Lithium News

Australia’s Hawkstone Mining has decided to revisit plans to buy lithium projects in the US only weeks after it said it wouldn’t proceed with their acquisition.

Earlier this month, the miner walked away from its planned 100% takeover of USA Lithium, saying it was unable to reach a deal to de-risk the transaction. But now it has agreed to sign a revised deal.

Investors welcome the news that gives Hawkstone two lithium projects – the Big Sandy in Arizona and the Lordsburg in New Mexico. The company’s shares soared almost 40% to A$.0.04 on the news, closing 32% higher at A$0.029.

Under the terms of the new agreement, Hawkstone would acquire all of the shares of USA Lithium in exchange for 250-million shares. The first half of the shares will be issued at the completion of the transaction, with the issue of the remaining shares subject to Hawkstone declaring an inferred resource of no less than 30-million tonnes, at grades greater than 2,000 parts per million at the Big Sandy project, within 36 months of the transaction.

The issue of the second batch of shares was also subject to the ASX granting a waiver for the issue of the deferred consideration shares. Following shareholder approval, Hawkstone will also transfer A$250,000 to USA Lithium.

The Big Sandy lithium clay project extends over about 20.9 square kilometres of granted Bureau of Land Management claims. A further 53 claims covering 4.9sq km were also recently pegged.

According to Hawkstone, the asset has returned high-grade assays from surface soil sampling and the company plans to kick-off a diamond drilling program immediately.

The Lordsburg lithium brine project, in turn, comprises 28.7sq km and has had no modern exploration, but surface sampling has uncovered lithium concentrations of 160ppm.

Lithium, the lightest solid element, is giving weight to the electric vehicle revolution and ushering in a new era of clean energy.

Manitoba is hoping to support the revolution from the Canadian heartland. The province’s sweeping flatlands are best known for their wheat exports, but lithium’s rise has intensified exploration around the Winnipeg River area for what many have dubbed “the new gasoline.”

The area hosts the historic Tanco mine, which sits atop the world-class Tanco lithium-cesium-tantalum deposit. The area is now the subject of intense exploration for lithium, but the mine and its surroundings have long been a hotbed of resource production and exploration.

The Tanco pegmatite was first discovered in the 1920s, and was ultimately developed into a large deposit of spodumene, one of the primary minerals mined for its lithium content. While the Tanco mine first opened in 1969 as a tantalum operation, it was not until the 1980s that it began mining spodumene as a pyroceramic. In fact, one of the major uses of the Tanco spodumene was Corningware cookware.

Over its history, the mine’s production revolved primarily around spodumene as an industrial product with little to no focus on lithium production. As the world moves away from the use of fossil fuels and the market for lithium battery-powered cars continues to grow, the Tanco mine region has garnered interest in the search for lithium-rich deposits.

The rise of Manitoba’s lithium

Pegmatite, similar to granite, is an extreme igneous rock that forms in the last stage of magma crystallization. Rare ions that are not used up in the crystallization process can form minerals that contain enrichments in elements like the lithium that exists in the Tanco pegmatite area. These pegmatites are the single largest potential source of lithium in Manitoba.

The world-class Tanco pegmatite is part of the Bernic Lake pegmatite group, which belongs to the larger Winnipeg River-Cat Lake pegmatite field. The pegmatite field is subdivided into two districts and further classified into groupings based on location, mineralogy and geochemistry.

Though less prominent than in Winnipeg River, lithium-bearing pegmatite occurs across the province. Areas including Snow Lake, Red Sucker Lake, Gods Lake and Cross Lake all host pegmatite lithium deposits, but the region’s most significant pegmatite occurrences are located in the Winnipeg River-Cat Lake pegmatite field.

Additionally to its lithium sourced from pegmatites, Manitoba and neighboring Saskatchewan both share a system of regional aquifers notable for an eastward and upward flow of deep saline groundwater. Analysis of Saskatchewan’s portion of this groundwater system shows the potential for economic lithium concentrations. Further studies are ongoing to determine if similar potential within these aquifers exists under Manitoba’s jurisdiction.

New operations on old ground

Following the emergence of electric vehicles and the associated battery metals, Manitoba has seen growth in lithium projects being developed in the province. FAR Resources, for instance, is developing its Zoro lithium project in the mining region of Snow Lake.

The project sits in a regional pegmatite area akin to the Whabouchi region in Quebec, which itself hosts numerous large deposits. Sampling and drilling on the project has identified significant lithium mineralization with results of up to 6.35 percent lithium oxide from rock chip assays and 1.8 percent lithium oxide over 15.7 meters from drilling.

Also near the town of Snow Lake, Nova Minerals is developing the Thompson Brothers pegmatite, which hosts historical resources of 4.305 million tonnes at 1.3 percent lithium oxide in a known strike length of over 800 meters. Optioned from Ashburton Resources, the project is made up of 18 claims over 1,829 hectares that sit across a spodumene-rich pegmatite dyke.

