Lithium News

An Australian-based startup has launched a ground-breaking, ESG technology project which aims to revolutionise supply chain transparency and carbon footprint verification in the fast-growing lithium battery recycling sector.

Loop Critical Minerals (Loop CM) – a joint venture between recycling technology company Battery Pollution Technologies and leading blockchain supply chain technologist Blockhead Technologies aims to set a new standard in accountability and environmental responsibility in the lithium battery recycling industry.

Lithium battery disposal is a growing challenge around the world with many batteries ending up in landfill where they cause complexities including the leaching of dangerous chemicals.

There has also been a spate of Electric Vehicle (EV) battery fires in Australia and internationally, including when cars are dumped, and smaller lithium batteries exploding while charging, causing major property damage. Those “thermal runaway incidents” are now extended to large scale battery storage systems.

Emergency services are grappling with how to manage lithium battery fires which can only be contained and not quickly extinguished.

With global efforts focused on combating climate change and creating a circular economy, Loop CM’s technology is being designed to eliminate greenwashing and deliver a data-driven, objective assessment of a company’s recycling processes.

It will effectively monitor the recycling process from battery end-of-life recovery and transportation to chemical engineering battery metals extraction processes.

Loop CM’s technology is also being designed to:

• Assist companies meet increasing regulatory compliance, including in the transportation of spent battery cells and disposal verification.
• Monitor and manage the safety and hazard issues.
• Measure residual waste and how it is responsibly reprocessed or disposed of.
• Assess the use of energy in the recycling process as the world transitions to a zero net carbon footprint.

The Joint Venture will not only target Australia, but the large, established Northern Hemisphere markets.

The blockchain technology is an attractive sustainability solution for multiple players within the battery ecosystem including major battery producers, car manufacturers, financiers and regulators.

“We are excited to be working towards a transformative solution that empowers businesses in the lithium battery recycling sector to take meaningful steps towards transparency, sustainability and the journey to net zero impact,” said Nicholas Assef, Founder and CEO of Battery Pollution Technologies.

“The Loop CM technology is aimed to provide visibility into the complex recycling supply chain which will also allow verification of a variety of data points that are specific to the lithium battery recycling industry, enabling companies to make environmentally conscious choices.”

Blockhead Technologies Founder and Managing Director Greg Leach said: “We have already successfully developed and applied supply chain traceability and carbon footprint calculation technology in precious metals refining.

“We are pleased to be working with a visionary company such as Battery Pollution Technologies to create a unique technology solution for the end-of-life battery industry – which we believe will have global application.”

A county in California is in the focus of the scientific community after huge reserves of lithium. The Imperial County has so much rare earth element that 375 million batteries can be produced. The research holds important because lithium is in high demand due to the popularity of electric vehicles. Located on the Southeast border of the US state of California, it is among the least populous counties in the country. In straddles the border between the United States and Mexico.

According to SFGate, 3,400 kilotonnes of lithium was found in the Salton Sea region. The mineral is mostly found (around 80 per cent) in Australia, China and Chile, and US officials predict that the demand for lithium will skyrocket by 4,000 per cent in the coming decades.

The official website of the county said that it could take 100 years to completely extract lithium. California State government said the Salton Sea region is “believed to have the highest concentration of lithium contained in geothermal brines in the world”.

In the United States, only one per cent of global lithium is being mined and processed, according to US Geological Survey. The latest discovery is set to give a boost to this industry in the country.

Politico said in a report that EnergySource Minerals, one of three companies spearheading lithium production by the Salton Sea’s southern shore, has said it plans to start mining in 2025.

After the mining begins, the US is estimated to overtake China to become the leading country in the field of chemicals. It is expected to eliminate the reliance on imports from China and make the US totally self-sufficient in the mineral.

According to a March press release from the county, lithium extraction will be taxed, and 80 per cent of this new revenue stream is to go directly to the county.

While it may not rise to the level of the 19th-century gold rush in the western United States, the shifting technological landscape has started a surge of its own.

With the automotive and industrial worlds turning away from fossil fuels and toward battery-powered vehicles, lithium has become an elite commodity. A report from USA Today found that the price of lithium went up 500% from 2021 to 2022, and manufacturers are using more lithium than is currently being mined.

Though there are many suspected lithium deposits in the United States — including one location in Nevada that is believed to hold billions of dollars’ worth of the metal — American companies largely rely on foreign sources for it.

A researcher at Central Michigan University hopes to change that, starting with an easier way to find it.

WHAT IS LITHIUM?

You don’t have to travel far down the periodic table of elements to find lithium. With the atomic number of 3, it is the lightest-known alkali metal.

Lithium is used in a number of ways — included in things like drugs, lubricants and even hydrogen storage. It has also proven to be key in several alloys, allowing a structure to maintain its strength without adding much weight.

But its primary service, especially going forward, is its role in rechargeable batteries. Compared to other metals, batteries made with lithium can power devices for longer and also have a longer shelf life.

