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Speaking exclusively with Fastmarkets on Monday March 17, Vinayak Singal, assistant vice president at Lohum, said that the new plant can take both black mass and spodumene as input materials. “This gives us flexibility based on market dynamics,” he said.
Some Lohum customers insisted on black mass input due to a desire for “green”, recycled credentials, he said, while others preferred a primary feedstock.
The two potential raw material inputs have been subject to widely differing fortunes recently.
While spodumene prices have edged downward so far during March, amid weak lithium market demand, black mass prices have risen both on stronger demand in Southeast Asia ahead of changes to China’s import rules, and on higher cobalt prices driving the material’s cost.
Fastmarkets’ daily assessment of the spodumene, min 6% Li2O, spot price, cif China, was $840-870 per tonne on March 17, down week on week from $860-880 per tonne.
Meanwhile, Fastmarkets’ daily price assessment for black mass, NCM/NCA, inferred, cif South Korea, rose as high as $5,063.87 per tonne on March 14, up sharply week on week from $4,253.87 per tonne, although it fell back on Monday to $5,043.42 per tonne. The inferred price was based on a cobalt content of 10%.
The new facility has capacity to produce 1,000 tonnes per year of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE), Singal said, but it can also produce lithium hydroxide if required.
Although lithium carbonate is typically consumed in the lithium-ion battery production sector, India’s battery-making capabilities are still limited, Singal said, while other end-user markets are more established.
“The battery industry is not that big yet [in India] but there are the glass, ceramic and lubricant [end-user markets]” which also take lithium products, he said.
Lohum’s lithium refinery achieves a lithium product of minimum 99.7% purity, rising to 99.9%, according to the firm.
Singal said that a typical industry performance for refining lithium from black mass typically would only reach a 60-70% yield, while Lohum can achieve more than 90%.
Lohum’s new facility “positions India as a key [market participant] in global critical minerals markets [and] de-risks the supply chain for lithium battery technology,” the firm said on March 5.
The operations are “also globally competitive with regard to cost, with capital expenditure [capex] and operational expenditure [opex] in line with the best Chinese refiners, and as low as one-third to one-fifth of [those of] US- or EU-based refiners,” it said.
Although Lohum said that the new unit’s capacity makes it one of the largest lithium refineries outside China, it is significantly smaller than those operated by the likes of lithium miner Albermarle, which owns the Kemerton manufacturing plant in Australia that has capacity to produce around 25,000 tpy of lithium hydroxide from spodumene.
Still, Lohum’s scale and its rate of development as a producer of recycled battery metals at commercial scale has been rapid, and has led to the company taking a dominant position in the growing Indian battery recycling market.
Across all of its operations, Lohum can process more than 25,000 tpy of critical materials through its recycling and extraction technology. And it believes that it holds a share exceeding 90% of India’s integrated lithium-ion battery recycling market.
It has capability to extract recycled battery metals from black mass and scrap lithium-ion batteries of chemistries such as nickel cobalt manganese (NCM) and lithium iron phosphate (LFP).
Lohum is also planning expansions into the European and US markets in the coming years, having signed a joint venture with American Metals and ReElement Technologies in September 2024 to build a recycling facility in the US.
India’s ability to consume black mass domestically is on the rise due to new capacities coming to market and a growth in the country’s market. These developments have led some local recyclers to call for restrictions on the exporting of black mass from the country.
On the other hand, importing lithium-ion battery scrap and black mass into the country was made easier when India’s National Budget last month removed basic customs duties on the import of these items.
Callum Perry in London contributed to this article.