Another player in Manitoba’s lithium space is New Age Metals In 2016, CEO Harry Bar saw the value in entering that specific market and understood the potential associated with the pegmatites in the Winnipeg River area and nearby Tanco pegmatite.

The company has since acquired seven lithium properties in close proximity to the Tanco mine, making the company the largest claim holder in the Bird River greenstone belt. Three of the properties — Lithium One, Lithium Two and Litman West — are drill ready, and the company is working towards developing these.

Signaling its understanding of the region’s potential for significant lithium production, Azincourt Energy also signed a non-binding letter of intent (LOI) with New Age in late 2017 for the option to acquire up to 50 percent, 60 percent or 100 percent of the properties. Under the agreement, New Age will have the opportunity to enter into a joint venture agreement once Azincourt reaches 60 percent.

New Age Metals’ Lithium One project is situated in a historically known pegmatite-rich area in Southeast Manitoba containing several lithium-rich pegmatites. The property contains numerous pegmatite formations, with the Silverleaf pegmatite being the largest reviewed in 2016, yielding assays of 4.33 percent lithium oxide, 2.08 percent rubidium oxide and 0.04 percent tantalum pentoxide.

The Lithium Two project is situated about 22 kilometers north of the Tanco mine and hosts two main pegmatite bodies: the Eagle pegmatite, with a historical (non-NI 43-101) resource of 544,460 tonnes of spodumene at 1.4 percent lithium oxide, and the FD No. 5 pegmatite. In 2016, the company carried out a small ground-proofing program to confirm the historic lithium assays and uncovered results of up to 2.44 percent lithium oxide at the Eagle body and up to 3.04 percent lithium oxide at the FD No. 5 pegmatite.

What investors should look for

With an international focus on cutting fossil fuel emissions, lithium is ascendant. The discovery of lithium deposits in Manitoba bodes well for current and future exploration projects in the province. Additionally, the confirmed lithium potential in aquifers beneath the border with Saskatchewan could indicate even further viability for Manitoba as a major lithium producer.

Keliber participates in a project aiming to develop and commercialize a new lithium ion battery recycling process.

The increase in the use of lithium ion batteries has been strong during the last two decades. Driver for the past rapid growth has been the use of mobile electronics. Further growth is expected and will be mainly driven by increasing demand of electric vehicles and stationary battery applications.

Lithium ion batteries contain materials such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, aluminium, graphite and special fluoride salts. As demand and use of these materials in lithium ion batteries increases, recycling of these valuable materials comes increasingly important.

Keliber is one of the industrial partners in project aiming to develop and commercialize new lithium ion battery recycling process that is suitable for the larger future volumes and have a much higher material recovery rate than today’s state-of-the-art technology for recycling.

Other industrial partners of the project are Norsk Hydro ASA as a project leader, AS Batteriretur and Glencore Nikkelverk AS. R&D partners for the project are Elkem AS Technology, IME RWTH Aachen (DE), MIMI Tech (DE), Agder University (UiA,MIL) and NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology). Funding for the project is received from the Research Council of Norway.

“As a future lithium chemical supplier, with operations founded on sustainable development and social responsibility, we are interested about the life cycle of our products and the possibilities that new innovations can offer for recycling for the lithium ion battery materials.

We are pleased to be part of international project consortium that has target in developing and commercializing new sustainable recycling process,” says Keliber’s Chief Production Officer Manu Myllymäki.

The power source for things like implanted medical devices, electric cars or unmanned aerial vehicles are vital to their performance. So, what would happen if that powerhouse of energy — a lithium battery — failed? An electric or hybrid car would render useless and a much-needed biomedical device would hamper a patient’s health.

These are the kinds of things Polymer Science Professor Dr. Yu Zhu, along with other researchers, is trying to prevent.

A recent paper from Zhu’s research group, “A Superionic Conductive, Electrochemically Stable Dual-Salt Polymer Electrolyte,” will be published Tuesday in the journal Joule, Cell Press’s forward-looking journal spanning energy research across disciplines.

Specifically, Zhu and his research team developed a solid polymer electrolyte that can be used in lithium ion batteries to replace the current liquid electrolyte to improve the safety and performance of lithium batteries.

Zhu says solid electrolytes has not been commercialized in lithium batteries because of drawbacks like low ionic conductivity and high interfacial resistance with electrodes. However, Zhu and his team demonstrated that a dual-salt based polymer solid electrolyte exhibited superionic conductivity at room temperature and outstanding electrochemical stability with lithium battery electrode materials.

“A solid electrolyte has long been thought for lithium ion batteries due to its nonflammable property and high mechanical strength that may mitigate the disaster caused by battery failure,” says Zhu. “Battery safety and energy density are major concerns for emerging applications of lithium batteries, such as for use in electrical vehicles. If the solid polymer electrolyte is successfully developed, the energy density of the battery could be doubled and the safety concerns for lithium batteries could be removed. This research sets up a strong base to develop such a promising solid electrolyte for lithium batteries.”

