ABTC hits technical milestones on path to commercializing lithium hydroxide refining operations in Nevada

The American Battery Technology Co. (ABTC), a Reno, Nevada-based critical battery materials company commercializing both its primary minerals manufacturing and secondary minerals lithium-ion battery recycling technologies, says it has achieved all required milestones for the first phase of its U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) $4.5 million project for the design, construction and operation of its lithium hydroxide from Nevada sedimentary claystone system.

“We are excited to have achieved these technical and performance milestones for our internally developed processing train for the manufacturing of battery-grade lithium hydroxide from our unconventional Nevada-based sedimentary claystone resource,” ABTC CEO Ryan Melsert says. “There is near-infinite demand from automakers, battery manufacturers and cathode refiners for this type of domestically produced, low cost and low environmental impact lithium hydroxide material, and we are rapidly scaling up our commercial operations to meet this demand from our strategic partners.”

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The company says that while the U.S. does not hold large deposits of conventional lithium resources, such as hard rock ores and lithium-rich brines, it does have significant amounts of lithium held in unconventional deposits such as sedimentary claystone resources. To date, ABTC says attempts to produce battery-grade lithium products from these vast quantities of lithium-bearing unconventional sedimentary resources have utilized processes that were designed for conventional hard rock or brine-based resources, and as a result were not economically competitive.

To broaden the resource base for U.S. domestic production of critical lithium materials, ABTC has collaborated with Wilmington, Delaware-based DuPont and the University of Nevada, Reno, with funding from the DOE to develop an integrated process train specifically designed to access the lithium in these types of unconventional resources to produce a lithium hydroxide monohydrate product that meets the rigorous specifications for use in high energy density battery cathode manufacturing.

One critical milestone achieved during the first phase of ABTC’s project was the manufacturing of a battery-grade lithium hydroxide product from its Tonopah Flats claystone resource. The company says the product has been analytically characterized and shown to meet all third-party battery cathode-grade specifications. This process included the collection of feedstock material from ABTC’s domestic sedimentary claystone resource; the selective leaching of lithium from this feedstock; the purification of the generated leachate solution; the conversion of this solution into a lithium hydroxide material; and the purification and crystallization of this material into solid lithium hydroxide monohydrate powder.

A second milestone was the completion of techno-economic analysis (TEA) demonstrating production costs lower than with conventional resources. The company says the empirical data generated from the processing of this lithium hydroxide product was used to produce a TEA that demonstrates that at commercial scale, ABTC’s internally developed technologies produce a lithium hydroxide material with production costs that are lower than when manufactured from conventional resources and with conventional technologies.

The company says the next phase of its project includes $3.3 million for the integrated field operations of this set of internally developed technologies in order to further de-risk the commercial scale-up of these refinery operations.