US Patent Issued to Tesla on Feb. 3 for "Selective extraction of lithium from clay minerals" (California, Pennsylvania Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 3 -- United States Patent no. 12,540,367, issued on Feb. 3, was assigned to Tesla Inc. (Austin, Texas).

"Selective extraction of lithium from clay minerals" was invented by Zhiwen Sun (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Huiyuan Chen (Philadelphia), Turner Boris Caldwell (San Francisco) and Anthony Michael Thurston (Morgan Hill, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Processes for extracting lithium from a clay mineral and compositions thereof are described. The extraction process includes providing a clay mineral comprising lithium, mixing a cation source with the clay mineral, performing a high-energy mill of the clay mineral, and performing a liquid leach to obtain a lithium rich leac...