Australian mining enterprises and Korean battery recyclers sign supply agreement for cobalt and lithium

Posted 2025-04-19 00:00:00 +0000 UTC

According to foreign media reports, envirostream Australia Pty Ltd (24%) a subsidiary of Australia Lithium Industry Co., Ltd. (ASX: lit) signed a purchase agreement with sungeel hitech, a Korean battery recycler, to sell mixed metal dust (MMD) such as cobalt nickel lithium extracted from Australian recovered lithium to the latter. Envirostream is the only company in Australia with comprehensive capabilities to collect, classify, shred and separate used lithium battery components. As a large-scale lithium mining enterprise in Australia, lit is seeking to establish a vertically integrated lithium processing business by integrating lithium recovery, extraction and processing. In October 2019, lit invested 100000 Canadian dollars (about 529000 yuan) to acquire part of the equity of envirostream. After the acquisition, its shareholding ratio increased from 18.9% to 23.9%, further enhancing its competitive strength in the field of lithium salt processing. Founded in 2000, sungeel hitech is an electronic waste recycling and refining company in South Korea, dedicated to recycling important energy metals from used lithium batteries. With the continuous growth of the new energy vehicle market, the demand for power battery continues to rise, thus driving the growth of the production and sales of the upstream lithium battery raw materials. However, due to the sharp decline of China's new energy vehicle subsidies and intensified market competition, the demand for lithium salt in the downstream market has been greatly reduced, and the excess capacity of lithium salt has led to a sharp decline in the price of lithium salt, which has a great impact on the operation of Australian lithium mining enterprises. At present, a large number of lithium enterprises are reducing production capacity or stopping production to reduce the loss caused by the sharp drop of lithium price. At the same time, with the growth of the number of used lithium batteries, the economic value of recovering cobalt lithium metal from used batteries is increasingly prominent, thus attracting many enterprises to layout. It is understood that lit has proprietary destructive Extraction Technology (silech ® and Liena ®), which can recover and extract lithium materials from waste batteries and mine wastes and produce lithium batteries, so as to reduce the cost of raw material procurement and relieve the pressure of insufficient supply of lithium materials. Among them, sileach is a hydrometallurgical process, which can extract lithium from mica or minerals, including a new process to remove fluorine and calcium and heat conversion, with a lithium recovery rate of more than 90%. The difference between sileach process and thermal conversion process is that it is not limited by ore feed size or impurity content, eliminating the requirement of producing high-purity lithium hydroxide or carbonate, thus greatly reducing the cost. "We plan to develop a vertically integrated lithium production business by providing sustainable technologies for the battery industry," said Adrin Griffin, managing director of lit. These results clearly show that the existing resources can be better utilized and the environmental pressure caused by the increase of energy metal demand can be reduced. ” in July this year, lit established a joint venture with Chinese battery manufacturer DLG, Soluna Australia Pty Ltd, which will provide other products such as lithium iron phosphate battery storage products and ternary batteries for the residential and industrial energy storage system market in Australia. Among them, VSPC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of lit, will use its (silech ® and Liena ®) technology to produce lithium iron phosphate cathode materials and supply them to Delong for battery production. Currently, it is providing samples to Delong for testing.

Copyright © 2020. TUTESL All rights reserved.