January Mining Sundowner with historic news from Cornwall amid concern over global lithium supply

Last night's Cornish Mining Sundowner was held at the County Arms Hotel in Truro, with a modest attendance of eleven, which included two Camborne School of Mines students attending their first sundowner. Molly Gordon and Ben Mantell-Jolly are MSc Mining Engineering students, who both intend to start their careers in Australia later in the year, Molly with Mount Isa Mines. They were accompanied by Dr. Pat Foster, Director of Education at CSM, who updated me on progress with CSM's Mining Degree Apprenticeship (see posting of 26 November 2021), which is hoped to commence in September.

Pat, Ben and Molly

Nick and Pauline Clarke, Barry and Barbara Wills

There was much to discuss last night, apart from Boris Johnson's latest adventures, and it was good to talk to British Lithium's Manager of Metallurgy, KP van der Wielen about the good news this month of an historic addition to Cornwall's illustrious mining history. British Lithium said early this month that its pilot plant in Roche, just 17 miles from Truro in East Cornwall, has successfully extracted lithium carbonate from the mica in the county’s granite bedrock. It is the first time commercial-grade lithium carbonate has been produced from the mica in granite rock, the company having identified a resource of more than 100 million tonnes in a former china clay mine near St Austell, enough to support a projected annual production of 20,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate. The plant, which was funded by the UK Government, will shortly start producing 5kgs of lithium carbonate each day for customers to trial. The company’s unique pilot plant approach incorporates all processing stages, from quarrying through to high purity lithium carbonate production. This includes crushing, grinding and beneficiating the ore, custom-built electric calcination at low temperatures, acid-free leaching and multiple purification steps that include ion-exchange.

Plans are underway to build a full-scale plant, with the aim of producing 21,000 tonnes of battery-grade lithium carbonate each year, which would be around one-third of the total lithium supply the UK is expected to need to meet future electric vehicle demand.

Pete Shepherd, KP van der Wielen, David Mildren, Treve Mildren and Pat Foster

British Lithium is not the only company targeting Cornwall’s lithium reserves. Last November Cornish Lithium received investment to fast track its lithium mining projects in the county (posting of 9th December 2021). It also plans to build a processing plant near its mining sites to “build a value chain” for electric vehicle battery production in Cornwall. Together the two firms could create around 860 jobs in the county and if the mines and processing plants attract investment for a battery factory a further 3,000 jobs could be created. 

Prices for lithium, a critical metal for EV batteries, reached record highs last month, causing concerns that there won’t be enough of the metal to fuel the switch away from combustion engines, so now should be a prime time to build a mine. However the pandemic has temporarily closed mines, factories and borders and destabilised flows of lithium and other critical metals.

Back in August (posting of 26 August 2021), I reviewed current developments in lithium production and highlighted the announcement from Rio Tinto that it will spend $2.4 billion building a lithium mine in Serbia, from an entirely new mineral source, jadarite (LiNaSiB3O7OH). What makes the deposit unique is that both boron and lithium are contained in one mineral, which was new to science and which was later confirmed as a new mineral by the International Mineralogical Association. Rio Tinto’s Serbian team named it jadarite. 

Rio said its Jadar project in Serbia was expected to start operating in 2026 and hit full-production in 2029. The investment would turn the company into a top-10 lithium producer globally and position it “as the largest source of lithium supply in Europe for at least the next 15 years.” Rio Tinto targeted an initial mine life of 2.3 million tonnes of lithium carbonate over 40 years. Following ramp-up to full production in 2029, the mine would produce roughly 58,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate, 160,000 tonnes of boric acid (borates are used in solar panels and wind turbines) and 255,000 tonnes of sodium sulphate per year.

However within months of unveiling these ambitious plans local opponents organised a movement and authorities subsequently suspended a land-use plan for the proposed mine, and only yesterday Serbia revoked Rio Tinto’s lithium exploration licences, bowing to the protesters who opposed the development of the project on environmental grounds.

Unfortunately it is becoming increasingly difficult to build a mine today, it being far easier to organise opposition, often in rural and isolated communities. Speaking in London Last month, Mark Cutifani, CEO of Anglo American plc said “Despite mining’s contribution to almost every aspect of modern life, the industry is still seen as one that takes more than it gives.” 

Following the potential demise of the Serbian Project, Rio announced last month that it would buy the Rincon lithium project in Argentina, a large undeveloped lithium brine project located in the heart of the lithium triangle in the Salta Province of Argentina. The direct lithium extraction technology proposed for the project has the "potential to significantly increase lithium recoveries" compared to solar evaporation ponds, Rio said, adding that a pilot plant was currently running at the site.

According to the International Lithium Association the growth in EVs could see lithium demand increase by over 40 times by 2030, last year being about 320,000 tonnes and is expected to hit 1 million by 2025 and 3 million by 2030. The rising price of lithium and the growing divergence between supply and demand is likely to lead to an increase in the price of EVs, as automakers pass the cost on to the consumer, batteries being the most expensive part of an EV.

Hopefully we will have more lithium news from Cornwall at the next sundowner, which will be at Tyacks Hotel in Camborne on Thursday 17th February.

@barrywills