direct lithium extraction

The Great Salt Lake isn’t an obvious place to develop a lithium mine. The Salton Sea boasts lithium concentrations of just under 200 parts per million. Argentina, where Lilac has another test facility, has resources of above 700 parts per million. 

Here on the Great Salt Lake? “It’s 70 parts per million,” Raef Sully, Lilac’s Australia-born chief executive, tells me. “So if you had a football stadium with 45,000 seats, this would be three people.”

For Lilac, this is actually a feature of the location. “It’s a very, very good demonstration of the capability of our technology,” Sully says. Showing that Lilac’s hardware can extract lithium at high purity levels from a brine with low concentration, he says, proves its versatility. That wasn’t the reason Lilac selected the site, though. “Utah is a mining friendly state,” says Elizabeth Pond, the vice president of communications. And though the lake water has low concentrations of lithium, extracting the brine simply calls for running a hose into the water, whereas other locations would require digging a well at great cost. 

When I accompanied Sully to the test site during my tour, our route following unpaved county roads lined with fields of wild sunflowers. The facility itself is little more than an assortment of converted shipping containers and two mobile trailers, one to serve as the main office and the other as a field laboratory to test samples. It’s off the grid, relying on diesel generators that the company says will be replaced with propane units once this location is converted to a permanent facility but could eventually be swapped for geothermal technology tapping into a hot rock resource located nearby. (Solar panels, Sully clarifies, couldn’t supply the 24-7 power supply the facility will need.) But it depends on its connection to the Great Salt Lake via that lengthy hose. 

ALEXANDER KAUFMAN

Pumped uphill, the lake water passes through a series of filters to remove solids until it ends up in a vessel filled with the company’s specially designed ceramic beads, made from a patented material that attracts lithium ions from the water. Once saturated, the beads are put through an acid wash to remove the lithium. The remaining brine is then repeatedly tested and, once deemed safe to release back into the lake, pumped back down to the shore through an outgoing tube in the hose. The lithium solution, meanwhile, is stockpiled in tanks on site before shipping off to a processing plant to be turned into battery-grade lithium carbonate, which is a white powder. 

“As a technology provider in the long term, if we’re going to have decades of lithium demand, they want to position their technology as something that can tap a bunch of markets,” McBride says. “To have a technology that can potentially economically recover different types of resources in different types of environments is an enticing proposition.” 

This testing ground won’t stay this way for long. During my visit, Lilac’s crew was starting to pack up the location after completing its demonstration testing. The results the company shared exclusively with me suggest a smashing success, particularly for such low-grade brine with numerous impurities: Lilac’s equipment recovered 87% of the available lithium, on average, with a purity rate of 99.97%.