Lithium doesn’t occur naturally as a metal. Primarily, it is found within the water of most mineral springs. Right now, most of the world’s lithium is produced in Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, taking advantage of continental brine deposits. Remember that Nevada property worth billions? That’s the Silver Peak lithium mine, the United States’ only continental brine lithium mine in the U.S., according to the British Geological Survey.

But lithium can be found in other places, even if it may be more difficult to identify. You can find traces of lithium in most rocks, but to make financial sense, lithium companies want to find rocks that are lithium-rich to get the most bang for their buck. That can be boiled down to a select group of pegmatites called LCT.

Pegmatites, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, are a type of granite or igneous rock characterized by its giant crystals. Some of them contain high volumes of rare metals like lithium, cesium and tantalum (LCT).

Pegmatites are first formed more than 10 miles below ground. But over time, tectonic forces push the rock formations higher while erosion works away topside, bringing pegmatites closer to the surface until they can be uncovered by miners.

But how do you know you are sitting on pegmatites? And how would you know if they are rich in lithium? That’s where Mona Sirbescu and her team comes into play.

HOW DO WE FIND IT?

Sirbescu is a geology professor in CMU’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. She said the methods for finding lithium can be relatively primitive, but they are evolving.

“The current methods are more of a shotgun approach,” Sirbescu told News 8. “They use boots-on-the-ground kinds of methodology, sending geologists and geological technicians to collect rock specimens and look for natural rock outcrops. It’s not always easy because many terrains in North America are covered by forests or glacial sediments.”

She continued: “(There are also) remote sensing methods to figure out the uneven topography of the terrain. These rock bodies, pegmatites, tend to stand up. So they can be determined from satellite images. And then there are even newer methods that are used when big funding is involved. Geophysical methods, airborne sensors, detecting the radioactivity of the materials or the magnetic properties or the density of the materials. All of these contrasts in the physical properties of the rocks can indirectly reveal whether there are pegmatites or not in the subsurface.”

Sirbescu, partnered with a lithium company in Wisconsin, is leading research focused on identifying the key indicators within soil to give miners a more accurate estimate to whether or not their bedrock is rich in pegmatites and if it contains heavy levels of lithium.

“We were contacted a couple of years ago by a lithium company. We were asked to develop a pilot exploration project focused on about 10 square miles in an area of northeastern Wisconsin,” she said. “We had already studied the mineralogy, the mineral components of these rocks in detail and already published a bunch of papers in scientific journals starting about 15 years ago. But now with new research funds from this lithium company and from our own Office of Research and Graduate Studies at CMU, together with my team of students, we conducted fieldwork in the area and came up with this multi-faceted way of integrating different methods.”

One of Sirbescu’s key strategies is soil sampling.

“Soils form directly through weathering of the bedrock — both pegmatites and their host rocks. So, the soils potentially carry the chemical signature of the rocks beneath the soil cover,” she said. “So we are expecting to find a chemical anomaly or chemical halo around these bodies or in the soil above the bodies.”

Her team uses tools and analytical equipment available to them at the university to determine the exact chemical makeup of the soil. Then, working with a fellow researcher in Brazil, the data is entered into an algorithm that determines the lithium potential for the bedrock.

Sirbescu said that teamwork is key to making scientific progress.

“It’s a really interesting development and I couldn’t have done it without my collaborators, my international collaborators, and the partnership with the lithium industry,” Sirbescu said. “My colleagues here in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, who were very instrumental and very supporting in developing this project. And some of the biggest benefits really for me as a researcher and professor at CMU is working with my students, including a bunch of undergraduates who are very passionate and very eager to learn. One of my biggest satisfactions is to help them achieve their career goals and see them get started on their careers.”

The Imperial Valley in southeastern California is emerging as a global hotspot for lithium: A new U.S. Department of Energy report confirms that the Salton Sea holds enough of the rare mineral to power over 375 million electric vehicle batteries—more than the total number of vehicles on U.S. roads.

That’s good news for the global shift toward clean energy and American ambitions of energy independence. However, USC experts warn that the race to mine American lithium could come with significant environmental and public health impacts.

“‘Lithium Valley’ is now poised for a potential economic boom—one promoted not just by companies but by environmentalists who believe that the method of lithium extraction being proposed there is the ‘greenest’ approach available,” said Manuel Pastor, director of the USC Equity Research Institute. “But the question is, who will benefit from the boom and who will face continued marginalization?”

California enters the global race to mine ‘white gold’

Lithium—”white gold”—is produced from hard rock or extracted from natural geothermal brines, sourced from salt lakes like the Salton Sea. Australia is the world’s biggest supplier, with production from hard rock mines, while Argentina, Chile and China lead in lithium production from salt lakes, according to the World Economic Forum.

In recent years, both the pandemic and geopolitical tensions have highlighted the risks of relying on foreign sources for critical materials like lithium, nickel and cobalt that power the batteries in our EVs and devices. The World Bank anticipates a 500% spike in demand for lithium by 2050.