The research team has formed a company, Akron PolyEnergy Inc., that will further develop this technique and produce a large prototype for future commercialization.

Zhu’s graduate students Si Li and Yu-Ming Chen are leading authors for this research. Other researchers include graduate students Wenfeng Liang, Yunfan Shao and Kewei Liu, and Dr. Zhorro Nikolov from the National Polymer Innovation Center.

Researchers from Brown University have discovered yet another peculiar and potentially useful property of graphene, that could be useful in guiding nanoscale self-assembly or in analyzing DNA or other biomolecules.

Their new study demonstrates mathematically what happens to stacks of graphene sheets under slight lateral compression—a gentle squeeze from their sides. Rather than forming smooth, gently sloping warps and wrinkles across the surface, the researchers found that layered graphene forms sharp, saw-tooth ridges that turn apparently have interesting electrical properties.

“We call these quantum flexoelectric crinkles,” said Kyung-Suk Kim, a professor in Brown’s School of Engineering and the paper’s senior author. “What’s interesting about them is that each crinkle produces a remarkably thin line of intense electrical charge across the surface, which we think could be useful in a variety of applications.”

The charge, Kim says, is generated by the quantum behavior of electrons surrounding the carbon atoms in the graphene lattice. When the atomic layer is bent, the electron cloud becomes concentrated either above or below the layer plane. That electron concentration causes the bend to localize into a sharp point, and produces a line of electrical charge roughly one nanometer wide and running the length of the crinkle. The charge is negative across the tip of an upraised ridge and positive along the bottom of a valley.

That electrical charge, the team says, could be quite useful. It could, for example, be used to direct nanoscale self-assembly. The charged ridges attract particles with an opposite charge, causing them to assemble along crinkle ridges or valleys. In fact, Kim says, particle assembly along crinkles has already been observed in previous experiments, but at the time the observations lacked a clear explanation.

Those previous experiments involved graphene sheets and buckyballs— ball-shaped molecules formed by 60 carbon atoms. Researchers dumped buckyballs onto different kinds of graphene sheets and observed how they dispersed. In most cases, the buckyballs spread out randomly on a layer of graphene like marbles dropped on smooth wooden floor. But on one particular type of multilayer graphene known as HOPG, the balls would spontaneously assemble into straight chains stretching across the surface. Kim thinks flexoelectric crinkles can explain that strange behavior.

“We know that HOPG naturally forms crinkles when it’s produced,” Kim said. “What we think is happening is that the line charge created by the crinkles causes the buckyballs, which have an electric dipole near the line charge, to line up.”

Similarly, strange behaviors have been seen in experiments with biomolecules like DNA and RNA on graphene. The molecules sometimes arrange themselves in strange patterns rather than flopping out randomly as one might expect. Kim and colleagues think that these effects can be traced to crinkles as well. Most biomolecules have an inherent negative electrical charge, which causes them to line up along positively charged crinkle valleys.

It might be possible to engineer crinkled surfaces to take full advantage of the flexoelectric effect. For example, Kim sees a crinkled surface that causes DNA molecules to be stretched out in straight lines making them easier to sequence. “Now that we understand why these molecules line up the way they do, we can think about making graphene surfaces with particular crinkle patterns to manipulate molecules in specific ways,” he said.

Texas’ largest solar farm will soon have a big battery to go with it.

Los Angeles-based FlexGen will supply the 10 megawatt, 42 megawatt-hour battery for Vistra Energy’s 180 megawatt Upton 2 solar farm in West Texas. The system can provide 10 megawatts an hour for more than four hours. One megawatt can power 200 Texas homes in the summer.

The Upton 2 solar plant went online June 1 and is the largest in the state.

The battery system will be housed in 40 shipping container-sized boxes on the site, where work has been going on since May said FlexGen CEO Josh Prueher. The battery is expected to be online by the end of 2018.

While he wouldn’t release the cost of the system Prueher said it is in the tens of millions of dollars.

Prueher’s company has worked on similar battery systems with the military and oil and gas industry for years.

The combination of renewable resources and batteries is not the first in the state. In Ector and Winkler counties Duke Energy’s Notrees wind farm is hooked into a 36 megawatt battery system developed by Younicos. The system has been online since 2012 when it was built with lead-acid batteries, and was recently upgraded in December to lithium-ion batteries.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas or ERCOT, which oversees Texas’ grid supplying 90 percent of its population, showed its summer seasonal grid assessment that six storage projects are operating in Texas.

San Antonio’s city-owned utility CPS Energy has been planning to build a 10 megawatt, 10 megawatt hour battery system hooked up to a five megawatt solar farm for more than a year after winning a $3 million grant from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality or TCEQ. CPS Energy CEO Paula Gold-Williams has said the facility will be located on the campus of the Southwest Research Institute.