Weardale Lithium

Looks very early to me - they've got a couple of million, so presumably are going to try to get outline planning permission to enable them to raise some proper money to get started.

Good luck to them.

Chris.
 
I guess this is lithium leached out from the Weardale granite? I would imagine you'd need to be processing a fair volume of brine to extract useful amounts of lithium.

If it works out, there's plenty of ofther British batholiths to investigate.
 
Only know whats on the DCC planning system already.... and that shows a bout of fisticuffs between a couple of the companies involved with neighbouring wells seems to be about to break out over planning applications. One lot in the planning system also seem to have managed to upset their neighbouring landowners by presuming the ability to lay pipework across their land too.
 
They are little more than a venture capital company hoping to make a big hit. Ineptitude at the church commissioners new land agents led them to getting a 45 year lease on the whole area, despite having no concrete plans to actually develop it, and very little by way of land or rights or access to a good chunk of what they propose (they were also given a veto on any any other mineral development in the area - metalliferous, spar etc by the land agents - go figure that one out)

There is also Weardale Lithium in the frame who also got rights to Lithium brines, but essentially in one small field, who they re trying to push out of the picture
 
Interesting talk by Prof. David Manning of Newcastle Uni on the Eastgate geothermal hole and Li content on YouTube may be worth 20 minutes of your time. Reports 76 - 92 mg Li in the brine. I'm still trying to assess whether that makes economic sense or not, certainly not compared to producing brine basins.
 
Imageo said:
Interesting talk by Prof. David Manning of Newcastle Uni on the Eastgate geothermal hole and Li content on YouTube may be worth 20 minutes of your time. Reports 76 - 92 mg Li in the brine. I'm still trying to assess whether that makes economic sense or not, certainly not compared to producing brine basins.
Click to expand...

Thanks Imageo, very interesting clip.

Jim
 
time will tell if anything happens there and 'hundreds of jobs' are created. The old cement works site has form for projects never happening.

If it happens, then I hope some local jobs happen too, the dale could do with some opportunities within it.
 
A bit about Northern Lithium

www.prnewswire.co.uk

Northern Lithium successfully concludes 60-day long term pump tests and demonstration scale Direct Lithium Extraction trials

Detailed design engineering now underway for construction of first production boreholes and commercial scale DLE plant, underpinned by strong response to...
www.prnewswire.co.uk www.prnewswire.co.uk

They operate from an adjacent bore hole on the Eastgate site, as far as I know they are competitors with Weardale but as they both seem to be accessing the same brine deposits it make some sense to leave it on the same thread unless something dead exciting happens.
 
DLE requires reasonably high brine concentrations to be commercially viable at the moment. To my knowledge even the most promising trials in the UK are only demonstrating that concentrations are high enough for DLE to be feasible, not commercially viable. I can see the appeal to the government in terms of resource security, but commercially I can't see us ever competing with e.g. South Africa.
 
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