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

UK urged to prioritise mining and refining minerals following supply shock warning

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”.

Scalability challenges

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.

In a study published last year, the consultancy outlined several challenges that need to be overcome to scale up direct lithium extraction technologies. Firstly there is limited infrastructure to support large-scale operation, and while oil and gas companies are among those that do it’s unlikely to be an attractive proposition as they do not have lithium within the resources they process. Wood Mackenzie also noted that each project requires its own direct lithium extraction process tailored to the chemistry of the fluids it is seeking to extract lithium from, which will slow scale-out of operations.

It reports that global demand for lithium carbonate equivalent has risen from 383,000 t in 2020 to 1.2m t in 2024, and will reach 6m t/y by 2050. In 2023, direct lithium extraction accounted for just 83,000 t of lithium carbonate equivalent, though with more than 30 companies worldwide developing the technology, it projects supplies will increase to more than 300,000 t/y of lithium carbonate equivalent by 2028.

As well as valuable minerals production, Cornish Lithium says its Chacewater 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”.