The US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) has announced a conditional commitment to EnergySource Minerals LLC (ESM), via subsidiary SPV ESM ATLiS LLC (ATLiS) for a direct loan of up to US$1.36bn for the construction and operation of the ATLiS facility in Imperial County, California, which will produce lithium hydroxide from geothermal brine.
The facility is forecasted to produce up to 20,000 metric tons of lithium hydroxide annually, enough to produce approximately 52GWh of lithium-ion batteries per year.
Project ATLiS
The ATLiS facility will use lithium extraction (DLE) technology to recover lithium from geothermal brine found in Salton Sea. DLE technologies allow economically-competitive extraction where impurities and lower lithium concentrations would limit commercial opportunities. DLE also requires less water and land compared with conventional extraction methods.
Project ATLiS will be the first facility to utilise DLE processes at commercial scale within the US. The company will deploy DLE technology ILiAD for lithium recovery – a technology which has already been piloted across the US and internationally with various brine resources, including those in Utah, Texas and Nevada.
The facility will be located next to the existing geothermal plant which will supply the lithium-rich brine from the subsurface geothermal field situated a mile underground. Once impurities have been removed from the brine, the lithium will be separated using ILiAD technoloday. The lithium-depleted brine will then be returned to the geothermal plant for reinjection and the lithium will go on to be further purified, crystallised and packaged into battery-grade material.
Analysis by the Department of Energy has estimated that potential lithium production from the Salton Sea geothermal resource may exceed four million metric tons, which has the ability to produce over 10,000GWh of battery capacity.