Li Liangbin, Chairman of Ganfeng Lithium Industry, deeply interprets the technical status and development trend of lithium industry.

On the evening of August 10, Li Liangbin, chairman of Ganfeng Lithium Industry, visited the Wall Street broadcast room and gave detailed answers to the current mainstream lithium extraction technology, salt lake lithium extraction development, solid state and battery recycling technology and other issues.

The following is a summary of the conversation:

Four kinds of Lithium extraction Technology

At present, there are four lithium extraction technologies, namely, lithium extraction from spodumene, lithium extraction from mica, lithium extraction from brine, and lithium extraction from clay. The first three of them have been industrialized, and the extraction of lithium from clay is expected to be industrialized by 2023-2024.

Technical route of extracting lithium from salt lake

Lithium extraction from salt lakes will use completely different processes according to different brines. From the point of view of salt lakes in China, the technical routes used by salt lakes in Qinghai and Tibet are different. Foreign salt lakes also use different methods because of their different lithium content:

Cauchari-Olaroz Salt Lake Project under Construction in Argentina

1) spreading method: the traditional method used in foreign countries, such as Chile, is also used in Zabuye Salt Lake in Tibet because of its high lithium content, few magnesium impurities and simple extraction.

2) adsorption: the adsorption technology has gradually matured and realized industrialization, especially when the ratio of magnesium to lithium is relatively high. Adsorption is suitable when the ratio of magnesium to lithium in Chaerhan Salt Lake exceeds 100. Adsorption is also used in Lanke lithium industry in Qinghai. Recently, after China's Baowu moved to Zabuye, Tibet, it is also planning to use adsorption.

3) electrodialysis: mainly used in Dongtai Salt Lake;

4) membrane method: used in Xitai Salt Lake;

5) extraction: Dahua is used more.

At present, these technological routes have been industrialized in China. Through the continuous technological progress, the competitiveness of the adsorption method may be stronger in the future, because the advantage of the adsorption method is to increase the yield, the efficiency of the adsorbent is higher, the kinetics is faster, and the cost will be lower.

Comparison of four ways of extracting Lithium

There is no difference in lithium salts produced by different lithium extraction methods, but only some impurity indexes are different between ore and brine. For example, the extraction of lithium from ore may be high in sulfuric acid, and the extraction of lithium from brine may be high in chloride ion, but the quality consistency can be achieved through processing sequence purification. For example, lithium carbonate is purified by deep carbonization, and lithium hydroxide is recrystallized to improve product quality, which will not lead to differences in lithium quality because of differences in methods.

Australian Mount Marion spodumene project

1) Lithium extraction from ore: the ore method is relatively mature at present. Xinjiang lithium salt factory used limestone in the past, but the disadvantage is that the proportion of limestone at 1:3 is calcined, and the overall income will be relatively low. Now the mainstream method is sulfuric acid method. The main cost of extracting lithium from ore lies in the purchase of raw materials, and the cost of direct processing is actually lower than that of brine.

2) Lithium extraction from brine: the overall cost of brine is still on the low side because the brine is self-owned and the ores are purchased upstream. But from a separate point of view, the brine processing cost is higher, and the processing cost is basically the complete cost. At present, it is not a problem to add a process to achieve high-quality technology, and many domestic enterprises can do it.

3) Lithium extraction from mica: Mica lithium extraction is the technology of Jiangxi Lithium Salt Factory, the previous lithium mica grade of 4.4 to 4.5, relatively high, so you can use limestone method, through 1:3 limestone calcination. With the decrease of ore grade, the grade of lithium mica is about 2.2, so the limestone method is not suitable. At present, it is generally calcined by sulfate method, lithium mica + sodium sulfate + calcium sulfate + a small amount of potassium sulfate.

4) Lithium extraction from clay: at present, it has not been industrialized. In principle, there are three methods: sulfuric acid method (the content of impurities is relatively high, which will have a greater impact on the environment), sulfate method (similar to the way of extracting lithium from mica, the leaching rate of lithium is about 95%) and pressure cooking (the yield is relatively high but the cost is high).

Difficulty of Lithium extraction and expansion of domestic Salt Lake and Mica

Lithium extraction from salt lakes: globally, the quality of salt lakes abroad is better, especially in Chilean salt lakes, with a lithium content of more than 1000 mg / L and a magnesium-lithium ratio of 1:3. From a domestic point of view, the grade of brine is relatively low, and the lithium content in the original brine is about 30-50mg, which leads to a relatively high cost of domestic investment and expansion. Then the concentration of salt lakes in China is low, the grade is also low, so that the domestic expansion will be limited by resources, subject to the amount of effective brine, it is difficult to make a large scale.

However, the technology of extracting lithium in China is very advanced, and various technical means such as adsorption, membrane, electrodialysis and extraction are the most advanced in China, and other countries should learn from China. If Chinese enterprises go to foreign salt lakes to build factories, the construction cost is actually higher, such as the Ganfeng Argentina project, they all buy domestic equipment and send it to Argentina, but foreign resources such as natural gas are cheaper than at home. Other costs are not easy to compare, if the accessories are purchased domestically, it will increase the freight and customs declaration costs, and the cost may also be a little higher.

