Direct Lithium Extraction Screening for Co-Produced Brines

An operator holding a brine analysis has no shortage of technology reviews, and no structured route from that analysis to a defensible choice. Geologic inverted the technology literature to address that gap: the evidence is reorganised by feed parameter, so that a brine's lithium grade, magnesium-to-lithium ratio, salinity, temperature, silica, boron, arsenic and radionuclide burden, together with the host operation's flow rate, reinjection specification and thermal limits, decide which extraction families remain feasible and what pre-treatment each one implies.

Operating windows are compiled for seven technology families, with every threshold traced to its source and disagreements kept as ranges rather than resolved silently. The interactions that single-parameter screening misses are treated directly: silica scaling against sorbent temperature windows, radionuclide accumulation on beds, and the reinjection chemistry that can force a conditioning step into the flowsheet.

Four pilot settings are reread through the framework, and they share one pattern: every co-production project that has reached hardware chose a sorption route. The seven-step procedure is then run forward, from public data alone, on a project outside the framework's inputs. The reading is concordant with the route chosen there, and it shows the grade gate to mark the boundary of demonstrated practice rather than of feasibility. The procedure remains an unvalidated synthesis, and the work states the research that would validate it.