Lithium carbonate production technology is at a watershed moment. The traditional evaporation-precipitation method has dominated lithium extraction from salt lakes for decades, while the lithium mica roasting method has supported the lithium battery industry in Yichun. However, both approaches have inherent limitations—the salt lake method is helpless against brines with high magnesium-to-lithium ratios, and the mica method suffers from low recovery rates and large volumes of residue—and these have long been persistent concerns for the industry. In the past two years, a batch of new technologies has been emerging from laboratories and pilot lines. Some have already achieved industrial validation, while others remain stuck on material stability and scale-up effects. The following discussion covers two main pathways: salt lakes and hard rock.
Salt Lake Pathway: A Paradigm Shift from "Sun Drying" to Direct Lithium Extraction
The traditional logic of lithium extraction from salt lakes is "concentration-precipitation": brine is pumped into salt pans, solar evaporation takes place over months to raise lithium concentration, and then impurities are removed before precipitation. This method was effective in early projects at Chile's Atacama and Qinghai's Qarhan, but when facing Tibet's carbonate-type salt lakes and sulfate-magnesium subtype brines with high magnesium-to-lithium ratios, the evaporation pathway is either disrupted by large amounts of carbonate or hampered by the similar chemical properties of magnesium and lithium, making separation difficult.
The "novel lithium-ion adsorbent + carbon dioxide desorption" technology developed by the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences is the most representative breakthrough in this direction. Its core is a novel adsorbent bonded with polar-nonpolar synergistic functional groups, whose selectivity for lithium ions far exceeds that of traditional manganese-based or titanium-based ion sieves. In 2024, a hundred-ton-scale pilot was built at Jiezechaka Salt Lake in Tibet (at an altitude of 4,600 meters). Operational data showed that the sodium-to-lithium mass ratio dropped from 240 in the brine to below 1.0, lithium recovery exceeded 90%, freshwater consumption fell from the hundred-ton level of traditional adsorption-membrane methods to 52 tons per ton of product, and the COD of the tail brine was close to the background level of the raw material.
The difficulty of implementation lies in engineering at high altitudes. The pilot unit at Jiezechaka operated for four months with stable adsorption capacity, but scaling from the hundred-ton level to the ten-thousand-ton level involves the uniformity of fluid distribution in continuous moving beds, the mechanical wear of adsorbents during repeated adsorption-desorption cycles, and the mass transfer efficiency of carbon dioxide gas-liquid-solid three-phase desorption—each of these is a classic challenge in engineering scale-up. When this technology passed scientific and technological achievement evaluation, it was recognized as "internationally leading," but to truly enter large-scale production, at least one more round of validation at the thousand-ton level or above is still needed.
The "raw brine adsorption lithium extraction" technology of Minmetals Salt Lake is somewhat further ahead. In March 2025, the world's first ten-thousand-ton-scale high-efficiency raw brine lithium extraction facility for salt lakes was put into trial operation at Yiliping in Qinghai, taking only seven months from construction start to completion. Its technical key is an adsorption-based lithium extraction method suitable for sulfate-magnesium subtype salt lakes, requiring no brine pretreatment and directly confronting complex systems with high magnesium, high potassium, and high sodium. The comprehensive recovery rate of lithium resources is nearly double that of traditional processes. This facility has been running for more than a year, operating continuously and stably, with both the unit load rate and product qualification rate meeting design expectations.
The progress it brings is structural: traditional processes extract potassium first and then lithium, with lithium being diluted through entrainment losses at each step; direct lithium extraction from raw brine skips the evaporation and concentration stage, greatly shortening the process and raising the recovery rate from the original 30%-40% to over 80%. For the large number of sulfate-magnesium subtype salt lakes in Qinghai, this pathway is replicable.
Electrically controlled adsorption is a more cutting-edge direction. The team led by Liu Zhong at the Qinghai Institute of Salt Lakes, Chinese Academy of Sciences, developed a spinel material with manganese substituting at titanium sites (H₁.₃₃Ti₁.₁₇Mn₀.₅O₄), utilizing the structural stability of inert titanium-based materials and the electrochemical activity of manganese to achieve a lithium adsorption capacity of 43.58 mg/g in the electrically controlled adsorption process, with a Li/Na separation coefficient of 420.6. The core challenge of this technology is the "contradiction between electrochemical activity and structural stability": titanium-based adsorbents are stable but electrochemically inert, while manganese-based ones are active but manganese dissolution during cycling leads to structural collapse. The team's strategy of partially substituting titanium with manganese is essentially finding a balance point between the two, but manganese dissolution and electrode degradation under long-term cycling remain key obstacles to industrialization. This work is still at the laboratory stage, published in Nano Letters and Environmental Science & Technology, and still some distance from pilot testing.
Mica Pathway: Overcoming the "Ring Formation" Problem
Lithium extraction from lithium mica in Yichun, Jiangxi, supports a group of enterprises including Yongxing Materials and Jiangte Motor, but the traditional sulfate roasting method has a long-unresolved process problem: rotary kiln ring formation. During roasting of high-fluorine mica ore, fluorides react with potassium-sodium salts to form low-melting-point eutectics that adhere to and grow on the kiln wall, ultimately forcing frequent shutdowns for cleaning. Equipment corrosion and low recovery rates are two other pain points.
