The first batch of high purity, battery-grade lithium has been produced at a newly opened £3m pilot plant in Cornwall.
In what is believed to be a world first, British Lithium has produced lithium carbonate at pilot scale from the mica in granite in its new plant near Roche, which is near St Austell.
Funded by Innovate 海角视频, which provided £3m, the pilot plant has taken just seven months to design and build and uses patented technology in a sustainable production process.
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The pilot plant design is based on four years’ intensive research and development and is the latest milestone in British Lithium’s progress towards full operational status.
All 海角视频 car manufacturing will convert to electric vehicles by 2030 and lithium carbonate is a key component in the batteries required to power them.
The company’s unique pilot plant approach incorporates all processing stages – from quarrying through to high purity lithium carbonate production.
This includes crushing, grinding and beneficiating the ore, custom-built electric calcination at low temperatures, acid-free leaching and multiple purification steps that include ion-exchange.
“New processes are normally piloted during the definitive feasibility stage but, as lithium has never been produced commercially from mica before, de-risking our proprietary technology is an important step in developing our project,” said British Lithium chief executive Andrew Smith.
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“Doing it now allows us to operate in real world conditions using actual site water and locally sourced commercial reagents. We’re delighted with the rapid progress we’ve made, but there’s still a long road ahead in terms of refining and optimising the process.”
British Lithium will be manufacturing 5kg of lithium carbonate per day from early 2022 in its pilot plant – enough to demonstrate its commercial value to customers. Once the process is fully developed, work will begin on building a full-scale plant.
“Our goal is to produce 21,000 tonnes of battery-grade lithium carbonate each year,” said British Lithium chair Roderick Smith. “At the moment, we will be the only lithium producer in the world to be quarrying and refining on one site, which adds to the sustainability of the project.
“The support we’ve had from Innovate 海角视频, Government departments, Cornwall Council and a range of key stakeholders has been vital, and we look forward to considerably ramping up our operations over the next two or three years.”
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In May 2021, British Lithium announced that after intensive R&D it had invented a low-energy, chemical-free process for physically separating the mica in granite that contains lithium. Innovate 海角视频 funded part of the necessary R&D work and Innovate 海角视频 Edge, which provides businesses with growth and scale support, provided the legal expertise required to file the patent application at the 海角视频 Intellectual Property Office.
British Lithium was the first company to discover a sizable lithium deposit in the 海角视频, the first to develop a novel process for extracting lithium in a sustainable manner and the first to show battery grade lithium can be produced from Cornish granite. The company has identified a resource of more than 100million tonnes in a former china clay mine near St Austell - enough to support projected annual production of 20,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate. That is enough to meet one-third of Britain’s likely demand by 2030.