LithiumOre is to form a new division to develop a method of extracting battery-grade lithium from brine.
The division will extract battery metals from LithiumOre’s 26,000-acre Nevada land holdings, as well as marketing its extraction technology to other mining companies.
The Nevada-based exploration and development company said current extraction technology— involving a series of evaporation ponds— can take up to two years to complete and requires a huge amount of water, meaning the process is no longer permissible within the US.
LithiumOre CEO Doug Cole said the new division “simultaneously creates a technology side to our business with an entirely new revenue stream independent of our mining operations and realises our goal of becoming a fully integrated lithium mining and production company”.
LithiumOre is a wholly owned subsidiary of Oroplata Resources. In September 2018, LithumOre acquired an additional 1,000 claims covering 20,000 acres contiguous to their existing holdings within their Railroad Valley Lithium Exploration Project, Nevada.
According to an economic study reported by BEST Battery Briefing earlier this month, the potential for cost-effective battery storage projects in Nevada could range from 700 megawatts to more than 1,000MW by 2030.
The Brattle Group report, prepared for the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada and the Nevada Governor’s Office of Energy, also found that— for the Nevada system with a peak demand of roughly 8,500MW— up to 175MW of utility-scale battery storage with a four-hour storage capacity could be deployed cost effectively by 2020.
