Direct Lithium Extraction: Is Lithium from Brine the New Oil?
This story is contributed by Buff López, Cleantech Group
- Direct lithium extraction (DLE) technology will double the current production of lithium while reducing the environmental impact.
- DLE recovers 70%-90% of lithium from brine compared to 30–40% for evaporation ponds at a competitive CapEx / OpEx.
- Commercial demos are set to come online as early as 2025.
Potential to Deliver on a Multimillion-Ton Scale
Lithium producers are struggling to meet today’s lithium demand, which has risen steadily in the last few years, from 310,000 mt in 2020 to an estimated 917,000 mt by the end of 2023. This demand is projected to grow to a staggering 2.4 million mt in 2030, (Statistica, 2023). A structural deficit of lithium chemicals by the end of this decade is increasingly a potential reality, and meeting the future demand for energy storage and electric vehicles (EVs) will require innovation across the lithium value chain.
Since 2013, 90% of lithium has come from hard rock mines that are steadily becoming more expensive as the quality of mineral ore declines globally. Decreased mineral ore quality means more material needs to be processed to generate lithium, resulting in increased OpEx.
Given that we cannot wait 10–20 years for conventional lithium projects to come online, near-term innovations like direct lithium extraction (DLE) may be capable of unlocking the massive brine deposits across the globe. The US DOE estimates that the Salton Sea alone could produce 600,000 mt of lithium annually — near the global annual production in 2022. Lithium brine deposits make up approximately 66% of global lithium resources, and DLE will potentially deliver millions of tons of lithium per year by accessing brines that have remained too costly and inefficient to tap.
Due to geological variation, no two brines are chemically equivalent and developers need to provide bespoke solutions based on the brine composition. For example, a salar brine in South America has different contaminants and a different lithium concentration than a geothermal brine in the UK. While this might sound challenging for developers, at the same time this site variability presents an attractive opportunity for smaller DLE players to provide custom solutions to major miners and mine owners, giving DLE developers who have not partnered with bigger players the opportunity to generate revenue.
Technology
The key DLE technologies for extracting lithium from brine are selective sorbents for adsorption, resins and sorbents for ion-exchange, membranes, and solvent extraction.
Developers typically use one or more of these methods to provide bespoke solutions depending on the brine composition.
- Adsorption: Lithium chloride is selectively captured by a sorbent (e.g., magnesium) and extracted via a solution. This process requires few chemical reagents, is not weather dependent and can be ideal for high-temperature brines. (e.g., Livent, Energy Source Minerals)
- Ion-exchange: Lithium ions are selectively captured by ion-exchange resins or sorbents from brine. This simple process requires few chemical reagents, is not weather dependent and has a high throughput. (e.g., GeoLith, Standard Lithium, Lilac Solutions)
- Membranes: Lithium ions are separated via membranes driven by an external force, such as pressure, an electric field, or a thermal gradient, the most common of these processes being nanofiltration. Membrane sourcing is a significant bottleneck. (e.g., Summit Nanotech, EnergyX, Watercycle Technologies)
- Solvent Extraction: Lithium is selectively extracted from brine into the organic phase of the solvent. This process is relatively simple but requires large volumes of chemicals and reagents that can have a poor environmental impact and rapidly corrode equipment. Emerging innovations include reducing the water, chemicals, and energy required while keeping recovery rates above 90%. (e.g., POSCO Holdings, Adionics)
These methods aim to displace the incumbent evaporitic ponds, in which brine is pumped into large artificial ponds. The sun evaporates the water over time and the lithium salt is left exposed for collection.
But this approach comes with its own challenges, the primary one being time. The ponds, which can be as large as 15 square miles, can take up to ten years for the permitting to be approved and again as long to come online. Once online, it can take another 18 months for the water to evaporate completely from the giant ponds and even then the process yields only 30%-40% recovery, with much of the lithium lost due to runoff and leakage, in many cases into local water supplies.
What’s more, the lithium then needs to be sent to an offsite refinery, typically in China, which requires additional time, money, and energy. Because the battery value chain is largely dominated by China, there can be significant delays in processing lead times, especially for developers in the Americas.
DLE’s modular designs reduce land usage, which should accelerate permitting while enabling small to medium projects (many outside of the Lithium Triangle) in areas that do not have the weather and large amounts of land needed for evaporitic ponds:
- International Battery Metals (IBAT) just announced that it will deliver a modular DLE plant in the western United States in what could be the first commercial DLE facility to come online in North America
- Cornish Lithium is piloting lithium extraction from geothermal brines in Cornwall, UK
- E3 Lithium is piloting ion-exchange DLE facilities in Canada for production from geothermal brines by 2025
- Lithium de France began exploratory drilling of geothermal brines in Northern Alsace in November 2023
Once the permitting is approved, modular processing units (e.g., Geolith, Summit Nanotech) have the potential to bring a DLE project to an operational state in just a couple of months. Bringing additional lithium production online when costs are high could help stabilize the cost curve and deliver more predictable lithium prices for consumers.
Tapping into renewable power assets can help reduce carbon emissions. Summit Nanotech, for example, reports 50% GHG emissions compared to traditional pond projects by using renewables. Innovators are reducing, recycling, and in some cases even eliminating the use of freshwater in their processes. For reference, processing one metric ton (mt) of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) requires:
- Evaporitic ponds: < 2200 mt water
- Livent (DLE): 71.4 mt water
- Lilac Solutions: 10–20 mt water
An integral step in the DLE process is the reinjection of wastewater back into the ground. While DLE developers claim that there is minimal harm to the environment, researchers warn that brine injection has the potential to lead to human-induced earthquakes. There is also speculation that more resources (water, energy, etc.) may be required in key steps of DLE than reported.
