The world contains large quantities of lithium, an integral element in electric vehicle batteries. And while lithium is commonly mined from hard rock, most of the world’s lithium reserves are actually found in brine, extremely salty water below the Earth’s surface.
Today, brine mining involves evaporating brine in massive, flamboyantly colored pools over a series of about 18 months, leaving behind high concentrations of lithium. It is a simple but inefficient process that takes up large areas of land and is ecologically disruptive.
As automakers around the world struggle to meet extraordinarily ambitious electric vehicle production targets, there is growing interest in doing things differently.
“The automotive industry requires a 20-fold increase in lithium supply and there is no way to achieve that kind of growth with conventional technologies,” said Dave Snydacker, founder and CEO of Lilac Solutions.
Lilac is one of several companies piloting a set of new and largely unproven technologies called direct lithium extraction, or DLE, that could increase the efficiency and decrease the negative externalities of the brine extraction process.
Instead of concentrating the lithium by evaporating the brine in large pools, the DLE pumps the brine directly into a processing unit, undergoes a series of chemical processes to separate the lithium, and then re-injects it underground. This process produces lithium carbonate or battery hydroxide in a matter of hours, without the need to transport concentrated brine to a separate processing facility.
DLE could also help boost the domestic lithium mining market. Today, most lithium brine mining takes place in the Salar de Atacama, a large salt flat in northern Chile that contains the highest quality lithium brine in the world. But DLE technologies require much less land and can help unlock resources in areas where the brine contains less lithium and more impurities.
US companies Lilac Solutions, EnergyX and Standard Lithium are exploring for lithium resources in areas such as Arkansas’ Smackover Formation, California’s Salton Sea and Utah’s Great Salt Lake, as well as overseas in Argentina , Bolivia and Chile. The Chilean government has even announced that all new lithium projects will have to use DLE technology.
“So the timing is right and ripe for it to see the light of day very, very soon,” said Amit Patwardhan, CTO of EnergyX.
Direct lithium mining company EnergyX is building demonstration plants in Argentina, Chile, California, Utah and Arkansas.
Energy X
In a world before electric vehicles, traditional methods of brine extraction and hard rock mining were more than sufficient to meet the global demand for lithium.
“The world didn’t need DLE for the last 50 years. The primary use of lithium was industrial: ceramics, glass and lubricants,” said Robert Mintak, CEO of Standard Lithium.
But with demand for electric vehicles and the lithium-ion batteries that power them booming, there is now a supply crunch.
“Over the past 10 years, 90% of new lithium production has come from hard rock projects. But hard rock projects are getting more and more expensive as we get into lower grade resources. And if you add up all the hard rock projects, there aren’t enough resources to meet the automakers’ goals. It’s the brine resources big enough to electrify the vehicle industry,” Snydacker said.
DLE is already being used to some extent in both Argentina and China, where companies Livent and Sunresin are implementing commercial technology that combines DLE with traditional evaporation pond operations.
These companies rely on a technology called adsorption, the only commercially proven approach to DLE. In this process, the lithium molecules in the brine adhere to an adsorbent substance, removing them from the surrounding impurities. But experts say removing lithium from adsorbents requires a lot of fresh water, a big problem given that many of the world’s best brine resources are in arid areas.
Livet’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. Lilac reported that in pilot tests it uses between 10 and 20 metric tons of fresh water, while EnergyX says it uses less than 20 metric tons.
China-based Sunresin says it recycles all its fresh water and its newest projects will operate without evaporation ponds.
But a host of other companies are now entering the industry, testing alternative technologies they claim will not only eliminate evaporation ponds entirely, but increase yields while reducing energy and fresh water requirements.
Bay Area-based Lilac Solutions uses a technology called ion exchange. It is currently testing its technology in Argentina in partnership with Australian lithium company Lake Resources.
“With the Lila ion exchange bead we have developed a ceramic material. This ceramic selectively absorbs lithium from the brine while releasing a proton. Once the lithium is absorbed into the material, we then remove the lithium from the bead with dilute acid. and this produces a lithium chloride concentrate that can be easily processed into battery-grade chemicals,” explained Snydacker.
Lilac Solutions is developing a direct lithium mining facility in Argentina in partnership with Australian lithium company Lake Resources.
Lila Solutions
Lilac hopes to have its first commercial-scale module up and running before the end of 2024. The company is backed by BMW and Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Ford has signed a non-binding agreement to buy lithium from its Argentina plant.
EnergyX, based in both San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Austin, Texas, uses a combination of technologies that can be tailored to the specific brine resource. The first step is traditional adsorption, followed by a method known as “solvent extraction,” in which concentrated brine is mixed with an organic liquid. The lithium is then transferred to the organic before being stripped and concentrated. Membrane filtration is the final step, which removes all remaining impurities.
“So you see all these loops and synergies that come out of combining these technologies. And that’s another big differentiator in what EnergyX does and what really makes the cost of the technology so much lower compared to any other person,” Patwardhan said.
EnergyX is building demonstration plants with undisclosed partners in Argentina, Arkansas, Chile, California and Utah, and aims to have the first two up and running by the end of this year. The company recently secured $50 million in funding from GM to help scale its technology.
Vancouver-based Standard Lithium also has big sponsors. The public company’s biggest investor is Koch Industries, and for the past three years it has been running a demonstration plant in southern Arkansas, producing lithium at a pre-existing bromine plant.
The company uses both ion exchange and adsorption technologies, depending on the resource. It expects to begin construction on a commercial-scale DLE facility next year and is also expanding into Texas.
“We have an opportunity as we expand from Arkansas to Texas to be the largest producing area of lithium chemicals in North America, using them in an area that is not under water stress, that has a social license to operate,” Mintak said.
Companies like Standard Lithium, which are leaning toward the U.S. market, will benefit from the Inflation Reduction Act, which ties electric vehicle subsidies to the domestic supply of battery materials. Automakers can also receive the full electric vehicle credit if they come from countries that have free trade agreements with the US, such as Chile.
While Chile has announced that all new lithium projects in the country will have to use DLE technologies, it has not announced which companies it will partner with for these new projects.
Neighboring Bolivia was considering technology from both EnergyX and Lilac Solutions to help unlock the country’s vast but largely underdeveloped lithium resources. Finally, the government tapped a consortium of Chinese companies, led by battery giant CATL, to spearhead DLE’s efforts at its salt pans.
Most of the new lithium supply will continue to come from hard rock projects for the rest of this decade, Snydacker said. “But by the end of this decade, we will see large-scale brine projects coming online…” he predicted. “And in the next decade, this technology will provide the majority of new supplies.”
Overall, DLE’s lithium production is expected to grow from about 54,000 metric tons today to 647,500 metric tons in 2032, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. It is expected to be worth around $21.6 billion.
“But when you put it in relative terms to the rest of the global market, that’s only about 15% of the total supply,” said James Mills, principal consultant at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. “So we’ll still have to rely on traditional forms of production for lithium units, whether it’s evaporation ponds or hard rock mining.”
Watch the video to learn more about the companies looking to bring direct lithium mining into the mainstream.
