Abstract
Lithium is a critical element for energy transition, especially in battery manufacturing. Canada is hosting large reserves of lithium as brines and pegmatite hard rocks and has a great potential to be a major lithium producer. The hard nature of the pegmatite ore body, as compared to lithium extracted from brines, is an important reason for the limited development. With a growing global demand related to clean technologies, one Canada’s strategy is to give a priority to the lithium supply chain. Spodumene in pegmatites occurs as large minerals intermixed essentially with quartz, feldspars, micas. This petrological feature made it a suitable feed for efficient and selective liberation of spodumene by high voltage electric pulse (HVEP) fragmentation. Using HVEP fragmentation, individual coarse minerals of the ore are much better liberated than in the case of conventional grinding techniques. In the current study, the HVEP technology is compared to jaw and cone crushers (conventional) for effective size reduction prior to dense media separation (DMS) of spodumene in a pegmatite ore. The results showed that HVEP fragmentation allowed to almost double the DMS recovery of spodumene, improving from 7.1% Li2O by conventional crusher to 14.1% Li2O (relative to feed). This preliminary study suggests opportunities for more sustainable spodumene mining and extraction approaches, specifically well adapted to some Canadian mineralized zones, especially if these are far from mineral processing plants.