➡️ Tell us about Adionics and its operations.

For the last two and a half years, we have been moving from a research company to an industrial company. We finished manufacturing our industrial demonstrators two years ago. We have three pilot plants, two of them can produce 15 tonnes of LCE a year, and the other one, 250 t/y.

One of these demonstrators was based in Atacama by SQM. Following a trial of 500 continuous hours running the pilot, SQM found the results very good and they decided to become a shareholder of Adionics, which was around a year ago. After that, we continued with the 1,000-hour trial in Atacama, but that was just to get information to go to industrialisation. After those 1,000 hours, which we finished just before Christmas last year, we started to make the basic engineering of our first industrial plant.

Now we need to see when we go to the industrial plant or not... The lithium investments are slowing down a little bit – not only because of the price but the forecast of when the price is going to rise. We moved that pilot from Atacama [in Chile] to Salta in Argentina, and we are going to start making tests on the Argentinian site, hopefully end of September or beginning of October for Argentinian mining companies.

The second plant is in Germany, because we have a partner, K-UTEC, they are able to make the carbonation. When the mining companies send us brine to Germany, we are able to do both – our part DLE, so we concentrate and purify the lithium, but we deliver a lithium chloride, which is still a liquid. K-UTEC can make the carbonation plant. What we want to show to the clients is that, because our DLE makes a very pure lithium chloride, it’s much easier and straightforward to do the carbonation and cheaper as well.

The third plant is still in France, ready to go to Latin America. We will find the correct site to install it. It’s a bigger plant, it’s ready to go to Latin America. Our focus is the Latin American brines and American brines but we are also starting to think about other markets for the future.

➡️ How does Adionics’ DLE technology work?

We use Flionex, a patented liquid, made up of three main confidential components, that chemical companies are producing for us. For the process, we take the raw brine as it is and put it through a three-step process. The first one is extraction, where we put the Flionex in contact with the brine. When it’s a raw, not very concentrated brine under three grams per litre of lithium, we use mixer settlers. When it’s more than three grams, we use a centrifuge at ambient temperature.

The equipments are the ones that the mining companies use; we don’t have our proprietary equipment. So that’s why the scale-up is going to be very simple and easy. In the first step, Flionex will extract most or all of the lithium contained in the brine. One thing is very important to underline is that the Flionex was created to be very selective; it will not take any magnesium, potassium, sulfate, or boron. Some other technologies, they need steps to remove all those impurities after the DLE. We will extract the lithium and in case there are some sodium and some calcium, we have a second washing step in a centrifuge, where we use a little bit of water to wash the Flionex at ambient temperature. Then, we have what we call the regeneration, where we will heat the Flionex to about 80 degrees Celsius – just the volume of the Flionex, we do not heat the brine – and the Flionex will release very pure and concentrated lithium chloride. The Flionex goes back; it’s a closed loop. The Flionex is not a consumable, it’s just staying in the system the whole time.

➡️ What makes your process unique and what advantages does it offer compared to other DLE technologies?

A very important [advantage] is the selectivity. You have a lot of technologies that need acid to regenerate, resins, and things like that. We don’t need any. We just need our Flionex. The selectivity not only makes our DLE competitive, we also use just very little water. The selectivity of our liquid media, Flionex is a very important point. The second one is that we have the lowest water consumption in the market. For any tonne of lithium equivalent produced, we use only 10-20 cubic meters per tonne of water – that is the best consumption you have among the DLEs. That’s why we say we have a very sustainable process because we don’t change the nature of the brine. We just extract the lithium. The brine stays with its pH and the same composition, we don’t leave any traces of any product in the depleted brine, so there is the possibility of reinjecting the raw brine. And we use less energy to heat the Flionex.

➡️ DLE has often been cited as a technology that could disrupt the lithium supply chain. What do you think will be the impact of DLE technologies on the global lithium market over the next decade? Why is DLE important?

Even if the price is down, the forecast of the needs of the world in lithium are still almost the same as years ago. In 2030 we will need maybe 3-4 million t/y production, whereas today we produce roughly 1m. So, where are those 3 more millions going to come in? Today is 2024. We have six years to do that. So, DLE could be a great booster of the production. We are ready today for industrialisation. In two years, we can build a full plant, able to [produce] 20,000-60,000 t/y. If we really need to get to 3-4m t/y in 2030, DLE will help a lot to speed up the production. Mostly, of course, not on the hard rock side, but on the Latin American and the US side lithium coming from brines.

