THE GREAT LITHIUM ORE WINDFALL

A huge potential source of lithium has been found in the British Isles just as plans for the first UK lithium battery gigafactory are being sketched. If the two firms exploring the area are right, it may not be long before the UK battery industry can cross lithium off its shopping list.

It didn’t seem to matter so much then. But it does hugely now. Some 34 years ago the UK National Environment Research Council revealed that there was just over three million tonnes of accessible lithium sitting in Cornwall in the far south-west of England.

Put another way there are only two other countries in the world with reserves larger than the UK — Chile with 9.2 million tonnes and Australia with 4.7 million.

It suddenly puts the UK firmly at the top table of lithium resources.

The US Geological Survey estimates worldwide reserves to be around 21 million tonnes but not all of this is commercially viable. Moreover, Cornwall’s three million tonnes is located with 100 metres of the surface.

Benchmark Mineral Intelligence believe there is enough to support what it told the G7 summit in Cornwall in June could be a ‘lithium-ion economy’ in the UK.

Back in 1987 at the time of the survey lithium batteries had just been invented. Based on John Goodenough and Stanley Whittingham’s research, Akira Yoshiro had developed a lithium battery two years earlier, but the survey did not rank batteries among the top uses of the element, although its properties for energy storage were recognized.

The information about Cornwall’s potential riches was largely ignored — about a third of its use was then in aluminium reduction and about 40% by applications in glass, ceramics and lithium-based lubricants.

Two companies are licensed to explore Cornwall’s lithium resources in different ways.

British Lithium is looking to mine the former clay pit on the St Austell granite that was the subject of the 1987 BGS report.

The firm claims the pit has an identified resource of more than 100 million tonnes of lithium, and it would be possible to produce 20,000 tonnes a year — enough to supply a third of Britain’s demand by 2030, when the true EV era will be ushered in.

British Lithium chairman Roderick Smith says the Cornish resource is contained in mica as opposed to spodumene, which is exploited in Australia.

Lithium mine production (2020), reserves and resources in tonnes according to USGS

Country Argentina Australia Austria Bolivia Brazil Canada Chile Czech Republic DR Congo Finland Germany Ghana Kazakhstan Mali Mexico Namibia People’s Republic of China Peru Portugal Serbia Spain United States Zimbabwe World total Production

Reserves Resources 6,200 1,900,000 19,300,000 40,000 4,700,000 6,400,000

1,900 0 -

50,000 - 21,000,000 95,000 470,000 530,000 2,900,000 18,000 9,200,000 9,600,000

- - 1,300,000

- - 3,000,000

-

50,000 - 2,700,000 90,000 50,000

-

700,000 - 1,700,000

- -

50,000 14,000 1,500,000 5,100,000

900 60,000

880,000 270,000 - 1,200,000

- 300,000

870 1,200

750,000 7,900,000 220,000 500,000 82,000 21,000,000 86,000,000+

“This type of lithium as a mineral is the only type that’s been found in the world — it’s in a mica and we’ve developed a process for extracting it then separating it,” he says.

“It’s a completely different process and because it’s never been done commercially, we had to develop the technology and that’s a big part of what we’ve done. It involves physical separation, no heat — it’s sophisticated mechanical separation, and there’s no equipment doing this in the UK so we had to build a lab and ship the equipment over here to do it.

“Granite contains three minerals: quartz, feldspar and mica. First you have to separate the mica from the granite, then you have to get the lithium out of the mica. We have a way of doing it without using chemicals and very little energy.

“We are doing the fourth drilling programme right now. We have produced battery-grade lithium carbonate at laboratory scale and are perfecting that technology and applying for patents. Next is a pilot plant. That will produce big enough samples for battery makers to test the process within about 18 months.”

Commercial production could happen in three to five years, he says, although they are working on a 20year plan with the ultimate aim of producing 21,000 tonnes of batterygrade lithium carbonate a year.

“Our production wouldn’t be a big tonnage, but it’s worth a lot of money,” says Smith. “With some minerals you need a huge fleet, railways, ports, massive infrastructure — you don’t need that here, it would be about three shipping containers a day, so the impact on the local area wouldn’t be noticeable.

“We need the whole battery value chain in the UK. And it’s not just for EVs — grid storage gets less attention because it’s easy to do the numbers on cars, but power generation is probably the biggest industry in the world and it’s transforming very rapidly.”

