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An Australian start-up backed by the miner Rio Tinto is raising funds to develop a lithium extraction technology that could open up new reserves of the key battery ingredient and reduce the world’s reliance on China to refine the commodity.
ElectraLith, spun off from Melbourne’s Monash University, said it had successfully produced battery-grade lithium hydroxide from a variety of raw lithium types. After attracting investment from Rio Tinto and Britain’s IP Group, it now intends to raise $15mn to build its first facility for further development and commercialisation of the technology.
The start-up is one of a small number of companies developing “direct lithium extraction” technology, which could transform the sector by substantially reducing the cost of lithium mining and opening up previously unviable deposits.
Goldman Sachs argued in a research note last year that the successful deployment of DLE could double lithium production and likened its impact to that of shale on the oil sector.
ElectraLith is different from its rivals in also claiming to be able to refine the lithium through a process it calls DLE-R. This is achieved by using electrodialysis to filter brine containing lithium through a membrane to create lithium chloride. A second membrane purifies it further to create lithium hydroxide, a refined product used in electric vehicle batteries.
Charlie McGill, chief executive of ElectraLith, said the ability to refine lithium into hydroxide could have significant benefits for countries such as the US and Australia, which have moved to develop critical minerals policies aimed at reducing their dependence on China.
“The onshoring of the refining process could have a significant impact for the US,” he said. “We can take brines directly to Tesla and the US government with no China involvement.”
China dominates lithium refining with a 65 per cent global market share, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
Mike Molinari, IP Group’s managing director in Australia, said reducing costs, increasing production and navigating geopolitics had become defining factors for the critical minerals sector. He said technology that could help address those issues was well placed to succeed, especially in the lithium market, where demand is expected to outstrip supply.
“The vast majority of capacity is in China and that’s become problematic,” he said. “This could reduce the dependence for critical resources on governments you’re not aligned with.”
ElectraLith’s testing showed it was able to refine lithium without water or chemicals, which sets it apart from traditional evaporation methods that use huge amounts of water and from other DLE processes. McGill said the proof of concept showed it was able to produce hydroxide from very low-quality brine sourced from Utah.
Scepticism remains over the potential of DLE, a technology that has been in development since the 1970s yet only used at commercial scale at a handful of projects globally, and McGill admitted the company had a long road ahead to deliver on its promise.
But the backing of mining major Rio Tinto was hugely significant, he said, and large oil and gas companies and government departments had expressed interest in the new funding round.
Travis Baroni, chief adviser at Rio Tinto’s battery minerals unit who sits on ElectraLith’s board, said the technology showed “real potential to significantly reduce the economic and environmental costs of lithium production”.