Mineral exploration company Cornish Lithium Ltd has raised £6m from investors to create a “battery metal hub” - in just 20 minutes
The Cornwall-headquartered company successfully completed a crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube raising the cash to progress its geothermal and hard rock projects in Cornwall. The company opened up the opportunity to pre-registered investors at 9am on June 21 and had hit its £6 million target within 20 minutes.
Jeremy Wrathall, chief executive and founder of Cornish Lithium, said: “We are delighted with the support we have received to date for our latest crowdfunding round. The additional funding will be used to continue the progress towards our goal of creating a battery metals hub for the UK.
“We have made significant advances since our last fundraising on Crowdcube, on both our geothermal and hard rock workstreams. We have also continued to attract Government support with additional funding grants being made as well as receiving our offshore exploration licences from the Crown Estate.”
In 2020 Cornish Lithium paid Australian firm Lepidico Ltd £2.3m for a licence to use new technological processes, and Mr Wrathall said this had allowed the company to unlock the significant potential of the Trelavour Project.
“We have now successfully completed our second drilling campaign at Trelavour, the data from which will enable us to publish our maiden resource in the autumn of this year,” he said.
“We have also made great progress at United Downs where we have completed the construction of our geothermal waters test facility where the team is currently trialling technologies from different Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) technology providers.
“This work will help to inform our decision as to which will be the most appropriate technology to use in the pilot plant we plan to commission at United Downs in March 2022.”
Cornish Lithium announced in December 2020 that it had successfully produced nominal battery grade lithium hydroxide utilising Lepidic’s proprietary and environmentally-responsible L-Max and LOH-Max process technologies on lithium mica samples obtained during its initial hard rock lithium drilling programme.
Following these successful test results, Cornish Lithium acquired an exclusive licence to use Lepidico’s processing technology covering the St Austell region.
The company has subsequently completed its second drilling campaign at the Trelavour Project and work is now underway to define a JORC (Joint Ore Reserves Committee) resource for the project, which will ultimately define the scale of the project.
In addition, test work is being conducted to optimise the extraction of lithium from mica minerals in the granite.
A demonstration mineral concentrator plant has been constructed by Grinding Solutions Ltd, a Cornish mineral processing consultancy and laboratory, which is currently being used to refine the plant design that Cornish Lithium intends to use on lithium bearing granites extracted from the Trelavour Project.
The results of this work together with the resource statement will inform the project’s scoping study, which is being partly funded through a grant awarded in April 2021 by the Government’s Automotive Transformation Fund.
Cornish Lithium is also leading a consortium in partnership with Imerys and sustainable manufacturing innovation consultancy, HSSMI, to assess the potential for the co-production of lithium and china clay, more properly called kaolin, in Cornwall - the CLiCCC Project.
The CLiCCC Project will assess the potential to produce lithium from waste material produced from both current and historic kaolin operations and, this £1m project, will benefit from Innovate UK’s funding.
On June 7, 2021,, Cornish Lithium announced the completion of the construction of the Geothermal Water Test Site at United Downs.
The site is a test facility designed to trial a number of DLE technologies on both deep - delivered by GeoCubed in collaboration with Geothermal Engineering Ltd (GEL)) - and shallow geothermal waters, from Cornish Lithium’s research boreholes.
The test work is designed to establish which of these highly selective technologies is most suited to the low-carbon extraction of lithium from Cornish geothermal waters.
Having received funding from the UK Government’s Getting Building Fund, the company is now moving ahead, with its partner Geothermal Engineering Ltd, to construct a £4m llithium extraction pilot plant in Cornwall.
If successful, the company believes that this pilot plant will set the scene for a much larger combined geothermal and lithium extraction industry across Cornwall.