Mica lithium extraction: the raw ore grade of domestic mica is relatively low, and there are very few minerals that can reach more than 0.8%. If the standard is lowered to 0.3% and 0.4%, although there are more minerals, the yield of lithium extraction from mica is relatively low, so the output of lithium extraction from mica will be limited by the grade. If we use 0.4 grade ore, 8 tons of raw ore as 1 ton concentrate, 25 tons of concentrate 1 ton of lithium carbonate, and 200 tons of concentrate 1 ton of lithium carbonate, it is obvious that the lower the grade is, the more difficult the production will be.

Effect of Environmental Protection on the way of extracting Lithium

The implementation of ESG will have a great impact on the industry. China has also put forward the goal of carbon peak and carbon neutralization, so that the way of extracting lithium needs to be changed to save energy and reduce the use of water resources. For example, Ganfeng has a water recycling project, which needs to recover more than 1 million tons of water. At the same time, there are corresponding development plans for energy conservation and environmental protection, such as using photovoltaic power generation instead of thermal power generation.

The power of the Cauchari-Olaroz project comes from the surrounding photovoltaic power station.

Specifically look at the environmental protection properties of three ways of extracting lithium:

1) Lithium extraction from salt lake: at present, there are some restrictions, but the impact is relatively mild. For example, the adsorbent method is discharged into the salt field after adsorption, because there is no increase of organic matter and other impurities, so it has no effect on the salt field and its surroundings from the point of view of environmental protection.

2) Lithium extraction from mica: it is greatly affected, because mica contains fluorine, the fluorine process needs to be strengthened, otherwise the release of fluorine will pollute the environment; at the same time, because mica lithium extraction is currently using sulfuric acid method, so the waste slag contains sodium, potassium, calcium, etc., which is also disadvantageous to the cement industry that uses these waste residues, and with the gradual increase in the amount of waste slag, the digestion capacity of the cement industry is limited, and the remaining slag still needs to be treated.

3) Lithium extraction from ore: there are not so many impurities in the waste residue as mica lithium, only hydrogen is in it, but it has some effects on energy consumption (natural gas and gas), tail gas emission and water discharge.

Lithium resources are continuously in short supply.

Demand side: judging from the expansion rate of cathode materials, especially lithium iron phosphate, in the second half of this year, the demand for lithium salt increases, and the situation that supply falls short of demand will continue to be maintained. Even before 2030, we did not see that a particularly large supply would lead to oversupply. The current situation is very conducive to the development of lithium salt, and the price is expected to remain in the range of 10-120000 yuan / ton.

Suppliers: foreign Australian RIM, Galaxy, Tellyson and Pilbara can provide stable supplies, and they will gradually release production capacity in the next 2-3 years. At the same time, Africa, Mali, Congo (Democratic Republic of), Brazil and other places are also expected to start releasing spodumene capacity around 2023, such as Congo gold AVZ reserves are particularly large, raw ore more than 200 million tons, the overall lithium supply will increase in the future, but it is still difficult to balance compared with demand.

Effect of solid State Battery and Sodium Ion Battery on Lithium

Solid-state battery: the development of solid-state battery has a positive impact on lithium resources, and the commercialization cycle of pure solid-state battery is still relatively long, which may not appear until 2028-2030. However, the hybrid solid-state battery has basically matured, and the performance of the battery can be improved by increasing the energy density and strengthening the safety performance by means of metal lithium and reducing electrolyte.

Ganfeng solid state battery and electrolyte products

At the same time, because the negative electrode of the hybrid solid-state battery is metal lithium, the positive electrode does not change much, and the electrolyte is generally oxidized or vulcanized solid electrolyte, so its lithium content will be more.

Sodium ion battery: the development of sodium ion battery suppresses the demand for lithium to a certain extent, but at present, sodium ion battery is not suitable for all application scenarios. It can be used in the field of energy storage or two-wheeled vehicles, but there may be some limitations in other areas, such as mobile phones, from the original one-day charge to half-day charge, the user experience will decline;

In addition, the sodium ion battery needs to be promoted on a large scale to reduce the cost, and considering the overall system cost, taking the lithium battery system as an example, the battery cost accounts for only 60%, and the remaining 40% is the management system cost. Because the energy density of sodium ion battery is low, the management cost is higher, so the total cost is still not low.

The bottleneck of battery recycling business is being dismantled.

With the increase in price, the recycling value of both lithium iron phosphate battery and ternary battery has been greatly improved. At present, the biggest limitation of battery recycling is disassembly. Here are two main methods of battery recycling:

Fire method: the waste battery is calcined into iron ingots in the furnace, and then the metal is recovered by acid melting. Lithium is difficult to recover in this method because it volatilizes during calcination. Some foreign enterprises such as Belgium mainly adopt this method.

Dismantling method: the domestic mainstream method is to remove the shell after disassembling the waste battery, grind the cell through the kiln after calcination, separate copper and aluminum, and recover nickel, cobalt and lithium through acid solution.