How a new, more sustainable lithium mining process could kick off the industry in Western Canada

A new and possibly more environmentally friendly way to mine lithium could make it easier to extract the critical mineral from deposits in Western Canada, as companies move closer to demonstrating that the technology works at scale.

Such lithium is found in very salty water underground known as lithium brines and has not been easily accessible with conventional methods. Now, a technology called direct lithium extraction (DLE) could allow companies to mine those resources, at a possibly lower cost to the environment than other methods.

Alberta is particularly attractive to at least one such company because its long history of oil and gas extraction has “left behind an incredible amount of infrastructure that we are trying to repurpose,” said Kevin Piepgrass, chief operating officer of LithiumBank, a mining company that’s trying to develop lithium resources in the province.

It holds licences for two lithium projects in Alberta, about 200 to 300 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, and is using wells that were built decades ago to extract oil and gas, to instead access the underground brines that contain lithium — an essential ingredient in the batteries that are powering the clean energy transition.

"It's an incredible opportunity to produce lithium from an area that has all these things that you need,” Piepgrass said, referring to Alberta’s favourable regulations and the availability of water and power for the mining sector.

Something similar has happened in Alberta before: its oilsands only became financially successful in the 1970s when prices went up and the technology to extract the oil improved.

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