Commodities, Exploration/Development, Lithium, News

The rise of Australia’s lithium refining industry

lithium refining

While Australia is the world’s biggest producer of lithium raw materials, it only exports a small amount of refined lithium. But this is set to change.

The Australian Government has not been shy in its support for an onshore lithium refining industry, supporting the emerging sector through its $1.3 billion Modern Manufacturing Initiative (MMI).

Pilbara Minerals and Calix received a $20 million grant to support the development of their ‘midstream’ project, where lithium salts will be produced via an innovative refining process.

If successfully developed and proven, the new process could mean spodumene concentrate is replaced by a higher-grade lithium salts product.

As it happens, Pilbara Minerals and Calix this week advanced their partnership from a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to a joint venture agreement, paving the way for a final investment decision to be made on a demonstration plant in the June quarter of 2023.

Core Lithium has also received the backing of the Australian Government through a $6 million MMI grant to build a pilot lithium hydroxide processing facility to support its Finniss project in the Northern Territory.

Australia’s first refined lithium was produced in the form of lithium hydroxide from the Kwinana plant in May 2022. Kwinana is shared in a joint venture (JV) between Tianqi Lithium Corporation (51 per cent) and IGO (49 per cent).

The JV partners will look to ramp up Kwinana to a nameplate production capacity of 24,000 tonnes per annum.

Then there’s the Kemerton JV between Albemarle Corporation (60 per cent) and Mineral Resources (40 per cent), which involves the construction of the Kemerton lithium hydroxide processing facility in Western Australia.

Kemerton is currently transitioning through commissioning before first lithium hydroxide can be produced from the facility, where the aim is to achieve an initial capacity of 50,000 tonnes per annum.

Federal Resources Minister Madeleine King reaffirmed the importance of Australia’s critical minerals industry – which includes lithium – at the recent critical minerals summit hosted by The Australian and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

“The focus on the extraction and refining of critical minerals needs to become, I think, something of a national mission, akin to the foundation of our iron ore industry in the 1950s and our LNG export industry in the 1990s,” she said.

“While companies like Japan’s Mitsui purchased some of the first iron ore exports from the Pilbara in the late 1950s, now in 2022 these companies now want to work with us again as we confront the challenge of building a new industry and supply chains around critical minerals.”

It looks like we’ll be hearing a lot more about Australia’s onshore refining opportunities.

Previous ArticleNext Article
Send this to a friend