SWA Lithium, the Joint Venture between Standard Lithium and Equinor which is developing the South West Arkansas Project (SWA) has successfully designed, built, commissioned, and is now operating, a pilot Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) plant at the South West Arkansas Project.

The pilot DLE plant is processing brine directly from SWA to confirm engineering design parameters for the Project and provide samples of battery-quality lithium carbonate for use in the qualification process with potential off-take partners.

Standard Lithium’s Director and President, Dr. Andy Robinson commented: “The Standard Lithium and Equinor teams, along with our various engineering partners are working hard on the design for our first commercial lithium facility, which will be constructed in southwestern Arkansas in Lafayette and Columbia counties. To date, in order to support that design work, we have been using the huge amount of DLE and flowsheet performance data that we’ve collected at our demonstration plant, combined with testwork completed by KTS using our SWA Project brines. This field-based pilot DLE plant is the final step in ensuring that we have exactly the right data to confirm our design and be sure that we know how our commercial plant will operate once constructed.”

“This pilot DLE plant is using real brine, collected in real-time from one of our Project wells (the IPC well), and we are using the same flowsheet as our commercial lithium facility to produce an intermediate lithium chloride solution, the same as what we do every day in our demonstration plant. We’ll then ship this solution to several selected vendor partners so that they can convert the lithium chloride solution to a battery-quality lithium carbonate product. This will serve two functions; first, it will provide us with lithium carbonate samples produced from the Project that we can use in negotiations with possible off-take partners and start the qualification process; second, it can also help the JV in selecting our preferred carbonate equipment vendor as we work through the design and partner evaluation process.”