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- Anson Resources has made a milestone discovery as it has managed to separate liquid lithium hydroxide and chlorine from highly concentrated lithium chloride- using electrolysis
- The company’s breakthrough technology is expected to lower the cost of producing lithium hydroxide from lithium concentrated brines
- It is the first to achieve this result from a commercial brine
- Anson Resources remains steady on the market today and is selling shares for 3.3¢ per share
Anson Resources has made a milestone discovery as it has managed to separate liquid lithium hydroxide and chlorine from highly concentrated lithium chloride.
As part of its current program to produce high quality, low impurity samples for testing by end-users and offtake partners, it developed and tested an innovative process.
The process has been successful in separating highly concentrated lithium chloride into liquid lithium hydroxide and chlorine using electrolysis.
Electrolysis is the process in which ions are decomposed or break into simple substances when an electric current is passed into it.
Lithium hydroxide, produced from brine is traditionally produced from an intermediate step of first producing lithium carbonate.
Anson’s breakthrough technology is expected to lower the cost of producing lithium hydroxide from lithium concentrated brines. As the lithium carbonate production step is not required in Anson’s process to produce lithium hydroxide.
The company says that Anson is the first to achieve this result from a commercial brine.
This innovative production process has been designed by Anson’s technical advisor, Tom Currin, from Southwest Technologies.
“We are pleased to have assisted Anson in the achievement of this important processing milestone,” Tom said.
“The successful demonstration of the integrated process with Anson’s brine aligns the project with the multiple products and low production cost business models utilised by the major South American lithium producers,” he added.
Significantly, the chlorine that will be produced from this electrolysis process will be fed into the bromine extraction process negating the need to purchase chlorine as part of the bromine production process.
Further, some of the chlorine that is produced will be converted to hydrochloric
acid (HCl) for use in both the bromine and lithium extraction processes, removing the need to purchase HCl and assisting to minimise production costs.
Anson has developed a flow sheet of the process:
The flowsheet designed by Southwest Technologies will produce six products: bromine, lithium hydroxide, lithium carbonate, chlorine, hydrogen gas and hydrochloric acid.
The latter three products will be used in the production process thereby reducing costs which would otherwise be incurred.
Anson says this achievement is a major step forward as it provides flexibility to respond to the changing lithium market.
The lithium hydroxide solution will next be processed into lithium carbonate by Southwest Technologies and lithium hydroxide monohydrate by Veolia Water Technologies.
Once the final products have been produced, they will be offered to potential customers and end-users for qualification test-work.
“As a result of this integrated production flowsheet, costs are expected to be substantially reduced as the major chemical inputs are provided or replaced by the complimentary extraction plants,” the company said.
Anson Resources remains steady on the market today and is selling shares at 3.3¢ apiece.
