Cornish Lithium Ltd has secured additional government funding to help develop its hard rock lithium project at Trelavour near St Austell, Cornwall.
GRANT
The undisclosed sum of money is from Innovate UK through the automotive transformation fund (ATF)’s scale up readiness validation competition (SuRV).
Cornish Lithium will use the grant to construct a hydrometallurgical section of a demonstration scale processing plant at the company’s Trelith processing site.
DEMONSTRATION PLANT
The company said that the demonstration plant would comprise concentration and hydrometallurgical processing steps.
“The first pre-concentration step will be via comminution and flotation to produce a lithium mica concentrate.
“This concentrate will then be fed into the second processing step, a hydrometallurgical process, using the patented Lepidico L-Max® and LOH-Max® processing technologies which Cornish Lithium has an exclusive licence for to produce lithium hydroxide.
“The award from ATF will be used to develop the hydrometallurgical elements of the demonstration plant which is expected to produce commercial samples of lithium hydroxide for evaluation by end users such as battery producers and automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
“In addition, the demonstration plant will produce samples of by-products such as gypsum, sulphate of potash, caesium and rubidium sulphate alum.”
FEASIBILITY STUDY
The company, which recently completed a scoping study for the Trelavour project, said that the demonstration plant would form a critical input to the feasibility study.
Subject to the conclusions of the feasibility study, Cornish Lithium intends to build a commercial lithium extraction plant in Cornwall and start production of lithium hydroxide in 2026.
Founder and chief executive Jeremy Wrathall added that the grant further validated the project’s potential, following the company’s major institutional shareholder, TechMet’s further £9 million investment.