Direct lithium extraction technology to come online in 2025

Chris Doornbos, founder and CEO of E3 Lithium, says the first projects ex-China to use Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) technology will come online in 2025. The company just started its own pilot operations.

E3’s Direct Lithium Extraction pilot plant was recently commissioned in southern Alberta. Data collected throughout the pilot operations will inform the commercial design of the processing facility for prefeasibility and feasibility studies. E3 Lithium has a 16-million-tonne resource of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) in the measured and indicated category, and 0.9 million tonnes LCE inferred.

Chris Doornbos, founder and CEO of E3 Lithium, says “We put out our inaugural pilot results from the operations that we just started, so we’ve been running the pilot for about six weeks, about half of that was commissioning, the other half has been operating, producing a lithium concentrate. We put out the results, what that concentrate looks like, some of the performance metrics last week. Results are exactly as we expected and what we’d hoped, over 90 percent recovery, over 80 percent purity, producing something around 800 almost 900 milligrams per litre lithium, so very exciting. This is what we want to see, this is going to lead us to be able to make battery-grade lithium hydroxide.

“Now we’re going to operate this thing for quite some time, we want to see it continually develop these results over the fall, effectively. We’ve got three systems we’re testing so we’re going to continue to test all over the next three-four months. All of that allows us to design a commercial system for the commercial plant and that will be hopefully happening by the end of this year. We’ll have that done and then published in Q1 of next year and that will be in the form of a prefeasibility study. So we’ll have project economics, capital costs, operating costs, value of the project, as well as all the engineering process flow sheet that you’re going to need to see on how this is going to develop. And that’s a huge milestone for us because once the pilot is operated and that is out and into the public, that really allows us to propel the project forward towards a design-construction mode. So next year it’ll be feasibility, detailed design-construction, a lot of the corporate development activities really ramp up post-prefeasibility study, so we’re going to be staffing that team as well, so very exciting. This is a really big move for the company.”