Australian company’s novel green lithium concept yields battery-grade product in Germany
Author: Bella Peacock
Vulcan is currently working on its pilot project in Germany’s Upper Rhine Valley, one of Europe’s best geothermal resources. The company’s concept for producing ‘zero carbon’ lithium is to use well established geothermal energy technologies to extract the Upper Rhine’s lithium-rich brine and then use the more novel technique of lithium electrolysis to create the final lithium hydroxide product. “The embodied renewable heat within our brine means we are able to leverage sorption, a commercially proven process to extract lithium from brines that requires heat to work,” Vulcan’s Managing Director and CEO Francis Wedin explained. “Sorption is highly selective, which means that we can produce a very pure LiCl [lithium chloride] eluate. This in turn means we are able to use lithium electrolysis, a method of producing lithium hydroxide directly which by its nature produces a very pure product, in excess of the purity required for use in electric vehicle batteries, with minimal reagent usage.”