The company produced 90% LCE from 34 parts per million (ppm) lithium brine through its proprietary direct lithium extraction process, president and CEO Alex Wylie said in an interview.
“We’ve developed a compound, or most people call them media, that is really agnostic to things like magnesium and other items, other minerals that might cause interference in the process,” Wylie said by phone from Calgary. “We can get to a purity with our process without doing final concentration steps and that I would say is pretty novel.”
While the lithium price has crashed by two-thirds from a year ago, Volt is vying to produce the battery metals by staking out a low-cost, low-grade operation that can be scaled up. By the end of next year, the company plans to decide whether it would be less expensive to build its own plant to process lithium carbonate into battery-grade metal or ship it to refiners in the United States.
Along the way…
