Oil and gas majors are intensifying efforts to break into lithium on hopes of a breakthrough to produce the metal needed for EV batteries. Read on.
But the oil companies’ activity to date has been speculative, involving a small fraction of the capital spent on fossil-fuel production each year and limited to buying rights to prospective lithium resources, taking minority stakes in lithium companies through venture arms and licensing extraction technology.
However, brine’s future contribution — and the involvement of the oil majors — hinges on the commercial development of direct lithium extraction , a technology unproven at scale that selectively takes the silvery-white mineral out of salty mixtures using membranes, filters or beads. Success for DLE, which has been used in Argentina by Livent Corp. since 1998 and in a handful of projects in Qinghai, China, would open the possibility of oil majors extracting lithium from wastewater at oilfields and at geothermal energy projects that have brine on site.
Despite the natural transfer of oil companies’ skills to such resources, the complexity of getting battery-grade materials approved by the automakers and the small size of the market might not make it worth the effort. Ahmed Mehdi, an adviser at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence Ltd. who consults oil and gas companies on their lithium strategies, said DLE’s contribution to lithium supply could grow from 10 per cent at present to 15 to 20 per cent by 2030.
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