Watercycle Technologies Ltd (‘Watercycle’ or ‘WT’), a UK-based climate tech company specializing in critical minerals recovery, has successfully extracted lithium to produce battery-grade lithium carbonate from geothermal brines.
The brines were synthesized from those previously analyzed at the Lazio projects of Altamin Limited AZI:ASX (‘Altamin’), an Australian publicly listed mineral exploration company. The finalization of this laboratory testing is part of a wider collaborative project assessing historical good data and market opportunities for lithium extraction in Italy.
Watercycle has deployed its proprietary Direct Lithium Extraction and Crystallisation (DLEC™) technology to process brines representing the range of compositions from two geothermal wells from the Lazio, a province of central Italy, to produce battery-grade lithium carbonate. The two synthesized brines were treated to further validate Watercycle’s DLEC™ process on brines of varied nature and composition.
This is a significant milestone in the utilization of DLEC™ beyond the UK and marks Watercycle’s contribution to Europe’s critical mineral strategic autonomy agenda.
Watercycle’s co-founder and CEO, Dr Seb Leaper said: “It’s fantastic to be working with Altamin and to have produced battery-grade lithium carbonate from two of their brines, representing the range of lithium concentrations present. The potential for Italy to become a major supplier of lithium in an environmentally responsible and cost-effective way is most interesting, and we are very excited by the prospect of bringing our technology to the market.”
“The Altamin team completed a thorough collection, analysis and interpretation of historical data that had been dormant in Italy since the 1980’s. One of the results of this assessment is the successful testing of Watercycle’s DLEC™ technology to be able to produce battery-grade lithium carbonate crystals directly from the brines synthesized to be representative of the historical well samples. Successful development of this technology has the potential to open the door to the commercial production and sale of lithium in Italy.”
Geraint Harris, Managing Director of Altamin