International Battery Metals CEO Talks Direct Lithium Extraction

As China continues to dominate global lithium processing and consumption, companies like International Battery Metals Ltd. (IBAT) are looking to boost lithium supplies and reshape mining in the U.S. by using direct lithium extraction.

The process, known as DLE, is considered cleaner, faster and more efficient than lithium processes that involve open pit mining or large evaporation ponds. By using adsorption, resin or membranes, lithium can be extracted directly from brines, including oilfield brines.

DLE is seen as a potential pathway to increase domestic production of the critical ingredient needed for electric vehicle (EV) batteries and systems that back up intermittent renewables on large-scale power grids and electronic devices.

But companies with DLE on their agendas face challenges that include proving and scaling the technology, a need for specific DLE regulations and weathering changing market conditions, which currently include a global lithium oversupply and depressed prices. Factors have included a slower-than-expected EV adoption and higher production from China.

IBAT brought its commercial-scale DLE facility online last year at a co-located site with US Magnesium (US Mag) near Salt Lake City, Utah. Operations at the plant, which used a proprietary absorbent to filter lithium from brine, have been put on hold and equipment moved.

Crain Communications’ Hart Energy spoke with Iris Jancik, CEO of IBAT, during CERAWeek by S&P Global. Jancik, who has served as CEO for the company since August, spoke about the plant, market conditions and lessons learned.

(Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity, length and style.)

Velda Addison (VA): You are in your first year in the CEO role for IBAT. How is it going? What are some of the strategic priorities that you’ve set and what progress has been made?

Iris Jancik (IJ): I came in at a time that’s super critical for the market, and IBAT needs to be well positioned to be part of the growth of the lithium market. I think that we have achieved in doing that. In the past six months, the biggest milestones or strategic activities that we’ve done was first of all to build on our U.S. Magnesium project that we completed this summer. We’ve put out a case study, which is something that I worked on to be able to not just say, ‘Hey, we’ve done it,’ but to also show and actually present the compiled data, the numbers, the hard facts on how the technology works and that it does work in a very tough environment, which we managed there. That was a big milestone for us as well as using everything that we've learned. We’ve put together a very detailed lessons learned process.

VA: Can you tell me about some of those lessons learned?

IJ: Yes, a lot of the challenges that we faced in the project had to do with the quality of the brine and with contaminants, so implementing better engineering to deal with that is even better. We have learned that our media is very, very, very resilient and that our process is very open to fine tuning and that we can continue to produce even in very tough conditions. We don’t expect those type of conditions on the Smackover brines, for instance. We’re able to design the system in a much more efficient manner. So that’s one example.

Another one of the biggest lessons learned is that since we have that field experience, we were able to go back into the lab from the field and test the same brine and results, and basically be able to correlate what our process and media do in the lab compared to what they do in the field. Everybody here in the conference is talking about scale and scaling up and economics of scale. It’s one thing to be successful in the lab; it’s very different to be able to show scaling up and being successful in the field. Since we’ve done it, we’re now able to kind of reverse engineer the results and show that the results in the lab will work in the field and will be very, very similar. So that’s a big confidence boost to our potential customers and partners.

VA: Lithium prices continue to be depressed. What do you think is needed to help bring the supply and demand dynamics more into balance?

IJ: The prices today nobody really thinks that’s where they’re going to settle. I think there is—you’ve been hearing in this conference—some careful optimism that the prices will probably settle somewhere around $15,000 to $16,000. Going back to one of our lessons learned, our opex, our operational cost, is something that we were able to really work through during that operational period and the fact that we have operated the plant and can now guarantee the opex, which is very, very low, less than $1,000 per ton. So even at the $10,000 or $11,000 lithium market price, our technology is still very much economical, very much profitable and we’re working to even improve that more. So, I think the fact that the falling prices—and again we’re all hoping that they do go up a little bit—will motivate everybody to be more efficient, to lower capex, lower opex, and we have that motivation as well.

VA: IBAT is focused on lithium. But can your technology be used to extract other critical minerals?

IJ: The answer is yes. We’re just not focusing on that right now, but the potential is there.

VA: How are the operations going at the site with US Mag? I realize operations were suspended there back in September.

IJ: US Mag put operations on hold because they were responsible, like all resource owners will be responsible, for the pretreatment. And their pretreatment was very, very costly. And so, they wanted to put the project on hold so that they can continue to experiment and find better solutions for their pretreatment. Keep in mind that this is not normal brine; this is not natural brine right; this is a synthetic material that they accumulated over three decades and so it was very inconsistent. It had very, very high concentrations of other impurities and so they needed a more robust way to treat it that made economic sense. So, they had asked us to put the operation on hold.

 We were producing lithium even with those conditions, but they wanted to make their end of the process cheaper.  So, they asked us to put it on hold and that’s when we made the strategic decision to leave the site so that we can use this plant and all the lessons learned that we’ve accumulated for other demonstration purposes. We’re not there anymore. We took the plant out. It’s currently in a temporary storage location where we are kind of touching it up, doing some of the modifications, some of the efficiencies that we’ve learned to do, changing out pumps, whatever it is, to again make it a more efficient process and working on finding its new home, basically.

VA: What would be a good new home for it?

IJ: So, good question. Now this plant is a demonstration plant. So, it’s not an operation plant. It was built originally as an operational plant or a production plant, but it’s a demonstration plant. The difference being it doesn’t have the redundancy and the support, auxiliary equipment to work 24-7, 365. So, it’s a commercial-scale demonstration plant. Who would be the right customers for such a plant? Landowners or resource owners that want to validate their resource. As you know, there’s currently no regulations for producing lithium commercially. And so, it would be for those players that have the funds, have made the strategic decision to be a player in lithium, whether it’s resource owners, developers, oil and gas, and so forth, but companies that want to be a big player in the lithium market and are now looking to really validate their resource and choose their technology. So that would be ideal for this plant because it can demonstrate the technology at scale.

VA: You mentioned regulations. What would you like to see policy-wise?

IJ: I think it depends. I know that Arkansas, Texas and Nevada are all in different places on the regulatory time schedule. There’s a lot of references made to the oil and gas industry which works on some parts, not necessarily on others, but we do know that the produced water avenue or option is a lot more viable at this point and that is something that can move forward. So, we would like, obviously, to see progress made on greenfield projects and on commercial extraction and selling of lithium.

VA: So, we have a new administration in the U.S. with an energy dominance agenda. What opportunities do you think that presents for the lithium sector?

IJ: Maybe the biggest thing that has happened so far are the tariffs and export limitations on China that have to do with resins. Certain resins and materials that come from China that are now limited is great for IBAT. Our media, everything in our equipment is 100% U.S. made, and so that definitely gives us an advantage. And then we know that China is responsible for over 60% of the processing of lithium in the world. We will definitely need to bring that home. Hopefully, it seems that this administration is leaning in that direction.