➡️ In terms of industrial readiness, where does DLE technology stand right now? Can you share insights into the current state of pilot projects globally?

Lithium was at extremely high price for quite some time, at $80,000 to $90,000 a tonne. It appears that a lot of companies are saying that they do have DLE technology. Adionics has existed for 12 years. Those 12 years were years of research to get ready today for industrialisation. Today, we have maybe 50 or 60 competitors. I don’t know exactly how many of them are ready to go industrial – that’s on the side of the DLE companies. On the miners’ side, like any long-term industry, they are risk averse. To start to work with DLE represents an industrial risk. I do fully agree they need to take care of what they are doing. The investments are huge. You cannot put $100 or $200 million and then say: “Oh, sorry, it’s not working.” What I think is, first, the mining lithium industry needs the DLE to to make a more sustainable industry on one side and to speed up the production on the other. Second, when the mining companies will start giving the first step, you will have one or two or three industrial DLEs like ours. This will speed up the process and there will be much more DLEs. And of course, there will be a consolidation in the market; I’m sure there will not be 60 companies in three or four years. But these three or four are going to be the best ones with the best processes. And of course, I do think Adionics will be among those three or four. The market is not big enough to [sustain] 60 companies, and the 60 companies do not have processes that could answer to the industrialisation needs.

➡️ There are several different types of DLE methods currently being developed. Do you see the market moving toward a particular technology as the standard?

Well, I hope the market will move to our technology. We are the unique technology doing this. You do have ion exchange, resins, and liquid-liquid extraction, but the other liquid-liquid extraction, they are just extracting an ion. It’s a kind of liquid-liquid-ion exchange. We are the only ones extracting a salt. We extract lithium chloride; we extract salts and not ions. So we are a very unique process. I do think that we have the better product. I hope we will be able to have an industrial contract in the next months to prove that in a big scale, as we did prove it in our demonstrators. 

➡️ In your view, what are the biggest challenges the DLE industry faces in achieving widespread adoption?

The mining industry is quite risk-averse. So it’s taking a very long time for mining companies to make a decision, even if you know there are DLEs working for 20 or 30 years. Arcadium is the example, they have been producing DLE technology lithium for more than 20 years in Catamarca in Argentina. Of course, maybe the process is not the best, more efficient, because it’s an old process, and they do spend a lot of water to do that, but it is working. So someone already showed that the DLE can be industrialised. Then, it’s also new for the communities in Argentina, Chile – will be the same thing in Bolivia. There’s a need to get the approval of the community surrounding the production sites. That’s a long process, as well as complicated. The third one is the environmental authorisations, depending on the country. In Chile, to get the environmental authorisation to go up to Atacama, we take maybe something between 3-7 years. That’s what the authority says. In Argentina, it is faster. But any study of environmental impact will take at least one to three years. So that is also, in a way, delaying industrialisation. So those are the challenges to get the first industrial reference with the mining companies. For example, SQM made a lot of trials with us, so now they know that this is working, and we make long trials to show the stability of the process, the regularity of how it works, show that the results of the treated brine are permanently good, and it’s not just an up and down process. So the biggest challenges are to convince the mining companies, convince the community surrounding the site where we are going to install the DLEs, and speed up authorisations with the environmental authorities in the countries where we are going to use it.

➡️ What is the company’s growth strategy for the next few years? What partnerships is Adionics currently pursuing to accelerate the adoption of your DLE technology?

Our main focus today is the Lithium Triangle brines because there are quite a few of them which are with a great concentration for our process. We did make tests in our lab and even in our pilots for most of the main players. We are in very advanced negotiations with a few of them – I cannot tell you the names because there are confidentiality agreements. Our first focus is to get our first industrial reference in the Lithium Triangle, or the US, because we do work also with some prospects in the US. Once we get the the first plant running, I think we will reproduce that in many other mines.

Second priority is to keep going with our research to address two markets: one is recycled lithium from batteries, because that will give us also a quite big European activity. There are a lot of gigafactory projects in Europe and in the US, so we want to address the recycling of lithium from those lithium batteries in the future. The other one is, in some cases on the hard rock, we can add quality to the lithium that they produce [in terms of] purity and competitiveness when they have a lot of purification stages.

➡️ Is there anything else you wish to add?

Even if the lithium price is slow today, we are very optimistic for the future, for the development of the lithium production in a sustainable way in the world. We think we have a lot of things to add to to the sustainable production of lithium, so we are trying to do that in the next years.