Lithium Hydroxide Production ; Battery Grade Lithium Hydroxide Monohydrate ; Lithium Sulfate ; Lithium Spodumene Concentrate from Finland

Categories:
Categories:
Unit processes/Materials production/Inorganic chemicals
Location:
FI - Finland
Reference year: 2016 -
Description

The future supply routes reviewed in this study are based on data gathered from technical reports and environmental impact assessment reports of several lithium mining and processing companies (Lithium Americas Corp., Minera Salar Blanco, Nemaska Lithium Inc., and Keliber Oy) that are at various stages of developing their lithium assets. These are considered future supply routes as they are not yet active but areexpected to be operational in 5–10 years. The lower lithium concentrations at these brine-based sources also reflect the possible future lithium grades of current supply routes from brines, whose lithium concentrations will likely decrease over the years due to extraction When using this data set for life cycle assessment, please take into account that the production processes for raw materials and any associated energy flows less than 1% are not included in the system boundary. This omission should be kept in mind for the completeness of the assessment and when comparing with data sets with different system boundaries. Users should also consider the geographical specificity of the data as it pertains to lithium spodumene sourced from Finland.

Technology

The future supply routes for spodumene are described in technical reports of operations at the Whabouchi site, Canada and the Central Ostrobothnia region, Finland. While neither Canada nor Finland are among the countries with the largest lithium reserves (USGS, 2021), they represent examples of new lithium supplies that might become exploited in response to increased lithium demand. The average lithium concentration in spodumene at the Whabouchi site is about 0.7% and in Central Ostrobothnia region it is 0.6%. In these future supply routes, concentrated spodumene is directly converted to LiOH⋅H2O without producing Li2CO3 as an intermediate. The datasets representing mining operations in Canada and Finland are based on the technical reports prepared for Nemaska Lithium Inc. (Golder Associates, 2013; Laferri´ere et al., 2012; Nemaska Lithium Inc., 2013; SENES Consultants Ltd., 2013) and Keliber Oy (Keliber Oy, 2020a, b; Sweco, 2016), respectively. Specific data for chemical inputs was not available for the LiOH⋅H2O production unit process (from concentrated spodumene) in the Nemaska Lithium reports. Therefore, the chemical usage in the Keliber Oy reports were used as proxy data when comparing the different lithium supplies.

Process type
Unit
LCI modeling approach
Unknown
Multifunctional modeling
NONE
Format
ILCD
Aggregation type
NOT_APPLICABLE
Data provider
TianGong
Review status
Internal
Cost
Free
Contact
Tiangong LCI Data Working Group