Cornish Lithium is the other firm looking at lithium in Cornwall, and if CEO Jeremy Wrathall is right, the UK could join the world rankings of lithium producers with the amount of the reserves he believes the country is sitting on.

He believes a massive granite complex underneath much of the 860,000-acre southwestern county of Cornwall could be one of five giant lithium-enriched complexes in the world.

While it may not be quite up there with the Lithium Triangle producers and Australia, the potential for his company’s production of 20,000 tonnes of lithium a year could mean that the UK would be far less reliant on imports.

“We can’t make any claims as to how big it is — we don’t know yet — but we do know that granite underneath Cornwall extends from one end to the other,” says Wrathall. “We’ve mapped the fractures, we know that.

“We also know that the water is very unusual, if not unique, for the low total dissolved solids-to-lithium ratio. Most brines are very salty, some hyper saline, but we’ve got much lower salinity than sea water.

“In terms of needles in haystacks, there’s less hay and more needles.”

Whatever the quantity, Cornish Lithium has already made lithium carbonate from the brine extracted from these deep fractures — and Wrathall says he is almost spoilt for choice as to which technology to use to extract it.

It is likely more than one will be chosen, because the depth of the brines can affect their salinity and lithium grade, therefore could need a different approach.

“We are assessing well over 20 lithium extraction technologies from around the world and we are assessing which ones work best,” he says. “We’ve looked at resins, cartridges, membranes, beads, fibres, organic fluids –this space is rapidly filling, with people approaching us from universities asking us if they can take our brine and test their technology.

“It’s like a Great Awakening — and we are so encouraged by what we’re seeing so far that we think there’s a good chance we won’t need to even send it to a refinery.”

Kathryn Goodenough, principal geologist with the British Geological

WORLD BATTERY ARMS RACE

Presenting to world leaders at the G7 summit in the UK on June 11-13, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence managing director Simon Moores (pictured) said the world was in the midst of a global battery arms race, with supply chains key to being able to stay on the front line.

If the UK wanted to stay in the race, it had to build a lithiumion economy from the top, he said, from the highest levels of government and down.

“It’s not just battery capacity, we need an ecosystem to go with it to gain dominance in EVs and energy storage as that new industry emerges,” he said.

“This is not just a China phenomenon like it was four years ago — this is a global phenomenon now. The Biden administration is promising more to come — at least 10, if not 20, gigafactories in the US. But for these it’s not just capacity, it’s quality.

“Lithium-ion batteries are speciality products and the chemicals that go into them are not chemicals, they are speciality chemicals.”

There is a fear that China has control of these chemicals, but in fact, he says, the country has just 23% of the basket of chemicals (lithium, cobalt, manganese, lithium, graphite) needed, although it does refine 80% of them.

The UK will need 140,000 tonnes a year of lithium, which is 100,000 tonnes more than both Cornish and British Lithium say they will produce in total, as well as 315,000 tonnes of cathodes and 210,000 tonnes of anodes from top tier companies such as CATL, Panasonic and LG Chem, Moores estimates.

The numbers can only go higher: Moores believes that at least four gigafactories will have to be up and running by 2035 if the UK is to stand a chance of competing.

The race is on.

LITHIUM: WHO’S GOT WHAT, WHERE

Unlike lead batteries, which use large quantities of recycled lead from ULABs, there won’t be anywhere near enough lithium from recycled batteries to make any kind of dent in demand for years to come.

“Stocks of used batteries that could be recycled right now are very low compared to anticipated demand. This means that understanding the geology and natural resources of lithium is vital, as this will underpin exploration and mining for this critical raw material,” says the British Geological Survey.

Today, China has a stranglehold on lithium resources – not only because they produce it, but because they refine at least 80% of it, possibly even more, the BGS says.

In 2019, China came fifth in the world with an annual lithium production of 7,500 tonnes after the three South American countries making up the so-called ‘Lithium Triangle’ — Chile, Bolivia and Argentina — and Australia, says the US Geological Survey in its January 2020 report Mineral Commodity Summaries.

“Six mineral operations in Australia, two brine operations each in Argentina and Chile, and one brine and one mineral operation in China accounted for the majority of world lithium production,” it says.

“Lithium supply security has become a top priority for technology companies in the US and Asia. Strategic alliances and joint ventures among technology companies and exploration companies continued to be established to ensure a reliable, diversified supply of lithium for battery suppliers and vehicle manufacturers.