The "high-efficiency lithium extraction technology and equipment for lithium mica" project led by China Aluminum International Changsha Institute specifically addresses these three problems. The team pioneered a "molten salt displacement roasting technology" that changes the roasting reaction pathway from the source, inhibiting the formation of low-melting-point phases and thereby addressing the root causes of ring formation and corrosion. On the recovery side, the team developed comprehensive recovery technology for valuable metals such as potassium and rubidium in the leach solution, as well as a full-process impurity removal process for high-purity lithium carbonate. The project has now achieved industrial application and stable operation in multiple projects including Yongxing Special Steel, Lingneng Lithium, Fengxin Times, and Yichun Longpan Times, with lithium oxide content in the tailings below 0.3% and soluble lithium below 0.02%.
The significance of this technology's implementation lies in its "replicability." Yichun's lithium mica extraction capacity is enormous, but process quality varies among producers, and ring formation and recovery rate issues have long constrained cost competitiveness. A standardized technology paradigm validated across multiple projects has a direct effect on cost reduction for the entire Yichun lithium mica industry. The China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association recognized it as "internationally leading," primarily because it has completed the leap from laboratory to multi-project industrialization.
"Peripheral Innovation" in the Extraction Route
Solvent extraction is not mainstream in salt lake lithium extraction because the selectivity of extractants and environmental pressure have always been issues. However, a team at the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, developed an extraction system for lithium-containing solutions, proposing two novel stripping methods—water stripping and CO₂ stripping—achieving lithium recovery exceeding 99% and COD in the effluent below 10 ppm. Its application scenario is very specific: lithium precipitation mother liquor. In traditional lithium carbonate production, the mother liquor after precipitation contains substantial lithium and is usually returned to the front end for reprocessing, resulting in a complex process and low yield. This extraction system can directly extract lithium from high-sodium-potassium mother liquor in one step to produce lithium carbonate or lithium chloride. It has been demonstrated at the ten-thousand-ton production line of Qinghai Xinghua Lithium Salt and the pilot line at Jiezechaka in Tibet, and a ten-thousand-ton lithium precipitation mother liquor extraction line at Jiangxi Jiuling Lithium is under construction. Its limitation lies in processing capacity: extraction methods are suitable for treating high-concentration lithium solutions, but for raw brine with lithium concentrations of only tens to hundreds of mg/L, extractant loss and organic phase entrainment become economic issues.
Directions Worth Watching That Have Not Yet Been Scaled Up
Electrochemical direct lithium extraction is one of the most active areas in patent activity. From the patent landscape, the industry is shifting from "single material optimization" to "system-level integration": membrane-integrated electrochemical systems, multi-compartment Faraday reactors, and adsorption-electrochemical hybrid architectures have become the main lines of innovation. One noteworthy signal is that approximately 26% of leading patents target lithium hydroxide as the final product rather than lithium carbonate. This reflects the growing demand for lithium hydroxide from high-nickel ternary cathode materials and the fact that process pathways for directly producing LiOH are being seriously considered. However, the industrialization bottlenecks of the electrochemical route are clear: long-term electrode cycling degradation, membrane fouling (especially in high magnesium-to-lithium ratio brines), and system-level energy consumption optimization. Adsorption is currently the most mature DLE route, while electrochemical and membrane methods remain at the stage of "requiring further scale-up validation."
Photothermal coupling and solar-driven adsorption is another direction worth attention. The idea is to use solar energy to directly heat the adsorbent or desorption solution, reducing process energy consumption. In salt lake regions such as Tibet and Qinghai with abundant sunlight resources, if the heat consumption of adsorption-desorption can be combined with solar thermal utilization, the marginal cost would be very competitive. However, this is still at an early research stage, with very little engineering data on materials and system design.
Conclusion
The competitive focus of lithium carbonate production technology has shifted from "whether it can be made" to "whether it can be made stably at low cost and in a green manner." The ten-thousand-ton validation of direct lithium extraction from raw brine in salt lakes is a key milestone. If the Yiliping facility of Minmetals Salt Lake can demonstrate the adsorbent lifespan and process stability of this pathway over a two-to-three-year cycle, it will bring about a substantial cost restructuring for salt lake development in Qinghai and even Tibet. Molten salt displacement roasting in the mica pathway is an efficiency improvement on the basis of existing capacity, and its value lies in giving Yichun's high-cost capacity some breathing room. Electrically controlled adsorption and electrochemical direct lithium extraction represent a more distant future. Their potential lies in being able to process low-grade resources and unconventional brines (oilfield water, geothermal brine) that cannot be economically utilized by traditional methods, but the problems of material stability and system integration cannot be solved in a year or two. For the industry, what is truly worth tracking now is: long-term operational data from the Yiliping facility of Minmetals Salt Lake, progress in thousand-ton scale-up of the carbonate-type salt lake technology from the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the pace of adoption of Changsha Institute's technology in Yichun. The implementation rhythm of these three lines will determine the shape of China's lithium carbonate cost curve in the coming years.
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