Cornish Lithium gets greenlight to build UK’s first plant to recover lithium from hot water

Cornish Lithium

THE UK’S first commercial geothermal lithium production plant has been approved as Cornish Lithium seeks to demonstrate it can recover valuable battery materials and heat from the rocks beneath Cornwall.

Cornish Lithium has been granted planning permission to build a production facility at its Cross Lanes site near Chacewater. Phase one of the project will involve drilling two 2,000-m-deep wells: one to extract lithium-rich water from beneath the site, and the other to return the water after its lithium has been removed using direct lithium extraction technology.

Cornish Lithium has been trialling various direct lithium extraction technologies at a neighboring site since 2021. This has involved working with membrane separation technologies provided by GeoLith and Evove. The company declined to confirm which firms they are considering working with for the new containerised process plant, noting only that “they are still exploring which direct lithium extraction technology they will be using”.

Conventional methods for producing lithium involve heating up mined rock or slow evaporative processes involving huge ponds. Nascent direct lithium extraction methods promise to speed up recovery rates by 90% though they can be more capital intensive, according to analysis from Wood Mackenzie.

Cornish Lithium says the project will also assess the potential to use heat from the geothermal waters to provide heating for local homes and businesses.

Phase two will involve building a demonstration plant to produce samples of lithium for battery and electric car manufacturers. If successful, Cornish Lithium intends to build a commercial lithium production plant on site.

Jeremy Wrathall, Cornish Lithium’s CEO, said the approval is “a key milestone in our efforts to produce a domestic source of lithium from geothermal waters that were first identified in Cornwall in 1864. This marks another stage in the UK’s journey from currently relying solely on imported lithium to maximising the potential that lies beneath our feet in Cornwall”.

Urgent need to mine and refine

The UK’s Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre warned this week that the growing competition for critical elements needed for decarbonisation technologies including batteries could see supplies fall well short of what is needed for the country to hit its net zero targets. On lithium alone, the centre warned the UK could need as much as 40% of global supplies by 2030 to meet domestic demand.

To diversify supplies, it said the UK must prioritise mining and refining its own critical minerals.

Joan Cordiner, IChemE Fellow and chair of the National Engineering Policy Centre Working Group on Materials and Net Zero, said the findings reinforce the economic importance of critical materials, such as lithium, and repeated a recommendation from a study she led last year calling for the UK to find ways to reduce demand.

“Government should develop a data-led materials strategy to inform infrastructure and technology planning and encourage design changes that reduce the use of critical materials. For example, cutting the size of the largest electric vehicle batteries by a third could cut the UK’s lithium requirement by 17%.”

She added: “We must find ways to reduce demand, reuse and recycle critical materials – at present, recovering critical materials from our machines and personal devices requires highly intricate, expensive processes, and much of our electronic waste goes into landfill, taking valuable materials with it. Globally, 62 million tonnes of e-waste are generated every year, and the UK produces the second highest amount of e-waste per capita.”

While Cornish Lithium is set to be the first to produce lithium from geothermal waters, it is not alone in seeking to commercialise direct lithium extraction techniques. In September, Northern Lithium committed to achieving commercial production of lithium from brines pumped out of rocks in England’s Northern Pennine Orefield by 2027. It has contracted Evove to build it a demonstration plant using its membrane filtration technology.