After several years of metallurgical research, Ste. Foy, Que.-based
The plant will be built 14 km outside of Val d’Or, Que., at
Beacon’s infrastructure includes a mothballed 800-tonne-per-day concentrator, buildings, a hoisting tower, service areas, a tailings dam and a finishing basin. The property comprises 87.5 hectares along Route 117, near a rail line and the research laboratory of the Canada Centre for Mineral & Energy Technology.
Raymor says Beacon’s buildings and equipment are in “generally good condition” and that the concentrator, which operated for only a year during the flow-through boom in the late 1980s, can be quickly refurbished. Two consulting firms have estimated a cost of $1.5 million to restore existing equipment.
In late January, Raymor took a major step toward building its pilot plant by obtaining a $1.75-million loan from the city of Val d’Or. Raymor estimates it will cost $7 million to build and operate the plant for three years, and the company hopes to raise more money through the provincial and federal governments.
When asked why Val d’Or was chosen as the site for the pilot plant, Raymor’s vice-president of technology, Cameron Harris, responds: “It wasn’t the money that made us go there in the first place. Val d’Or is an industry-friendly town that’s used to mines and concentrators, and there’s a big pool of technically competent people available at a reasonable labour rate. The site is already fully permitted, and everything we need is there.”
Briquettes
Raymor aims to be producing briquettes of high-quality, battery-grade lithium metal by early 2003 at the annual rate of 50 tonnes.
Currently, the standard method for producing lithium metal is “difficult, expensive and complicated,” says Harris. “There’s a whole pile of recirculating flows and it’s a little difficult to deal with.”
Under this standard method, hydrochloric acid is used to dissolve lithium carbonate and form a lithium-chloride solution that is refined through a series of precipitations. The material is then subjected to multi-stage vacuum evaporation and crystallized into an ultra-pure lithium-chloride product, which is then placed into an electrolysis cell to produce lithium metal and chlorine gas. The process is similar to Noranda’s Magnola process for producing magnesium metal.
Raymor’s flow sheet is different in that spodumene feed is calcined (that is, heated so as to turn it into a pure oxide, as in any typical cement factory) and then put into a vacuum retort. Traditionally, this “Pidgeon process” has been used to make most of the world’s magnesium metal.
Up to this part of the process, Raymor will be using off-the-shelf technology that the company will tweak to make more suitable for lithium metal.
The next part of the process, the vacuum-refining of lithium metal, is Raymor’s innovation. Here, lithium metal comes off as a gas and is recovered by simple condensation method.
“This is where we’re strongly patent-protected,” says Harris. “This technique is completely new and definitely not obvious. It was very easy to get a patent on it.”
Development of the process was funded by Raymor and carried out at McGill University’s Department of Mining and Metallurgy, by Cameron Harris’ brother, Ralph Harris, one of the world’s leading authorities on vacuum refining.
In 2000, Raymor raised more than $1 million in a series of private placements and completed a year’s worth of semi-industrial testing on various spodumene feeds, including Raymor’s own material from its La Motte property in Quebec.
Under its partnership agreement with McGill, Raymor has obtained a 5-year, exclusive worldwide licence on the patented process in exchange for 200,000 Raymor shares. Renewals of the licence can be made every five years under similar terms.
With the agreement, Raymor retains a first right of refusal on applying this process to any other metal or mineral. However, with Raymor’s approval, McGill may sub-contract the process, with the resulting revenue shared equally.
Raymor says this new metal-purification process, applied to lithium-metal production, is more economical than the current electrolysis process and is much less vulnerable to variations in raw-materials sources. In particular, one of the key benefits of this pyrometallurgical approach is that it makes it easier for the operator to control the lithium’s purity and quality.
“When you’re using electrometallurgical techniques, you basically get what you get,” says Cameron Harris. “It’s very difficult to continue refining up and up, because there are limits to the chemistry. But with our metallurgy, the longer you can cook it, the cleaner you can get it. So quality is the thing we believe we have on our side, and with process and design optimization, we also believe we can get costs on our side.”
Raymor’s process has no adverse environmental impacts and can be used to recycle lithium contained in lithium metal-aluminum alloys.
“We firmly believe we’ll have no problem at all producing battery-grade lithium metal substantially less expensively than anybody else who is using the current technology,” says Harris. “The reason is that our flow sheet is simple and there are relatively few steps in the process.”
When pilot-scale production gets under way early next year, Raymor will try to fine tune its process to commercially viable levels and produce representative samples that it can distribute to potential customers.
“We have a process that is thermodynamically and kinetically sound,” says Harris. “We’ve done the testwork and hope soon to have people buying hundreds of tonnes of lithium metal from us each year.”