“To enable sustainable future production from local resources, the U.S. needs to reduce the amount of lithium used in batteries and seek alternative local sources of lithium,” said Greys Sošić, an expert in sustainability and global supply chains at the USC Marshall School of Business. She points to geothermal brine lithium recovery—a process that extracts battery-grade lithium from natural geothermal brines found in hot springs and salt lakes such as the Salton Sea—as a viable alternative.

Shrinking Salton Sea, air pollution crises raise public health concerns

Originally formed in 1905 as a result of an engineering mishap and spanning 350 square miles, the Salton Sea is now shrinking. Its exposed seabeds are releasing dust that poses a threat to health, especially in children, in a community already beset by environmental and economic challenges, experts say.

“This is one of the poorest counties in California, with a median household income roughly one-third of that in Silicon Valley … and it has a population which is 85% Latino but with political representation falling far short of that standard,” said Pastor.

The childhood asthma rate for the communities around the sea is 22% compared to the national average of roughly 8%, according to Shohreh Farzan, an associate professor of population and public health at the Keck School of Medicine of USC who has been collecting samples of air particles at elementary schools around the Salton Sea since 2017.

“Many children in this area are affected by respiratory symptoms, such as wheezing and allergies, and the local air quality is a likely contributor to the high rates we see,” Farzan said. “The trade-off with lithium is that while it can reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, there is much that remains to be understood about the environmental impacts of the extraction process and whether this energy transition could impact the health of the surrounding communities.”

Jill Johnston, an associate professor in the division of environmental health at USC, adds that “while efforts to move away from fossil fuels and promote zero-emissions technology is important for public health, it is critical to avoid creating new environmental hazards. The overly burdened families near the proposed lithium extraction site deserve to have clean air and water and protection of their health.”

After a brief hiatus, lithium-ion battery prices are back to their regularly scheduled nosedive.

Throughout the 2010s, batteries got cheaper and cheaper, cheering the businesses and climate activists that want to convert vehicles to electric and bolster renewable power plants with flexible energy storage.

That march of progress slipped on the banana peel of Covid supply-chain disruptions: Price declines slowed in 2021, and prices went up in 2022, per the analysts at BloombergNEF. That’s the wrong direction for a technology that’s supposed to benefit from learning curves and increased scale.

But the Covid years were a strange time, and the global lithium-ion battery industry seems to have shaken off the malaise. Global pack prices fell 14% this year to a record low of $139 per kilowatt-hour, according to BNEF. Lithium prices softened, components got cheaper, and massive new battery factories opened up. Demand for batteries grew an astonishing 53% this year, but even that fell short of some manufacturers’ expectations, which pushed prices down further.

That $139 per kilowatt-hour figure is actually a blend of different batteries from several categories, like electric vehicles, stationary grid storage and buses. Electric vehicle packs, which have the most scale of the bunch, have already hit $128 per kilowatt-hour. This metric matters because batteries generate most of the cost of electric vehicles, so more affordable batteries mean more affordable EVs. And the cheaper grid storage gets, the easier it will be to shift renewable generation into the hours when the sun or wind aren’t available.

Just how cheap do battery packs need to get? At least for EVs, battery watchers have long described the $100-per-kilowatt-hour threshold as a mythic boundary past which cost-competitiveness would be assured. The U.S. Department of Energy staked out the further target of “$80 per kilowatt-hour manufactured cost for a battery pack by 2030 for a 300-mile range electric vehicle” in its 2020 Energy Storage Grand Challenge.

If prices continue to fall at roughly the pace they did this year, the industry will blow past $100 per kilowatt-hour in a handful of years — and DOE’s 2030 goal looks eminently achievable.

Pure-play lithium company Surge Battery Metals (TSXV: NILI) announced Thursday it closed both the Wilkins Family and Y3-II agreements to secure control of over 25% of the mineral rights for the private lands within its flagship claystone project located in Elko County, Nevada.

The private lands are comprised of four parcels totalling 880 acres. The first agreement called for the company to acquire a 21.25% interest in the mineral rights underlying the private lands for $50,000 and issuance of a total of 1.25 million common shares.

The second agreement provided for the purchase of an additional 3.75% interest in the mineral rights and has now also closed with the issuance of a total of 300,000 shares.

The first round of drilling at the Nevada North project, completed in October 2022, identified a strongly mineralized zone of lithium bearing clays occupying a strike length of almost 1,620 meters.

Widths of the mineralized horizons are at least 400 meters, supported by highly anomalous soil values indicating potential for the clay horizons to be much greater in extent, the company said, adding that the potential for a significant lithium deposit can be illustrated by the average lithium content within all near surface clay zones intersected in 2022 drilling.

The 2023 drill program is designed to expand the known lithium-rich clay from the current 1,620 meters strike length to more than 3,500 meters and the known width of the mineralization to 950 meters from the previously drill-indicated 400 meters.

Initial assay results from the first hole of the 2023 season had a high of 8,070 parts per million (ppm) lithium with an average of 4,067 ppm lithium, using a 1,000 ppm cut-off.

Surge Battery Metals stock was up 1.03% by 3pm EDT in Toronto. The company has a C$76.4 million ($56.2m) capitalization.