Most importantly, the yield-normalized cost of DLE is competitive with traditional methods: The average capital expenditure required for a DLE project is approximately $600M (70–90% recovery) compared to $350M for evaporitic ponds (30–40% recovery). Some innovators, including EnergyX, Summit Nanotech, and Lilac Solutions, have even hit 90–99% lithium recovery efficiency.
DLE providers can leverage adjacent technologies to produce battery-grade lithium hydroxide. Mangrove Lithium, for example, manufactures battery-grade lithium hydroxide at the source, eliminating the need for post-processing at offsite refineries.
An exciting area of development for DLE is continuous processing streams. Right now, DLE is still widely performed using batch processes for which each cycle consists of concentrating a large container of brine, and converting these to continuous processes could greatly optimize production.
- Go2Lithium, a joint venture between Clean TeQ Water and Computational Geosciences Inc., is taking advantage of Clean TeQ Water’s commercially available continuous processing systems to deliver continuous DLE. The technology uses a proprietary magnesium sorbent that has up to 98% recovery efficiency and can treat 200–500 L/hour.
- Standard Lithium is also working to develop continuous processes for the North American landscape.
Venture Capital
While there are many DLE projects In China, the only public information is that a few of the commercial DLE operations in production are using SunResin’s adsorption technology.
In the rest of the world, numerous development stage projects are coming online. Many have completed feasibility studies and pilots with senior miners (those with established operations) and junior miners (with limited assets and operations), and are set to deliver commercial demos by 2025.
Investors continue to be engaged with this technology, and there have been a few large funding rounds in 2023:
- Summit Nanotech, which uses nanotechnology to extract 90–99.9% of the lithium from brine, raised a $50M Series A round in January from Evok Innovation, Volta Energy Technologies and six other investors.
- Cornish Lithium, a developer of sustainable lithium extraction techniques from geothermal brines and hard rock, raised $67M in August from TechMet, the UK Infrastructure Bank, and The Energy and Minerals Group. In September, they also crowdfunded over $6.2M — one of the largest crowdfunding efforts in the UK this year.
- Watercycle Technologies, which has achieved up to 90% recovery rates using a pH-based DLE involving membrane distillation crystallization, is fundraising a $7M Series A.
Corporate Engagement
Downstream industries are establishing offtake agreements to ensure material delivery and decrease supply chain disruptions. Buyers who do not may be left without reliable purchasing options. Corporate engagement, especially from energy players and automotive and battery OEMs in 2023, demonstrate the potential for wider adoption of DLE.
- Lithium de France raised $47.7M Series B from Equinor and two other additional investors in March.
- General Motors secured a lithium offtake agreement with Lilac Solutions, Inc. and invested $50M in a Series B round for EnergyX in April.
- Ford Motor entered into an offtake agreement with Albemarle, which is developing its own in-house DLE, to receive over 100 mt of lithium hydroxide for approximately 3 million EV batteries from 2026 to 2030. This lithium has to come from DLE to qualify for tax credits.
Incumbents are developing or considering implementation of DLE technologies for lithium projects. Rio Tinto’s Rincon Lithium Project in Argentina, for example, could employ DLE as part of its strategy to extract lithium from geothermal brines.
Government Engagement
The New Chilean National Lithium Policy (NLP) provides Chile with greater control over lithium deposits and marks significant participation from a government body to support the energy transition. The NLP is expected to generate significant investment in the lithium industry and is likely to encourage more government incentives, policy, and funding in sustainable mining practices for lithium and other minerals.
- A provisional agreement has been reached on the European Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), which will provide funding for lithium extraction projects as the EU aims for 30% domestic production by 2030.
- The US DOE has allocated over $10.9M for DLE developers to produce battery-grade lithium from geothermal brines.
- The Bolivian government struck a billion-dollar deal to extract lithium from brine with a consortium led by Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL).
Conclusion
As the quality of mineral ore drops, the global demand is only continuing to increase. Despite rising demand, investment in the mining sector has decreased in recent years. Mining has traditionally been a risk-averse industry, largely due to the capital-intensive processes required for mining operations, shareholder resistance, and ESG risks, and innovation has been slow to be deployed in the field as a result.
Mining companies and mine owners should be collaborating with startups to deliver the most efficient extraction processes not just for lithium but also other critical raw metals and minerals required for a low-carbon economy. The historically conservative mining industry needs to embrace the use of innovative solutions like DLE that are not only sustainable but will actually enable extraction of additional resources.
While DLE systems have not yet been validated at scale and challenges remain with robustness and durability, an exciting roadmap awaits. Developers originally targeting 2022–2023 to bring commercial-scale demonstrations online had to push back their schedules due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lithium off-take agreements and government incentives, including the Inflation Reduction Act, will result in more project development in 2024. Commercial scale demonstrations from Summit Nanotech and EnergyX, among others, are set to be achieved by 2025.
Cleantech Group is not affiliated with and does not have a financial interest in any of the companies or technologies mentioned in this article.
Buff López will be hosting an interactive briefing on DLE with Jeremy Patt, CTO of Summit Nanotech, and Saad Dara, Co-founder and CEO of Mangrove Lithium, at the Cleantech Forum North America (CFNA) in San Diego at 4:15PM on January 23, 2024. CFNA will take place on January 22–24, 2024.
As an analyst at Cleantech Group, Buff López (he/him/his) is focused on tracking venture capital activity in emerging cleantech solutions in the Materials & Chemicals sector to identify opportunities for innovation and investment. Buff has researched tech solutions across the battery landscape, mining industry, hydrogen, agrifood landscape, and more.
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