In case you missed it first time around PART 2 (edited)11 Aug 2021 21:50
It aims to list on the stock market - possibly within two years - but has in the meantime raised £13m including from government grants and crowdfunding after more than 4,000 investors ploughed in cash, many of them Cornish locals.
The project's backers have been persuaded that lithium demand will rocket, with plans to phase out petrol and diesel cars expected to trigger a sevenfold rise in lithium demand within the decade.
There is also the practical and, for many, emotional importance of freeing the UK and its pressured car manufacturers from reliance on imports. China’s grip on the supply of lithium and other battery metals is of rising concern, while post-Brexit rules of origin are adding to the pressure.
But mining projects are notoriously difficult to get off the ground, often full of unexpected problems and beset by delays. Wrathall, who trained in mining engineering at Cornwall’s Camborne School of Mines, is trying to strike a balance between optimism and level-headedness.
He thinks the hard rock mining at Trelavour could produce about 10,000 tonnes a year, while cautiously suggesting that about 5,000 tonnes could be produced from each geothermal drilling area, of which there could be several. The UK could need about 50,000 to 60,000 tonnes of lithium annually for electric car production.
In September, the company said it had found "globally significant" grades of lithium in deep geothermal waters. It is now testing which method best extracts the metal from the water.
“We would not be spending money if we didn’t think it was a very large opportunity,” says Wrathall. He says they have also found cesium, used in 5G networks, although the potential to exploit it remains unclear.
Pushed for a rough estimate on costs, he thinks he could get the hard rock project into production for about £250m. He believes the geothermal extraction scheme might cost in the low hundreds of millions, but stresses that this is a “really hard question to answer”.
Raising cash could be relatively easy given lithium's demand curve, although extracting the product from geothermal waters is not well understood by mining investors. The potential size of the lithium resource in geothermal waters is hard to quantify, and Cornish Lithium is working out how to do so.
“In the mining industry the first thing you do is dig a bunch of holes, and you build a model and you know how much basically is there - with the water we don’t have that ability yet,” says Derek Linfield, Cornish Lithium’s chairman.......
......""This is something everyone has heard of and it’s not billions [of money needed]..................................
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