Environmental assessment of an innovative lithium production process

Abstract

The recent development towards a battery-powered electric vehicle industry has led to a significant rise in the demand for high-grade Lithium (Li). Global Li is predominately produced from brines (salar or geothermal) and from hard-rocks, while the amount of Li produced from recycling (e.g. from waste batteries) is still negligible, although it is expected to increase in the near future. Li extraction from hard rocks and brines is also associated with environmental issues, such as (i) consumption of a large quantity of reagents, (ii) high water footprint (especially in the case of brines). Therefore, ensuring a clean, stable and sustainable supply of Li is a key point in the European agenda to reach its ambitious climate targets by 2050.Building on this need, a LiOH production process is under development at KU Leuven (C3 SOLVOLi+ project). This process concentrates technical grade LiCl from the roasting of low-content Li sources. Subsequently, it converts the concentrated technical grade LiCl into aqueous LiOH by mean of a series of processes. The presented environmental analysis, based on a ex-ante Life Cycle Assessment, highlights the potential environmental hotspots that can potentially hinder the breakthrough of the technology, providing useful insights on unit processes requiring optimizations during future upscaling. In particular, at this early stage of development, the optimization and the recycling of the chemicals used in the process seems to be the most efficient strategy to reduce the overall environmental impact of the process. Future studies foresee to enlarge the current analysis to the comparison with other processes for LiOH production. A lower environmental footprint can indeed help to strength the position of the proposed process into the future market for LiOH production.