Anthony King
A spin-out from the University of Manchester is the first UK firm recovering commercial grade lithium from black mass.
The price of lithium carbonate quadrupled from early 2021 to the end of 2022, raising interest in lithium mining and recycling. Now, UK startup Watercycle is putting its membrane filtration technology into action to extract lithium from waste streams and brines.
In May 2023, the company announced itself as the first UK firm to recover commercial grade lithium carbonate from black mass, a powder containing a mixture of metals and impurities recovered when lithium-ion batteries are shredded for recycling purposes.
Watercycle – a University of Manchester spinout – teamed up with RSBruce, a metal recovery firm in Sheffield, UK, to validate its technology on 1kg of black mass. Increased demand for lithium is driving a need for extraction, according to its CEO Sebastian Leaper, who founded the company in 2020. Battery recycling had in the past focused on recovering cobalt and nickel.
The UK startup now plans to build a pilot facility in Sheffield that can process 500t/year of black mass. Watercycle’s technology can also selectively extract lithium from brines pumped to the surface. In August 2023, the firm will deploy its containerised pilot system to Cornwall Lithium, a company producing lithium from geothermal waters.
The Watercycle system involves passing brine through membranes in a process that is not pressure driven. The first membrane selectively extracts lithium ions from the brine. The lithium is flushed and directed to a second membrane, which concentrates lithium ions further and removes impurities, followed by the crystallisation of lithium carbonate.
Globally, most lithium is obtained from rock deposits in Australia or from evaporation brine ponds in South America. ‘We do also have lithium in Europe and the UK, especially in the southwest and northeast of England, where granite deposits hold water underground with considerable amounts of lithium,’ says Leaper. His firm is scaling up the technology to generate commercial quantities of battery-grade lithium carbonate to feed into electric vehicles.
‘At present the UK needs to source lithium from other countries: China or the US, mainly,’ notes Jacqueline Edge, a mechanical engineer at Imperial College London, UK. ‘We are unlikely to be first in the queue if there are shortages.’
‘Sourcing lithium from recycling is another way to get access to materials, but it will be a while before we are recycling EV batteries at any volume, because they have reasonably long automotive lives,’ she adds.
‘Extracting lithium from local brine resources will be a good way to supplement the raw materials we need to manufacture batteries at scale,’ she concludes.
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