Sunresin-Minmetal’s lithium carbonate project passes project acceptance

Recently, the performance acceptance of the transformation and expansion project of the Minmetals Salt Lake’s 4,000 t/a lithium carbonate production line implemented by Sunresin has been successfully completed, marking the successful conclusion of this benchmark project of Lithium Extraction from salt lake brine.

The construction of this project started in late November 2021 and has gone through a number of challenging conditions such as the Covid lockdown and logistics challenges caused by the pandemic. Since the beginning of the project, Sunresin has mobilized a highly dedicated, customer-oriented and solution-driven team to ensure the smooth operation of the project and timely implementation and production on site.

During the construction of the project, Sunresin has continuously improved, optimized and upgraded the system thanks to its long-term technical expertise and based on the actual on-site conditions.

During the assessment period, all the indicators of the system have outperformed the design values. The single-line production capacity of this project is 4000t/a, which is currently the largest single-line production capacity of Minmetals in lithium extraction from salt lakes. 

Sunresin’s Simulated Moving Bed (SMB) system breaks through the limitations of factors such as the number of equipment and pipeline size, and reflects the flexibility and stability of the valve array mode in the application of lithium adsorption and extraction. The smooth implementation of this project further reflects the unique advantages of the adsorption method of the lithium extraction technology independently developed by Sunresin.

In 2019, Sunresin provided Minmetals with a 1,000-ton adsorption section unit for the original 10,000-ton membrane-process lithium carbonate production line, followed by the successive provisions of boron removal, magnesium removal and other technical product services. At present, the 1000t/a production line has been transformed and has reached 2000t/a lithium carbonate production capacity after the process optimization.

Based on the high efficiency and technological advancement of the 1,000-ton transformation project, Sunresin went on to supply a 4,000 t/a adsorption unit for transformation and expansion in 2021. This adsorption unit drew on the previous experience, adopted a single set of 4,000 tons of adsorption unit, and used the "one-key switching" mode between old and original brine for the first time to achieve improvements in both quality indicators and economic benefits.

Sunresin is a leading enterprise and the first listed company in the adsorption and separation industry. In the field of hydrometallurgy, strongly represented over the recent years by the extraction of lithium from salt lakes, Sunresin possesses over 10 related technical patents, adsorbents with completely independent intellectual property rights and a fully automatic Simulated Moving Bed (SMB) system, forming a unique whole-line adsorption technology for lithium extraction from salt lakes.

So far, Sunresin has built or is in the process of building 9 industrialized adsorption units and whole lines, with an annual production capacity of about 73,000 tons of lithium related products.