A start-up developing a lithium extraction process that is cheaper, less environmentally harmful and less reliant on China for processing has won the Agriculture, Mining, Engineering and Utilities category of The Australian Financial Review 2024 BOSS Most Innovative Companies awards.

The technology, developed 2½ years ago by Professor Huanting Wang at Monash University and being developed by ElectraLith, enables the extraction of lithium – critical to the manufacture of batteries for mobile phones, laptops, digital cameras and electric vehicles – without water or chemicals.

Critically, the extraction technology produces battery-ready lithium that does not require further refining, helping to reduce the world’s reliance on China to refine the commodity.

“By removing water and chemicals from the process, it’s the most environmentally friendly way of getting lithium out of the ground,” says ElectraLith chief executive Charles McGill.

ElectraLith says its process can extract lithium at up to 60 per cent of the cost of traditional methods.

“We’re rapidly emerging as the most cost-efficient and cleanest method of doing it,” McGill adds.

ElectraLith is part of a wave of direct lithium extraction (DLE) technologies being explored globally as demand for more environmentally friendly forms of the critical future-facing mineral rises.

Goldman Sachs analysts have said DLE is a “game changer” that could have a “revolutionary” impact on lithium supply. McGill, however, says the DLE market is home to non-competitive players that are falling by the wayside.

Mining behemoth Rio Tinto, IP Group, a British investor in technology companies, and Monash University are the start-up’s three shareholders as it prepares to close a second fundraising. McGill says the firm has had “international interest from many blue-chip investors.”

ElectraLith has licensed the technology to Rio, which will be its first customer. A pilot plant is scheduled to start operating in about 12 months at Rio’s Rincon lithium project in Argentina.

Charles McGill holding up a membrane used in a process to mine green lithium.

McGill has big plans.

Lithium’s weight, energy density and stability are what distinguish it from other elements as the ideal element for portable energy storage.

“We believe that we will have a substantial market share going forward in the market for lithium. We are gearing up quite rapidly to have a substantial revenue stream and a substantial percentage of the overall lithium production market,” he says.

The former aide to the secretary of the Navy is unperturbed by the slowing demand for electric vehicles (EVs) in many countries, with the notable exception of China.

“We’ve seen demand for EVs fall over the last few years, but we expect to see it recover over the longer term. It’s very temporary,” McGill says, adding that in any case lithium batteries also power laptops, mobile phones and the like.

He is also unfazed by the development of alternative battery technologies, such as graphene batteries, sodium-ion batteries and zinc-bromine flow batteries.

“There’s plenty of room for new battery technology, but many are in the early stage of development. Lithium’s weight, energy density and stability are what distinguish it from other elements as the ideal element for portable energy storage,” McGill says.

“The second part is, and we’ve come to this view quite fervently, the infrastructure is being set up for lithium [batteries], driven by Tesla and now [Chinese EV manufacturer] BYD and many other electric vehicle producers.

“The infrastructure for lithium charging is being rolled out throughout the United States. The idea that you would then say, ‘let’s come up with a new technology’ is very difficult because the infrastructure and the capital investment has already been made,” he says.

Existing DLE technologies extract lithium from brines using water and chemical-intensive processes, and are often conducted in arid and ecologically sensitive regions such as Chile’s Atacama Desert. The end-product is then shipped overseas, often to China, for refining into battery-ready lithium using a further carbon intensive process.

ElectraLith’s technology uses a different refining process it calls DLE-R, to highlight the “refinery” step. DLE-R’s membrane technology uses no water or chemicals, and produces battery-ready lithium as its end product, fully removing offshore refining.

ElectraLith’s technology is best suited to brines as opposed to hard rock lithium deposits which are generally found in Australia. Owing to the higher relative environmental and economic cost of mining hard rock lithium in Australia, McGill predicts the production of lithium will move away from Australia to countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Canada and the United States.

“Over time, we think that WA hard rock mining becomes very challenging,” he says.

Essential Energy

NSW regional energy provider Essential Energy has just completed a pilot of a service designed, at least in part, to help ease “range anxiety” among Australian owners of electric cars – and for which it is named a finalist in the Agriculture, Mining, Engineering and Utilities sector.

Essential Energy’s streetlight EV charger is situated near the beach in Port Macquarie on the NSW coast. The pilot ran for a month and the number of users exceeded expectations.

“We thought we might get five or six users over the time frame. We got in excess of 40 users,” says the company’s manager of innovation, Brad Trethewey.

The customers were a mix of locals and tourists.

The streetlight EV charger is a prototype consisting of a composite streetlight column, rather than one built of steel or concrete, that is hollow and able to accommodate a 7 kilowatt charger. Essential Energy is working on a bigger charger hosted within composite assets it owns.

The pole can only charge one car at a time and will take about eight hours to fully charge an EV. During the pilot, cars were given a four-hour parking arrangement, enough time to allow a recharge of between 40 per cent and 50 per cent.

Essential Energy, which covers 95 per cent of NSW, is now planning to run a pilot of an EV charger installed in an electricity distribution pole, probably next year. Normal electricity poles have greater capacity and so will be able to charge more than one vehicle at a time.

But, says Trethewey, even in streetlights, there is enough underutilised capacity. First, they are not used during the day. Second, they have excess capacity at night.

If you’re an EV owner, the best thing you can do to prolong the life of your [car] is to use slower charging rather than a fast charge.

— Brad Threthewey

“Even at nighttime, there’s heaps of capacity, because most councils across our area have transferred to LED street lighting, which has much lower consumption. So you’ve got this unrealised capacity,” he says.

“Streetlight EV chargers have the potential to play a significant role in expanding public ‘top-up’ charging facilities in regional NSW.”

Trethewey argues that Australia will need a variety of charging stations to facilitate the adoption of EVs and help Australia to meet its decarbonisation goals.

According to a survey conducted by the energy distributor, 60 per cent of customers said availability of charging hardware in regional New South Wales was either poor or terrible.

Furthermore, a mix of fast and slow chargers is vital to preserve the life of car batteries.

“If you’re an EV owner, the best thing you can do to prolong the life of your [car] is to use slower charging rather than a fast charge,” Trethewey says.

“If you fast charge your vehicle a lot, you degrade the battery a lot faster. That is why the mix of charging is really important. Also, the network can’t accommodate fast chargers where there’s just not enough capacity.

“So to avoid excessive investment in the network, you want to try and put as much destination charging (which is far slower) out there.”

A fast charger on a highway will typically recharge a battery in about 20 minutes.

Essential Energy doesn’t yet know when it will be able to roll out a series of streetlight EV chargers, as it needs to first overcome regulatory barriers.

The company envisages customers will be charged on a kilowatt per hour basis, and could pay via a tap-and-go system or through an app.

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