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In the five years since it was founded, Summit has ramped up its technology and incorporated it into a pilot plant in Santiago, Chile, to which it brought the brine in trucks, he says. It is now building a demonstration plant that will process 25 cubic meters of brine per day and is drawing up plans for its first commercial plant.
Livent and SunResin use their own aluminum sorbents. Three Chinese lithium producers have been using SunResin’s technology since 2017, and five more projects are underway, according to Goldman Sachs.
Livent, however, was the first, having deployed DLE commercially back in 1998. The company concentrates brines in small ponds before running them through the DLE process, using less land and water than traditional evaporation ponds. The company increased production to 27,000 metric tons a year in 2019, and plans to produce another 50,000 metric tons a year by 2026.
California startup Lilac Solutions is taking a different approach to DLE called ion exchange. The company uses tiny beads that look just like adsorbent beads but behave entirely differently, says CEO David Snydacker. The beads absorb lithium in exchange for a hydrogen ion. Then the company uses a dilute acid to flush out the lithium.
Ion exchange is a common process, used for everyday purposes such as in home water softeners. But developing an ion-exchange material for lithium has “been a Holy Grail,” says Snydacker. “For 20 years, large companies have been trying to make ion exchange work.” Only ceramic materials can absorb lithium with high selectivity, but the challenge is to make a durable ceramic that can survive brine and acid washes. Although previous ceramic ion-exchange materials have degraded after only 10 cycles, he says, Lilac’s material lasts for more than 2,000 cycles.
Australian lithium developer Lake Resources is now piloting Lilac’s technology at two remote project sites, and Ford has signed a deal to buy 25,000 metric tons of lithium a year from one of these projects. Snydacker says Lilac is installing a third pilot plant at “one of largest lithium resources in the world,” and it will announce other large customer projects in the coming months.
Oil and gas companies in Canada and the United States regularly pull up lithium-laced saltwater, but these waters contain only 30 to 40 milligrams of lithium in a liter, a mere 3 to 4 percent as much as the brines in Chile contain. That’s just too little for today’s adsorbents to nab, says Alex Wylie, president and CEO of Calgary startup Volt Lithium.
Large silver canisters of equipment with pipes connecting them.
Volt Lithium’s pilot-plant-facility equipment treats brine prior to entering into the direct lithium extraction (DLE) process.Greg Huszar/Volt Lithium
To tap into these oil-field brines, Volt Lithium has developed 5-micrometer-wide beads of a lithium-adsorbing compound that they expose to brines from which they first remove other contaminants. The beads are far smaller than the particles that other companies use, he says, “so we have 800 times more surface area, and that’s allowing us to extract from low concentration waters.”
Recent pilot tests for Volt’s Rainbow Lake Lithium Project in Northwest Alberta show that the material can extract 90 percent of lithium from water with concentrations as low as 34 milligrams per liter. The testing was conducted at the company’s pilot plant operations in Regina, Saskatchewan. Volt Lithium is now building a demonstration plant that will test brines from across North America, says Wylie.
The company’s team, which includes several oil and gas industry alumni, focused on oil-field brines. “The infrastructure is already in place,” he says. “That’s such a big deal. Lithium in that brine is being produced every day, it’s just not being extracted.”
Heavyweights in the oil and gas industry are starting to branch out into lithium, according to the Financial Times. ExxonMobil recently purchased oil-field brines containing lithium in Arkansas, and Chevron is also looking at producing lithium.
The ability to tap into diverse domestic sources of lithium is of special interest to the United States government, says Holly Stower, an analyst at the Cleantech Group. “As the U.S. transitions to a low-carbon economy, the Department of Energy wants to ensure that they have steady and secure lithium supply that is resilient to geopolitical risk, and DLE enables that,” she says.
The DOE is investing millions in new DLE technologies to extract lithium from geothermal brines in the United States, such as the Salton Sea in California, which the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates could provide over 24,000 metric tons of lithium a year. The DOE’s biggest purse of US $5 million has gone to Austin-based EnergyX, which also has $50 million from General Motors. The company is using a mix of technologies that include adsorption and a patented nanotechnology membrane that can almost instantly separate lithium.
Which technology for DLE will win is still unclear. There is as yet “no clear winner in terms of what customers want and what the technology can provide,” she says. But all the DLE separation technologies being piloted now are already used for other purposes, says Goldman Sachs’s Nicolaci, and that should speed up commercialization. “Expect the first real wave of DLE projects from later in the decade.”