Mexico isn’t key—US supply is sufficient
Alex Scott, 10-29-2022, Alex has been writing about the chemical industry for more than 20 years. He has an MS degree in environmental technology from Imperial College London with an Erasmus scholarship to co-study at the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal. He also has an MA degree in geosciences from Edinburgh University, “Challenging China’s dominance in the lithium market," Chemical and Engineering News, https://cen.acs.org/energy/energy-storage-/Challenging-Chinas-dominance-lithium-market/100/i38, b
Analysts predict that a substantial share of the world’s future non-Chinese supply of lithium and lithium chemicals will come from North America. The region accounts for nearly a quarter of the money being invested in exploration for new sources of lithium globally, and “some forecasts point to its share of global mine production increasing from less than 1% today to potentially north of 10% within 6 years,” says Sean Keenan, global natural resources research lead for Accenture. Production will also increase significantly in South America and Australia, he says.
Ken Hoffman, cohead of EV battery material research for the consulting firm McKinsey, takes a similar position. Lithium tends to occur at relatively high concentrations in dead seas—former bodies of water that have evaporated, leaving high concentrations of minerals—and the US has plenty of them, he says.
Pricing has very much gone up. That helps us with the long-term investments that we need to make.
Hoffman is optimistic that new technologies for extracting and refining lithium will greatly boost supply. A raft of direct-lithium-extraction (DLE) technologies, which precipitate lithium out of brine using filters, membranes, or ceramic beads, are being tested in pilot facilities around the world. Direct-lithium-to-product technologies, which involve the recovery of lithium hydroxide or carbonate from lithium-containing solutions without pretreatment steps, are also being tested, Hoffman says.
Among those developing direct-lithium-to-product approaches is the US material separation company IBC Advanced Technologies, which has been testing its SuperLig molecular recognition technology in the Salar de Maricunga, Chile.
Arguably, the company best placed to increase US lithium production is Albemarle, a US firm that is the world’s largest lithium producer. The company is substantially expanding production at its brine-based lithium site in Chile and at two huge rock mines in Australia.
In June, Albemarle inaugurated a lithium-processing facility near Antofagasta, Chile, as part of a $500 million investment that will enable the firm to double production at the site, to more than 80,000 t per year of battery-grade lithium carbonate.
Albemarle also operates the only major lithium production site in the US, a brine evaporation complex in Silver Peak, Nevada. The company plans to spend up to $50 million to double production there by 2025, to about 7,500 t per year. It also plans to build a plant for converting lithium ore into lithium hydroxide in the southeastern US and to reopen a hard-rock mine in North Carolina.