Industrial scale
The ultimate goal of the pilot plant is to complete engineering work on a second, industrial-scale, lithium-metal plant whose initial capacity is expected to reach 500 tonnes per year, with a potential to increase gradually to 2,000 tonnes.
The capital cost of building a commercial plant is estimated at between $68 million for a 500-tonne-per-year operation and $178 million for one with a capacity of 2,000 tonnes.
Once Raymor has completed its proof of process with this particular lithium metal production, the company can turn some of its attention to other, higher-purity metals that are amenable to vacuum work, such as ultra-high-purity strontium.
“There are many, many metals that are volatile, and this facility would enable research in the area of ultra-high-purity metals and even compounds,” says Harris. “The facility won’t die at the end of this project.”
He adds that Quebec is starting to become recognized in the metallurgical community as a world centre for light metals. “Noranda’s Magnola magnesium project is an incredible step forward in light metals production, and Alcan is here. There’s no doubt that there’s a real intellectual critical mass building here in light metals.”
Although the company will be purchasing spodumene feed over the next year for use in the pilot plant, it already owns a nearby, low-cost source of spodumene at the La Motte property, just outside Amos, Que.
La Motte hosts reserves of 4.6 million tonnes grading 1.14%Li2O (or 6% spodumene (LiAlSi2O6) from surface to a depth of 100 metres — good for more than 15 years of commercial-scale lithium-metal production. The deposit is open at depth for possible expansion.
Reduced cost
In 1999, provincially owned
The property could be sw
iftly brought into production with little investment in infrastructure because of its proximity to large mining centres, a natural gas source, and a paved road. It is also only 0.5 km from a power line.
The concentrator at Beacon could be adapted to process lithium ore from La Motte by adding a more-complete flotation section.
Raymor estimates that about $17 million will be required to bring the La Motte property into commercial production.
The current global market for lithium is about 1,000 tonnes per year, of which about 400 tonnes is lithium metal produced by a dozen companies. Recent prices for lithium metal for the battery market have reached US$100,000 per tonne.
Some forecasters anticipate annual demand will grow to 3,000 tonnes by 2005 and to 8,000 tonnes by 2008. The reason is that battery manufacturers are soon expected to begin using lithium metal in rechargeable units, whereas currently it is used only in non-rechargeable ones.
These lithium-metal batteries will be vastly superior to the lithium-ion (that is, lithium-carbonate based) batteries that now dominate the market in that they will be smaller, lighter, more durable and more resistant to heat.
As well, the market for industrial-scale batteries is likely to be affected by lithium metal.
Best possible energy
“Using lithium-metal in batteries is a hot favourite right now,” says Harris, “and the reason is that when you sit down and look at it from a fundamental thermodynamic viewpoint, it’s the best possible energy you can get out of mass. The big issue now is that the greater the number of recharging cycles a battery can handle, the better, so the trend in research is toward solving problems of battery degradation associated with recharging by going to higher and higher purity. That’s what Hydro Quebec and pretty much every major electronic and electrical-equipment company in the world are working on.”
Raymor is trying to position itself to become a major supplier of lithium metal to budding battery fabricator
Plant construction
Last year, Avestor authorized construction of a $340-million plant east of Montreal in Boucherville. The plant will produce lithium-metal polymer (LMP) batteries, a “next-generation” power cell that will be capable of serving various markets, including telecommunications, utility peak-output shaving, and electric and hybrid-electric vehicles. The battery has already been tried in Ford’s TH!NK city electric car, as well as Honda’s Insight electric hybrid car.
Initially, the Boucherville plant will build the STOR 48-70 back-up energy source for use in telecommunications, cable and Internet applications. By 2003, the facility will be producing some 175,000 batteries totalling 600 MW, and there are already plans afoot to double plant capacity by mid-decade. The operation will employ about 170.
It will be a significant shift in Hydro Quebec’s business plan, as Canada’s largest electrical utility expands from generating and transmitting electricity to storing it.
“We’re working with Hydro-Quebec to determine their lithium-metal needs related to the building of stationary batteries and, eventually, to the powering of electric cars,” says Raymor President Stephane Robert. “We want to be one of Hydro-Quebec’s five suppliers of lithium metal, apart from our other prospective clients.”
Aside from the battery sector, Raymor is projecting strong growth in demand for lithium metal-aluminum alloys for the aeronautical, aerospace and automobile industries. When added to aluminum, lithium reduces the weight of the alloy while increasing rigidity and corrosion resistance.
Raymor has issued 24.2 million shares and currently trades near 50 , with a 52-week high and low of 87 and 27.
Be the first to comment on "Raymor takes steps toward lithium metal production"