Standard Lithium makes better-than-battery-quality lithium carbonate

Cecilia Jamasmie | December 4, 2020 | 3:03 am News Canada United States 
Standard Lithium makes better-than-battery-quality lithium carbonate
Southern brine plant at the Lanxess project in Arkansas. (Image courtesy of Standard Lithium).

Standard Lithium (TSXV: SLL) announced that it has completed the start-to-finish proof of concept of its lithium processing technology and that the successful operation of the technology at a pre-commercial continuous scale has directly extracted lithium from brine in Arkansas and produced a purified, concentrated intermediate product (LiCl solution).

In a press release, the company said that the LiCi solution was then converted to “better-than-battery-quality” lithium carbonate final product.

The recrystallized lithium carbonate and the resulting high-purity lithium carbonate turned out to be of very high purity >99.92 wt.%

“The culmination of the proof-of-concept was to convert and crystallize the LiCl solution produced by the company’s first-of-its-kind Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) demonstration plant. The LiCl solution shipped from Arkansas was concentrated further using industry-standard reverse osmosis technology and then converted at the company’s SiFT Pilot Plant located in British Columbia, Canada,” the media brief states.

According to Standard Lithium, the recrystallized lithium carbonate as per the SiFT technology and the resulting high-purity lithium carbonate was sent for third party chemical analysis and it turned out to be of very high purity (>99.92 wt.%), as opposed to the normal industry benchmark for battery quality, which is usually understood to be >99.5 wt.%. 

The lithium extracted from brine to carry out these processes was produced at the company’s Lanxess project, which is located in southern Arkansas and comprises over 150,000 acres of permitted brine operations.

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