SLB recently announced that it has piloted its sustainable lithium production solution at scale at its demonstration facility in Clayton Valley, Nevada to accelerate the commercialization of responsibly sourced lithium products.
The proprietary integrated solution combines SLB’s subsurface expertise with the surface engineering of advanced technologies, including direct lithium extraction (DLE), to produce lithium 500 times faster than conventional methods while using only 10 percent of the land. The plant is about one-tenth the size of a commercial plant and achieves a verified recovery rate of 96% lithium from brine.
SLB’s integrated solution is a complete, end-to-end process that includes advanced impurity treatment and concentration technologies to produce high-purity lithium carbonate or hydroxide. The solution also uses significantly less water, energy and chemical reagents compared to other DLE-based offerings.
” Lithium is a key enabler for electrification, so we must find ways to accelerate its production without impacting the environment,” said Gavin Rennick, President of SLB’s New Energy Division. ” The SLB demonstration plant in Clayton Valley is proof of our unique integrated approach to producing scalable quantities of lithium in the fastest, most economical and sustainable way for today’s market. In doing so, we are accelerating the development of viable commercial facilities for high-value lithium products that are the backbone of our electrification economy.”
The traditional alternative to large-scale extraction of lithium from brine is evaporation. This process not only requires significant land use, but also results in massive water losses. Salt, subsurface minerals and spent chemicals remain on the surface, impacting biodiversity and the environment. SLB’s sustainable lithium production solution improves sustainability by reducing water consumption. The proprietary process also returns the spent brine, or brine with a lower lithium concentration, to its source after processing and separating the lithium.
The entire SLB solution, from extracting lithium from the brine to converting it to technical-grade lithium carbonate, takes just a few hours. In comparison, evaporation methods can take up to 18 months and have a much lower recovery rate of 50 percent or less.
Lithium is sold commercially as lithium chloride, which is used as a feedstock to produce lithium metal, lithium carbonate, which is used in smartphones and short-range electric vehicles, and lithium hydroxide, which is used in long-range electric vehicle batteries. SLB’s solution is extremely flexible and can be adapted to produce any of these products.
