Geothermal can supply Türkiye’s domestic lithium needs for 20 years

Ali Kindap, President of the Geothermal Energy Association (JED) (source: JED)

Carlo Cariaga 18 May 2023

The domestic requirement of Türkiye for lithium for the locally produced electric vehicles, mobile phones, tablets, and computers, is at about 1500 tons per year. With about 25,000 tons of lithium discovered from geothermal resources, geothermal lithium can supply Türkiye’s domestic lithium demand for at least 20 years.

This is based on the assessment made by Ali Kindap, the Chairman of the Geothermal Energy Association (JED) of Türkiye. With long-standing R & D studies yielding positive results on the analysis of lithium from geothermal brine, the geothermal resources of  Türkiye will also be used for the production of lithium.

Emphasizing that the lithium obtained from geothermal energy production facilities will also contribute significantly to Türkiye’s domestic electric car manufacturing and domestic energy storage technologies, Kindap underlined that Turkey is quite rich compared to the lithium potential found in geothermal resources in the world. Kindap added that domestic lithium production could form an export market in this area.

JED Chairman of the Board of Directors Ali Kindap made the following assessment:

“Geothermal mining is one of the most important industries that has developed recently. There are examples in different countries of the world. With the widespread use of electric vehicles all over the world in recent years, one of the most popular minerals is lithium. Especially in the automotive sector, in battery systems of electric cars – this mineral has an important place in the charging equipment of electronic devices.

We know that each car needs about 6-7 kilograms of lithium. We can say that we aim to produce 250,000 electric vehicles in the coming period. The amount of lithium that Turkey needs for battery systems of electric cars and charging equipment of electronic devices is 1,500 tons per year. As an association, we have done some research on how to produce this need, which is worth approximately 100 million dollars per year with its present value, in Turkey.

We realized that our geothermal resources contain a significant amount of lithium. We came together with expert companies and had laboratory tests done, and we saw that such a technology could be produced. We set up a unit based on the positive results of the tests. We saw that we could decompose the lithium in our geothermal waters and moved on to the field testing phase to produce it economically. Today, we see that there is a significant amount of potential in the fields we have discovered in Izmir, Aydin, Manisa, Denizli, and Çanakkale. There is no other source of lithium production in Turkey, it can only be obtained from geothermal sources.

The economic equivalent of the amount we foresee at the moment reaches 2 billion dollars. While drawing attention to the importance of eliminating the foreign dependency on lithium, I would like to give this good news through you.”

Source: Email correspondence via our Turkish language platform JeotermalHaberler