Lithium Miner Looking at the Bigger Picture
THE INSIDE STORY: While lithium miner Neometals (ASX: NMT) has already established itself as a serious Australian producer of the important commodity, the company is also displaying more than one string to its bow. By Ron Berryman
The Western Australia-based company has not only increased performance and product quality for spodumene concentrate from its Mt Marion lithium project 40 kilometres southwest of Kalgoorlie, but it has also embarked on a vigorous research and development program to place it at the forefront of companies providing quality product to the rapidly growing international market.
The Neometals R&D strategy is to develop technologies related to the lithium industry with suitable partners and licence the technology for royalties and retain the right to deploy it as principal.
Mt Marion is a globally significant lithium deposit containing total indicated and inferred mineral resources of 77.8 million tonnes at 1.37 percent lithium oxide.
Prices for lithium carbonate used in the cathode of a battery have more than doubled since 2015, according to international commodities research consultancy CRU.
Demand for lithium is anticipate to grow with the global market for lithium ion batteries, which is expected to reach US$33.1 billion by 2019.
The global lithium market expected to enjoy a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.07 percent during the period 2017-2021 according to Research and Markets, an international market research firm based in Ireland.
Some of the many recent industry developments include French Environment Minister Nicolas Hulot announcing that France will outlaw the sale of all petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040 while Swedish car manufacturer Volvo has also announced plans to build only electric and hybrid vehicles starting in 2019.
Neometals is excited about the direction the company has planned for its future development focussing on research and development.
“We’ll stick with our long-term strategy of developing our lithium, titanium and cobalt commodities and, with the battery supply chain,” Neometals managing director Chris Reed told The Resources Roadhouse
“Of course, Mt Marion is the rock on which our Lithium business has been built on.
“Since the start of this year Mt Marion has increased production and increased its shipments.
“It’s the second largest producer of lithium concentrates in Australia and is underpinned by two great partners, Mineral Resources as the owner and operator of the processing facilities, and Jianxi Ganfeng Lithium Co Ltd, one of China’s biggest Lithium producers.
“Mt Marion is self-contained and the most important source of value for the next stage of our strategy whereby, from 2020, we take our offtake and upgrade it into lithium hydroxide, potentially using our fully patented ELi Process.
“Our rationale to develop this downstream process is to capture the value of turning one dollar of spodumene into three dollars of lithium hydroxide.
“The ELi Process provides hard rock and brine lithium producers a solution to convert their feedstocks into lithium hydroxide at highly competitive and capital costs.
“Neometals intends to exploit the technology as principal, partner or by licensing this technology to producers in return for a royalty stream.
“We own 70 percent of the intellectual property.”
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Regarding funding, Reed said the company was taking a staged approach to get Mt Marion up and running and banking profits for a number of years so that the balance sheet provides flexibility in development.
“We can build a 10,000 tonne per year lithium hydroxide plant and feed it with our own product,” he explained.
“We might get someone to come in and manage it under contract, we can finance it off our own balance sheet, it won’t upset the apple cart.
“Once the testwork is completed in North America this quarter, we’ll get the lump sum equipment price and update our internal studies in the December quarter before moving to the engineering design.
“We should be able to complete that and move to the final investment decision at the end of the September quarter next year.”
An added bonus to the Neometals strategy is that the company also has high-grade titanium deposits at its Barrambie Project near Meekatharra in Western Australia.
Lithium Titanate battery anodes
Neometals has engaged a leading US test facility to conduct 100-cycle testing of coin cell batteries using lithium titanate anode (LTO) material made by a process being developed by the company at the CSIRO. Two samples made by different methods held higher voltage and current at the start and end of 100 cycles compared to commercially available LTO.
Lithium titanate has potential to be a leading anode material which can replace graphite due to its far greater surface area relative to graphite.
“Now that we have the necessary feed stocks we’re going to speed up the value of local conversion to the lithium compounds needed for battery manufacturing,” Reed said.
“In batteries you have a lithium based cathode and an anode.
“Our recent research has been looking at developing lithium and titanium for the anode of the battery.”
Brines
Another research and development project being undertaken by Neometals is to look at improving the brine process.
With half of the world’s lithium coming from brines, Neometals has investigated applying its electrolysis technique, which converts lithium chloride into lithium hydroxide, to these brine sources.
“We’ve tested our electrolysis process on Chilean lithium chlorides and benchmark studies indicate that conversion costs can be reduced by more than 60 percent,” Reed claimed.
“We also developed a titanium-based adsorbent, which would enable us to selectively recover the lithium and potassium onto the adsorbent whilst rejecting the sodium and water back into the salar (salt lake).
“It has the potential to replace conventional solar evaporation of the water in salt lakes which is not environmentally sustainable, requires massive capital costs and is tricky to manage.”
Lithium battery recycling
An important initiative taken by Neometals to diversify into the downstream lithium/battery material supply chain was to develop a technology to economically recover high value cobalt as a material that can be recycled within the battery manufacturing chain.
Less than five percent of lithium-ion batteries are recycled and when they are they have cobalt in them.
Neometal’s research and development team in Canada has developed a process, which Sedgman has run a scoping study on, to build a modular recycling plant which can be upscaled at a later date.
The recovery rate of the technology is 99.2 percent.
Patents
Three United States provisional patent applications have been lodged for the technology with Neometals’ dedicated subsidiary Urban Mining to hold its 50 percent interest in the intellectual property (IP) and patent applications together with its Canadian Joint Venture partner while Neometals will hold exclusive rights to commercialise the technology on a world-wide basis.
“All the technologies we have are either pre-patent or patent pending.”
Neometals Ltd (ASX: NMT)
…The Short Story
HEAD OFFICE
Level 1, 672 Murray Street
West Perth WA 6005
Ph: +61 8 9322 1182
Web: www.neometals.com.au
DIRECTORS
Steven Cole, Christopher Reed, David Reed, Natalia Streltsova, Doug Ritchie