I totally agree transporting over 95% waste, just to get the 6% lithia is not the Worlds best practice. In our case China has all this waste material they need to dispose of, it would be far more economic & greener to put the waste back in the mine.
AVZ were going down this track, mainly because of the transport logistics, to produce Lithium sulphate.
PLS are building a demonstration plant for this “mid-stream” processing, in their case they are using Calix’s “flash calcination” process which is greener than traditional.
PLS has chosen to convert to Lithium Phosphate. Their CEO calls this a “carrier salt”, it’s a lithia concentrated salt that is far cheaper to transport than Spodumene. Lithium Phosphate actually has a higher Lithium content than Lithium Hydroxide or Carbonate, both of which have about 40% lithium content.
They chose Phosphate (as opposed to AVZs Sulphate) because when they precipitate the Lithia out (to make hydroxide/carbonate), they are left with Phosphate which can be used in fertilisers etc. The Lithium Phosphate can also be used in LFP Batteries (Lithium ferro Phosphate). All Teslas made in China use LFP batteries as do the majority of Chinese EVs.
Conversion to these salts is really just stage 1 of the chemical conversion Ganfeng will do.
IMO it would make perfect sense after stage 2 to build something like PLS are doing, certainly a lot greener than the alternative.
(20min delay)