Cornwall’s British Lithium has applied for two more patents following extensive research and development as it prepares to make its pilot processing plant active.
Coming less than two months after the company filed its first patent, the latest applications are part of an innovative hydro-metallurgical process that uses salt, rather than acid, to extract lithium, the key ingredient in making electric vehicle batteries.
British Lithium is based in the St Austell area of Cornwall and all three inventions are the result of six years’ intensive project work to sustainably extract lithium from the mica in granite.
Four rounds of drilling have been completed, a unique on-site laboratory set up and an official inferred mineral resource declared.
With the help of £3m Innovate UK funding, the company is also building a pilot plant where the lithium will be recovered and processed using recyclable salt as a reagent, rather than toxic chemicals.
The pilot plant is currently in the early stages of construction and is scheduled to become operational in the last quarter of this year. As British Lithium’s head of metallurgy, Dr Klaas Peter van der Wielen has led on the ground-breaking approach.
“Our research and development strategy is focused on finding effective acid-free solutions to extracting and processing lithium,” he said. “The methods we use minimise waste and help protect the environment.”
Chartered patent attorney Kate Butler and her team from Sirius Intellectual Property have been helping British Lithium with its patent applications and the work has been funded by Innovate UK Edge.
“We are making extraordinary advances in our innovative methodology and are very grateful for the UK Government’s financial assistance to date,” said British Lithium chief executive Andrew Smith.
“Our aim is to develop a hard rock quarry and integrated refinery capable of annually producing 20,000 tonnes of battery-grade lithium carbonate with the most forward-thinking technological and sustainable solutions possible. This is another milestone moment in achieving our ambitions.”
In May 2021, British Lithium announced that after three years of intensive R&D it had invented a low-energy, chemical-free process for physically separating the mica in granite that contains lithium.
Innovate UK funded part of the necessary R&D work and Innovate UK Edge, which provides businesses with growth and scale support, provided the legal expertise required to file the patent application at the UK Intellectual Property Office.
British Lithium was the first company to discover a sizable lithium deposit in the UK, the first to develop a novel process for extracting lithium in a sustainable manner and the first to show battery grade lithium can be produced from Cornish granite.
The company has identified a resource of more than 100million tonnes in a former china clay mine near St Austell - enough to support projected annual production of 20,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate. That is enough to meet one-third of Britain’s likely demand by 2030 when all UK car manufacture converts to electric vehicles.
