Standard Lithium Announces Delivery of Its SiFT Lithium Carbonate Plant to El Dorado Arkansas Project Site

EL DORADO, Ark., (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Standard Lithium Ltd. (“Standard Lithium” or the “Company”) (TSXV: SLI) (NYSE: SLI) (FRA: S5L), an innovative technology and lithium project development company announced the delivery of its ‘SiFT’ lithium carbonate plant to the El Dorado Arkansas project site, located at the LANXESS South Plant facility. The SiFT Plant will be installed adjacent to and connected to the Company’s LiSTR Direct Lithium Extraction (“DLE”) pre-commercial scale demo plant. The SiFT plant is designed to take the intermediate product made by the company’s DLE process (a high purity, concentrated lithium chloride solution) and convert that into a battery-quality (or better) lithium carbonate.

The modular plant was sent as several truck-loads and has been reassembled on its purpose-built foundations. Standard Lithium and its team of engineers and operators in Arkansas, assisted by the experienced on-site team of Milam and HGA, is now reconnecting the modules, and making all utility, instrumentation, control, reagent and process-flow connections between the SiFT plant and the existing operating SLI Demo Plant. Following the connections being completed, a weatherproof structure will be installed at the site, scheduled for later this month. Once the SiFT Plant is made weatherproof, then it can be hydraulically integrated and site-specific commissioning can be completed; note that the SiFT Plant has been fully commissioned previously, and has been running successfully for several months in Vancouver.

The fully automated lithium carbonate crystallization plant has been designed around the Company’s proprietary ‘SiFT’ continuous fractional crystallization technology, which has demonstrated to produce >99.9% purity (also known as ‘three-nines’) battery-quality lithium carbonate. The crystallization plant was constructed by Saltworks Technologies Inc (see the Company’s June 6, 2020 news release). The SiFT plant has been operating for the past year at a facility in the Greater Vancouver area; processing lithium chloride produced at the Company’s Arkansas site, as well as reprocessing technical grade lithium carbonate sourced from South American brine operations into battery quality Li₂CO₃.

Dr. Andy Robinson, President and COO of Standard Lithium, commented, “Due to constraints imposed on our operations by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have, up until now, been running the SiFT Plant separately at a location in the Vancouver area. This work has been extremely successful, and we have produced large volumes of better-than battery quality lithium carbonate from lithium chloride concentrates made by the El Dorado Plant. We’ve also been reprocessing very large quantities of low-quality material sourced from existing South American brine producers, and have demonstrated that the SiFT technology can easily upgrade off-spec material in a single, simple step. We’re now thrilled to move the SiFT Plant to El Dorado, which was always our plan, get the plant connected and running, and then operate the only continuous, 24/7 start-to-finish brine-to-carbonate plant in North America.”