Lithium demand is expected to strongly grow in the near future, as a consequence of the envisaged increase of battery production for stationary energy storage and electromobility. The current technologies are not suited for meeting this demand. With the aim of spreading the available sources of lithium, in this work we investigated the limitations of the "electrochemical ion pumping" in terms of energy losses (overvoltages) and captured lithium for lithium sources with concentrations down to 1 mM. In order to do so, we used a flow-through electrochemical cell and we took into account also the energy consumption for the pumping process. We observed that in presence of large amount of sodium ions there is a detrimental effect on the performances of the system, likely connected to a surface adsorption process, as recently reported in literature. Our study points out which parameters of the materials must be tailored (porosity, surface) for improving the performances of the technique. (c) 2017 The Electrochemical Society.