A mining company drilling for “21st Century gold rush” metal lithium in Cornwall has smashed through a crowdfunder target to raise £3million – in just a few hours.
Cornish Lithium, which is exploring for the metal in geothermal waters and hard rock, took just 30 minutes to surpass its £1.5million target, open to pre-registered investors, by almost £545,000.
Within three hours the firm had raised £3million and is now offering its investment opportunity to people across the South West as it seeks further funding for its operations.
With 15% of its pre-registered investors being from the Duchy, Cornish Lithium is casting its net further via its new crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube.
Cornish Lithium uses modern technology to evaluate the potential to responsibly extract vital battery metals in Cornwall, including lithium from the geothermal waters that circulate deep beneath historic mine workings.
According to the Volkswagen Group, lithium is the “irreplaceable element of the electric era,” which makes lithium vitally important for the future economy as the world moves towards renewable energy sources and away from a reliance on fossil fuels.
As the UK aspires to be a leader in the move towards electric vehicles and renewable power in order to realise its net zero carbon ambitions by 2050, it will need significant quantities of lithium in order to build batteries for the domestic car industry.
Cornish Lithium, one of several companies exploring in the county, aims to establish a sustainable and environmentally-responsible extraction industry for minerals that facilitate this transition to a green economy via renewable energy and battery power storage.
The firm’s founder and chief executive Jeremy Wrathall said “globally significant findings” from a recent exploration and evaluation programme identified some of the world’s highest grades of lithium and best overall chemical qualities encountered in published records for geothermal waters.
The company has already received a “substantial award” from the UK Government’s Getting Building Fund for a £4million lithium extraction pilot plant at United Downs in conjunction with Geothermal Engineering Ltd.
Mr Wrathall said: “This provides us with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to catalyse commercial production and establish the UK’s battery metals hub here in Cornwall.”
As a result of its previous crowdfund in 2019, the Company has drilled and evaluated its own shallow wells of approximately 1km deep into lithium-rich geothermal waters near United Downs, as well as 41 holes of approximately 40m deep in a prospective hard rock granite source of lithium in a former china clay pit near St Austell, the metallurgical results of which are “highly encouraging”.
This progress towards the creation of a new lithium industry in Cornwall has been supported by Cornish Lithium’s first crowdfund in July 2019 and a pre-emptive rights offering to shareholders in April 2020, which raised a total of £2.2million.
“Following the generous support of our initial 1,244 investors from 2019, exceptional results from the United Downs Deep Geothermal Project that demonstrate economic potential, and the Government funding we have received to establish a lithium extraction pilot plant, we aimed to raise an additional £1.5million to further accelerate our progress,” said Mr Wrathall. “This funding will enable us to evaluate accessing geothermal waters with high grades of lithium using shallow drilling techniques, and to undertake further drilling and bulk sampling within the St Austell china clay pit to assess the feasibility of building a large-scale operation in the region.
He said the Duchy’s heritage is as a world-class producer of tin and copper, and now his company’s “pioneering mission” is to develop a 21st Century lithium extraction industry that will “create jobs and prosperity, and contribute significantly to the UK’s domestic supply”.
This crowdfund will also allow the Company – which is headquartered at the Tremough Innovation Centre in Penryn, and comprises a team of skilled geologists, many of whom are graduates of Camborne School of Mines – to enhance its already extensive portfolio of agreements with mineral rights holders to explore for lithium and other battery metals in Cornwall.
