Pure Lithium Corporation, a vertically integrated lithium metal battery technology company, has received funding from the Vehicle Technology Office to scale production of lithium metal anodes from recycled lithium metal, in partnership with Argonne National Laboratory.

Lithium metal waste is produced by certain industrial processes in the United States. Recovering and using this lithium in Pure Lithium’s batteries would create a closed-loop, fully domestic supply source. Pure Lithium will work in partnership with Argonne National Laboratory to recover lithium metal from one such waste stream and to demonstrate and to scale Pure Lithium’s patent-pending technology to use recycled metal to produce pure lithium metal anodes for lithium metal vanadium oxide batteries.

While our core technology is combining metal extraction from lithium-bearing brines with anode production, our team is highly skilled in metallurgical processing. The opportunity to extract value from a waste stream utilizing technology that complements our large portfolio of patents was one we could not pass up.

—Emilie Bodoin, Pure Lithium Founder and CEO

Pure Lithium is led by inventor and lithium expert, CEO Emilie Bodoin, and world-renowned battery and metallurgical expert, MIT Emeritus Professor Donald R. Sadoway, as full-time CSO. The company’s novel Brine to Battery technology combines metal extraction and anode production, unlocking unconventional sources of lithium.

Brine to Battery inexpensively electrodeposits highly pure lithium metal onto copper from widely available brine, creating a full battery anode in a single step that costs a fraction of existing lithium metal production. Pure Lithium’s proprietary polymer membrane conducts only lithium and protects the lithium metal anode from water. The process deposits ultra-thin, 99.9% pure lithium metal onto the substrate directly from brine. This is completely different than direct lithium extraction (DLE), which cannot produce lithium metal, the company notes.

The resulting pure lithium metal anode is the core component of the company’s lithium metal vanadium oxide battery, a step-change improvement over today’s lithium-ion technology in cell performance, cost and safety. Additionally, the battery is free of graphite, cobalt, nickel and manganese.