Relevant Excerpts from Lake Update Webinars, page-76

The topic covered in this transcript is "Why is Ion Exchange DLE is a good match for our particular conditions?"
Sourced from Update Webinar #2 on 28/9/23
Commentary made by Scott Munro - SVP Technology Strategy and Risk and Jonathan Neilsen - Project Technical Director

SM: "We do get questions often and DLE is a big bucket, right. There are multiple different types of DLE. It maybe worth just discussing why we think “ion exchange” DLE (Lilac in particular) is a good match for our particular conditions?

JN: Yeah absolutely. It is a question that we get often and it's a very good question. When you look at it, and as you said there's a number of DLE technologies that are out there. There are three that are kind of primary - Ion exchange, adsorption technology and solvent extraction technology. Membrane gets mentioned, but as a technology alone it's usually a support for one of the others. For us in our application, there's really a few unique features that Ion Exchange brings that are really beneficial for us and needed for our particular resource. One of them is our brine (and most South American brine in general) is at ambient temperature. We're talking between 10 and 20 degrees. It’s not a heated brine, like you might see in the geothermal applications some folks have. So, the kinetics are very important.

When you have a brine that's not heated, ion exchange gives you wonderful kinetics. You don't have to worry; you can treat the brine directly and that's definitely an advantage for us to be able to have fast kinetics. Fast kinetics means that you have smaller equipment, faster processing and you have lower cost. The other thing is water consumption. Our resource is located in an arid region of Argentina, so water is important and proper use of water is important. One of the benefits of ion exchange technology is it's the one that allows you most control over water use and to minimise water consumption. So, for us, that's a very important factor in technology choice. One of the others is the eluate concentration. Ion exchange allows you to produce a higher-grade eluate (that's the Lithium Chloride that that comes from the DLE) - that's the product from the DLE. This is what we call eluate, and the high concentration of Lithium in that eluate again means there's less work to do downstream. You have less work to do to concentrate that up to the carbonation step. The purification and the work that we just did with Saltworks, when you have higher lithium concentration, you have less work to do. Less work to do means lower energy. So really, those things combined for this location, a remote arid region in Argentina, really makes ion exchange an excellent fit for DLE technology for our resource."