Column: Electric dreams turn into a nightmare for battery metals
A sector that was once racing to build new supply has been closing mines and deferring projects as low prices bite into the cost curve.
Lithios, a Boston-based lithium technology company, announced Tuesday it as secured $10 million in seed financing to scale the development of the company’s electrochemical platform designed to produce low-cost lithium.
The round was led by Clean Energy Ventures, with participation from strategic venture groups TechEnergy Ventures and GS Futures as well as Lowercarbon Capital and MassCEC. The company also secured an additional $2 million in venture debt from Silicon Valley Bank.
Lithios will leverage the funding to scale its R&D, manufacturing and operations, and to accelerate the development of commercial projects to produce thousands of tonnes of lithium carbonate annually, it said.
Lithium, a key component of batteries for electric vehicles, is expected to undergo a worldwide shortage as early as 2025. To meet EV and energy market demand, approximately 7 million tonnes of lithium carbonate will be required by 2040, eight times more than the current supply.
Suppliers are seeking solutions to overcome bottlenecks including infrastructure constraints in remote locations and lack of affordable processing technologies for high-contaminant sources.
Lithios said it is developing the first scalable electrochemical lithium capture solution, advanced lithium extraction (ALE), to efficiently extract lithium from untapped brine deposits where existing solutions cannot operate.
The company says its ALE technology allows miners, operators and the battery supply chain to unlock sources of lithium previously considered uneconomical and inaccessible due to difficult contaminant profiles and resource constraints.
“After assessing dozens of new lithium extraction technologies, we believe Lithios’ ALE approach addresses serious pain points for customers across the entire lithium value chain and brings a much-needed step-change improvement to recover lithium from contaminated and forsaken sources,” Clean Energy Ventures managing partner Daniel Goldman said in Tuesday’s news release.
Currently, there are three prevalent energy- and resource-intensive approaches to lithium extraction: hard rock mining and the evaporation of brines in surface ponds — both of which are limited to high-grade lithium deposits — and the nascent direct lithium extraction (DLE) from brines.
Lithios says its ALE platform is designed to be capital efficient with low resource intensity and consumes ten times less energy compared to DLE approaches when used to process low-grade sources of lithium.
Developed by MIT scientists and engineers, the ALE technology unlocks more than 85% of known but currently inaccessible lithium brine sources, making the lithium recovery process for low-grade brines up to twice as cost-effective as emerging DLE methods.
Through ALE, tough-to-process low-grade sources of lithium become just as valuable as scarce high-grade ones, opening up a pathway for lithium resource owners to increase supply to battery manufacturers, it adds.
