermal and oilfield brines is served by a large body of technology reviews, yet an operator holding a brine analysis still lacks a structured route from that analysis to a defensible choice of extraction technology. Geologic® developed a review that closes this gap by inverting the technology literature: instead of surveying processes for their own sake, it reorganizes the documented evidence by feed parameter, so that a co-produced brine's lithium grade, Mg/Li ratio, total dissolved solids, temperature, silica, boron, arsenic and NORM burden, together with the host operation's flow rate, reinjection specification and thermal integration limits, directly determine which DLE families remain feasible, which are excluded, and what pre-treatment train is implied.

Chemistry windows are compiled for seven technology families with every threshold traced to its source, and the constraint interactions that single-parameter screening misses — silica scaling set against sorbent temperature windows, NORM accumulation on sorbent beds, and reinjection chemistry limits — are treated explicitly. Four pilot settings, the Salton Sea, the Upper Rhine Graben, Cornwall and the Smackover Formation, are reread through the framework, yielding the review's central empirical pattern: every co-production project that has advanced to hardware has selected a sorption route. A seven-step screening procedure is then proposed as an explicitly unvalidated synthesis, with the research needed to validate it set out.