Ernest Shader
HOUSTON (Reuters) – In a landmark move for the global clean energy transition, International Battery Metals Inc has become the first company to commercially produce lithium with a new type of filtration technique that is expected to lead to cheaper and faster supplies of the metal for electric vehicle batteries.
At a rural Utah facility managed by privately held US Magnesium, IBAT this week began producing commercial quantities of lithium at about 5,000 tonnes per year using its version of direct lithium extraction (DLE) technology.
This groundbreaking achievement has not been reported before.
The company developed a portable DLE plant and became the first to achieve this goal, essentially beating out others such as Standard Lithium, SLB, Rio Tinto and Eramet. Industry investors, analysts and customers have been waiting for commercial-level production for years.
DLE is now proven at commercial scale, and analysts predict it could become a $10 billion industry in annual revenue within a decade by transforming the speed and efficiency of lithium production for EV makers and others, much like hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling boosted U.S. oil production.
IBAT’s approach is based in part on technology that IBAT Chairman John Barba developed at Dow Chemical in the 1980s. “This is about increasing the global supply of lithium,” Barba said. “We feel like we’re at a critical time in the industry.”
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that saline deposits in Europe, Asia and North America contain roughly 70 percent of the world’s reserves of this ultra-light metal.
Historically, lithium has been produced through evaporation ponds, where the metal is extracted from saltwater, or through open-cut mining, where the metal is extracted from hard-rock deposits. These methods are water-intensive, physically demanding and take long to develop and produce, sparking a push for a third option.
DLE technologies vary widely, but are comparable to a typical domestic water softener and aim to extract around 90% or more of the lithium from saltwater, compared with around 50% when using ponds.
While Arkadium Lithium and other companies use the DLE process in conjunction with evaporation ponds, no DLE technology has ever reached commercial production without the DLE process, intensifying competition to expand production to many parts of the world where occasional rainfall makes evaporation ponds impractical.
Analysts say it is unlikely that any single DLE technology, including IBAT, will become a global standard because many saline deposits have diverse chemical compositions: Many Chinese deposits, for example, have high concentrations of magnesium, while Bolivia’s deposits, among the world’s largest, have high concentrations of potassium.
Lithium has repeatedly proven difficult to separate from other metals that often mix with it in saltwater, which has puzzled many scientists working on DLE technology for years: Lithium is also technically a salt, which can be corrosive.
IBAT’s rise comes as lithium prices have fallen by more than 80% over the past year, leading to job cuts at companies including industry leader Albemarle Corp. and DLE upstart Lake Resources Corp. But IBAT plans to build more plants and sell them for use around the world.
strategy
IBAT said its success at commercial scale production was due in part to its relatively small factory.
Rivals have been trying to commercialize DLE for more than a decade, but their plans included producing more than 20,000 tonnes per year in permanent facilities in remote areas where labor and supplies are hard to find.
Houston-based IBAT designed and built the 450-foot-long (137-meter-long) mobile plant in Louisiana, then transported it in 13 pieces to a U.S. Magnesium facility that pumps brine from the Great Salt Lake.
Additional plants can be added like Lego blocks and stacked to increase production by 5,000 tonnes per year. The company says it will take 18 months to build an IBAT plant and get it up and running.
Each plant is less than three acres (1.2 hectares) and is designed to be relocated to new deposits for reuse in the future, saving on construction costs. The cost of IBAT’s plants ranges from $50 million to $60 million each, depending on several factors.
Paris-based Eramet has spent about $900 million on its DLE project, which is aiming to start operating this year in Argentina after more than a decade of development.
U.S. Magnesium President Ron Sayre said he chose the IBAT process because of its portability and the type of sorbent material developed by Bhabha that is used in the IBAT process to filter lithium from the brine.
U.S. Magnesium has begun selling lithium produced with IBAT’s technology and pays royalties to IBAT, but he added that the company looked at several competing processes, including one from Breakthrough Energy Ventures-backed Lilac Solutions, before settling on IBAT.
“I view IBAT as a commercial lithium producer,” Thayer said.
ExxonMobil, which is developing a lithium project in Arkansas, is considering using IBAT’s technology, according to Reuters.
IBAT’s facility aims to recycle more than 98% of the water it uses, and Burba has repeatedly cited the lithium industry’s water-intensive nature as a structural obstacle to commercializing DLE.
This recyclability is especially important in Utah, where state officials last year tightened regulations on withdrawal of water from the Great Salt Lake, forcing Compass Minerals to abandon plans to mine lithium there.
(Reporting by Ernest Shader; Editing by Veronica Brown and Rod Nickel)
