ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,491,476, issued on Dec. 9, was assigned to SCHLUMBERGER TECHNOLOGY Corp. (Sugar Land, Texas).

"Method of recovering lithium from a lithium source" was invented by Florence Binet (Houston), Masoud Aghajani (Houston), Dominic Vincent Perroni (Sugar Land, Texas), Gary Wayne Sams (Houston), Prasanna Nirgudkar (Sugar Land, Texas), Rod William Shampine (Sugar Land, Texas), Sandeep Verma (Cambridge, Mass.) and Wenlin Zhang (Menlo Park, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Described herein are methods of recovering lithium from dilute lithium sources. The methods include extracting lithium from an extraction feed using direct lithium extraction ...