Lithium – The Essential Metallic Mineral For EV Battery Technology
What Is Lithium?
Lithium (Li) is a soft alkali metal, the 30th most abundant element but usually present in such low concentrations that it is non-viable to extract commercially.
There has long been a small demand for Lithium; since the mid-19th century it has been used for medical purposes, as a lubricant additive, and was even an ingredient in the first iteration of 7UP! Originally marketed for “hospital or home use” for “dispelling hangovers” and relief of gout, today’s 7UP is more useful for avoiding that hangover in the first place.
Back to our subject; Lithium is the least dense of all the metallic elements, making it a lightweight conductive metal that can produce energy-dense batteries – perfect for mobile plant and electric vehicles (EVs).
Today, its minor uses continue, as an additive or enabler, in various products such as coolant for the nuclear power industry, as a desiccant in air-con systems, and in specialist glass and ceramics manufacturing.
2020 - 2050: The ‘White Gold’ Rush
This current decade is seeing an astronomical growth in demand for Lithium.
As forecasts stand in 2024, demand will significantly outstrip supply from 2026 onwards. This jump is due to it transitioning from a trace, minor ingredient, to being the major component in ‘lightweight’ EV batteries – the globally chosen route to the decarbonising of transport.
Lithium use quadrupled from 2010 – 2021, doubled again over the next three years (to 2024), and is forecasted to keep doubling every 3 – 5 years until 2050.
The UK government estimates that this nation alone will need around 80,000 tons of lithium a year by 2030.
Lithium’s newfound importance, coupled with the fact that nearly all supplies of processed lithium are controlled by one country/one party, saw it added to the EU, UK and USA’s Critical Raw Materials (CRM) list in recent years.
How And Where Is Lithium Produced?
Lithium is a natural resource that is sourced from either mineral brine pools or hard rock (ore) mines. Major extractors of lithium ore include Australia, southern African and American nations, but due to the infrastructure costs, and ecological and safety challenges of processing this ore into a commercial product, much of the ‘added value’ is done in Chinese mega-plants. With China’s own known reserves of lithium sited in the remote and isolated Qinghai region, their strategy is to buy control of foreign mines, “off-take” the ore to China, and export higher-value batteries and finished products. This has resulted in China controlling over 80% of the global lithium supply chain, a monopoly not seen as conducive to market stability.
China, having gained control of the global lithium and EV marketplace (reportedly pouring in over $100billion to do so since as early as 2009), has continued this long-term strategy by restricting exports of lithium, and banning the export of extraction and refining technology.
This has resulted in governments around the world encouraging domestic production of lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide while searching for alternative free-trade countries to import from. The EU, USA, UK and others have seeded their markets through R&D grants and policies aimed to encourage longer-term investment into sustainable lithium and EV battery production.
Mining (Hard Rock Sources)
A number of regions across the world have granite rock which contains large amounts of lithium-rich mineral ores, mainly in the form of spodumene or pegmatites.
Importantly for the UK and its EU neighbours, commercially viable concentrations of lithium mineral (granite pegmatites) have been found in Cornish granite formations - in addition to geothermal brine. First discovered there in 1864, it wasn’t until the 21st century that major surveying and test extraction began.
The UK and Portugal are the only two European nations currently mining lithium, although Spain, Italy, Germany, and Serbia plan to open new lithium mines soon.
Brine Pools
Underground brine pools have formed naturally either in geologic formations, or abandoned mines where water has absorbed lithium from the surrounding rock. As time has replaced the need for rock crushing and roasting, brine-sourced lithium is especially cost-effective and energy-efficient.
Naturally formed, large lithium-rich brine pools are found on or near the surface in Australia, South America, southern Africa and Portugal. These warmer climates often use evaporation pools to concentrate lithium content, an energy-efficient method although it consumes a lot of land space, water (90% is lost to evaporation), and time (12 – 24 months).
In the UK, the extensive former Cornish tin mines hold valuable sources of lithium-bearing water, in addition to deep geothermal heat-rich, lithium brine. It's here in southwest England that lithium is being extracted from both rock ore and brine, enabling the likes of Cornish Lithium Ltd to use both sources in tandem for maximum efficiency.
Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) And Sustainability
In temperate UK and northern Europe, the lack of solar evaporation potential and often land limitations has spawned innovation in DLE (direct lithium extraction) technologies.
The sustainability benefits of DLE over traditional evaporation methods include much less water use and no soil contamination, avoiding water table depletion, and land and aquatic habitat loss.
How Does Direct Lithium Extraction Work?
Instead of evaporating off the water content over hectares of brine pools, DLE techniques speed up lithium separation through various chemical reactions, ion-exchange methods, and membrane filtration.
Subterrain lithium-bearing brine is pumped from the well extraction shaft and mixed with special resins that bond with the lithium ions. These ions are then stripped off the resin surface, resulting in a high concentration of lithium carbonate. This is used as an industrial and medical ingredient, or further processed with calcium hydroxide to create lithium hydroxide, highly sought after for high-capacity EV batteries. The by-product of this is limestone (calcium carbonate).
As DLE is done in a controlled, smaller footprint plant (compared with solar evaporation), it is possible to recycle the resins, water and other chemical compounds used in a closed-loop cycle.
Lithium Brine As A ‘By-Product’ Or ‘Co-Produced’ In The Energy Industry
When extracting oil and gas, the ‘produced water’ that comes to the surface as a by-product often contains valuable metallic mineral salts including lithium, which can be extracted through hydrocyclone gravity separation, flocculation, or filtering techniques. This process is being used for the recovery of lithium brine from fracking in Texas.
Experiments in Rhineland, Germany are showing promising mineral yields using brine water procured as a ‘by-product’ of geothermal energy production.
To meet the 2030 forecasted demand, $42 billion of new investment is required in refining and processing facilities globally, between 2023 and 2028, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
As demand grows, there is little doubt that ever more economical and environmentally sounder ways to extract lithium will emerge – eg. seawater desalination plants, mineral clay processing, end-of-life battery recycling, etc.
To learn who’s who in the UK lithium mining and refining market, look out for our upcoming article “Made in the UK – the State of Lithium Mining and Refining in Britain”
