The company is backed by BMW and the Bill Gates-funded Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Ford has signed a nonbinding agreement to buy lithium from its Argentina plant.ĮnergyX, which is based out of both San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Austin, Texas, uses a combination of technologies that it can tailor to the specific brine resource. Lilac expects to have its first commercial-scale module operating before the end of 2024. Lilac reported that in pilot testing it uses between 10 and 20 metric tons of fresh water, while EnergyX says it uses less than 20 metric tons.Ĭhina-based Sunresin says that it recycles all of its fresh water, and that its newer projects will operate without evaporation ponds.īut a host of other companies are now getting into the industry, testing out alternative technologies which they claim will not only eliminate evaporation ponds altogether, but increase yields while lowering energy and fresh water requirements.
Livent's most recent sustainability report indicates that it uses 71.4 metric tons of fresh water per metric ton of lithium carbonate equivalent, or LCE, produced. But experts say that stripping the lithium from the adsorbents requires a lot of fresh water, a big problem considering many of the world's best brine resources are in arid areas. In this process, lithium molecules in the brine adhere to an adsorbant substance, removing them from surrounding impurities. These companies both rely on a technology called adsorption, the only commercially proven approach to DLE. It's the brine resources that are large enough to electrify the vehicle industry," Snydacker said.ĭLE is already being used to some extent in both Argentina and China, where the companies Livent and Sunresin are implementing commercial tech that combines DLE with traditional evaporation pond operations. And if you add up all the hard rock projects, there's just not enough resource out there to meet automaker goals. But hard rock projects are increasingly expensive as we go into lower grade resources. "Over the last 10 years, 90% of new lithium production has come from hard rock projects. Lithium's primary use was industrial - ceramics, glass and lubricants," said Robert Mintak, CEO of Standard Lithium.īut with demand for EVs and the lithium-ion batteries that power them booming, now there's a supply crunch. "The world didn't need DLE for the last 50 years. In a world before electric vehicles, traditional methods of brine mining and hard rock mining more than sufficed to meet global lithium demand. But DLE technologies require much less land and can help unlock resources in areas where the brine contains less lithium and more impurities. Today, most lithium brine mining takes place in the Salar de Atacama, an expansive salt flat in northern Chile that contains the highest quality lithium brine in the world. This process produces battery-grade lithium carbonate or hydroxide in a matter of hours, without the need to transport concentrated brine to a separate processing facility.ĭLE could also help jump-start the domestic lithium mining market.
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Instead of concentrating lithium by evaporating brine in large pools, DLE pulls the brine directly into a processing unit, puts it through a series of chemical processes to separate the lithium, then injects it back underground.
Lilac is one of a number of companies piloting a set of new and largely unproven technologies called direct lithium extraction, or DLE, which could increase the efficiency and decrease the negative externalities of the brine mining process.
"The auto industry requires a 20x increase in lithium supply, and there's just no way to achieve that type of growth with conventional technologies," said Dave Snydacker, founder and CEO of Lilac Solutions. Personal Loans for 670 Credit Score or LowerĪs automakers around the world struggle to meet extraordinarily ambitious electric vehicle production targets, there's growing interest in doing things differently. Personal Loans for 580 Credit Score or Lower Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit
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