Lithium demand, forecast by Dahlman Rose & Co analysts to double to 300,000 tons in the next eight years on sales of EV traction batteries, is spurring the US company Simbol Materials to build a plant to extract lithium carbonate from brine in California.
Simbols’s proposed Imperial Valley plant would cut the time and cost needed to extract lithium from saline water, Chief Executive Officer Luka Erceg said in an interview with Bloomberg, posted on Simbol’s website, that his company may boost output from an initial 8,000 tons a year to as much as 64,000 tons by the end of the decade – approximating to 21% of projected global demand.
Global sales of 1 million EVs a year (compared to about 40,000 in 2011, according to the IEA) would more than double battery-grade lithium use which currently totals 18,144 tons, according to Simbol competitor Rockwood’s Chief Executive Officer Seifi Ghasemi, quoted by Bloomberg from an 11 September presentation.
Each electric vehicle uses about 50lbs/22.7kg of lithium and hybrids each use about 20 pounds, compared with about 0.1 ounce for a mobile phone and about 1 ounce for an iPad, Ghasemi said. He forecast that by 2020 there will be annual sales of 3.9 million hybrids, 1.4 million plug-in hybrids and 2.8 million purely electric vehicles.
Brine evaporation is the lowest-cost source of lithium carbonate. Simbol’s technology takes brine from geothermal power plants and extracts minerals via a reverse osmosis filtration system in a process that takes 90-120 minutes, compared with conventional methods’ 18 months.
The founders of Simbol Materials are Luka Erceg Erceg, M Scott Conley, Carol J Bruton and Brian R Viani, the latter two of whom previously worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Other shareholders in Simbol include Itochu, Firelake Capital Management and Mohr Davidow Ventures.
Simbol expects construction of its Californian brine extraction plant to begin in 2013.
Rockwood (which acquired the Australian Talison Lithium in August for US$743m), Talison, Soc. Quimica & Minera de Chile SA and FMC together account for about 90% of the global market, according to analysts at Jefferies & Co. Rockwood alone says it had about 50% of the US$900m market for lithium before its Talison acquisition.