“Brine-based lithium sources were in various stages of development in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, China and the United States; mineral-based lithium sources were in various stages of development in Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Congo, Czechia, Finland, Germany, Mali, Namibia, Portugal, Serbia, Spain and Zimbabwe.”

British Lithium and Cornish Lithium are making efforts to get the UK added to the list. Survey, is far more cautious. The brines in Cornwall, she says, are certainly lithium rich — but there isn’t any data to quantify exactly how much there is.

“There’s a rabbit warren of tunnels that are filled with water, which will be rich in lithium,” she says. “If you go deeper, there are natural fractures in which the brines are circulating, enriched with lithium because it has been leached in from the surrounding rocks for many millions of years.

“We know that but we don’t know how much there is because we don’t have a defined resource estimate. There very likely is, but we don’t have that data.

“One of the first steps in exploration is to have a good resource estimate so that you understand what’s there based on quite a lot of data, then you step to the next stage, which is understanding what we call the reserve,” she says. “The reserve is not just what’s there but also what could be extracted feasibly in the current socio-economic and commercial climate.

“Until they have what we call a code compliant resource estimate, compliant with the mining code, either of Australia or Canada or wherever — there are various different mining codes around the world — there is no basis for saying how much there is.”

Goodenough believes lithium imports will be necessary for at least 10, if not 20, years.

“It’s also the lithium supply chain, which you can summarize as involving exploration, then mining, then refining, then manufacturing, and then use. At the minute, the UK is firmly in the exploration stage. We are unlikely to have mining before the next decade. Even if we have mining, we’re then going to have production of most likely a lepidolite concentrate which would probably have to go overseas for refining.”

ENVIRONMENTAL COMPLIANCE AMID UNSAVOURY ALTERNATIVES

“The whole environmental platform is changing things. Governments all over the world are forcing the very destructive transformation of petrol and diesel and ICE for electric cars, for example, for environmental reasons,” says Roderick Smith, CEO of British Lithium.

“But the solutions for that have to be environmentally sustainable as well. It wouldn’t be acceptable for the government to ban combustion engines and then come up with a dirty alternative.

“So with technology it has to be the most sustainable carbonnegative way of producing these things without creating waste and so on.”

The so-called Lithium Triangle of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia is a worrying case, he says.

“It’s environmentally awful,” he says. “It’s such a fragile environment — what water there is in the ground they are pumping out and evaporating, and depleting what small amount of water there is.

“The salt lakes are 12,000 feet up in the Andes, there’s barely any rainfall, and they’re pumping this super-saturated brine containing lithium into gigantic evaporation pots to produce lithium.

“It is an important producer but it hasn’t grown as fast as hard rock lithium because it’s so environmentally awful.”

Smith says British Lithium’s method — for which there is a patent pending with the UK Intellectual Property Office — uses no chemicals and very little energy, and their licensed area is an abandoned clay pit which is already dug.

“Because of the environmental sensitivity we have sourced it in order of priority,” he says, “and eliminated anything that’s in an area of outstanding natural beauty, or near a village or farmland — any difficulty, we avoided it.”

Cornish Lithium is equally cognisant of environmental damage, and Wrathall says the brines will be exploited from areas that have already been disturbed, like the clay pits.

“It’s a huge area of disturbed ground that we’d be repurposing to extract lithium from the same place,” he says. “Deposits in Europe are challenged because of the infrastructure — national parks, cities, and so on — but in Cornwall it’s not intrusive because the land has already been mined.”

Yet refining is one step already being made in the UK.

Leverton Lithium is one of two companies in Europe that convert, refine and produce lithium chemicals: and it is based in Basingstoke, about 200 miles (330km) away from the St Austell clay pit.

“Our main output is to other industrial markets with only 5%-10% going into lithium batteries, but this is growing,” says CEO David Hicks. “So we are already producing the right products at the right quality. The European demand is quite low but set to grow rapidly.”

He warns there will be no demand in the UK for lithium refining until there are cathode material plants as well as cell factories — which is unlikely for a few years yet.

“The technology is there for Cornish Lithium but it is new and unproven on an industrial scale and they also have to decide if they want to go from miner to battery-grade producer, which is a big step, or to stop short of that and pass on an intermediate material to companies like ours to refine/purify to the final high-quality levels.”

British Lithium’s Andrew Smith, CEO (left), and metallurgical manager Klaas Peter Van Der Wielen.

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