LITHIUM PROCESSING AND PRODUCTION: A Practitioner's Handbook

Lithium Processing and Production: A Practitioner’s Handbook is a practical engineering guide to the complete lithium value chain — from orebody and mineral concentrate through conversion, purification, and final battery-grade product.

Written for mineral process engineers, metallurgists, project developers, plant operators, consultants, and students, the book treats lithium production as an integrated processing problem rather than a collection of isolated unit operations. Its emphasis is on how geology, mineralogy, comminution, beneficiation, conversion chemistry, purification, product quality, economics, and project risk interact to determine whether a lithium project will succeed.

The handbook is built around hard-rock spodumene and petalite processing, while also covering brines, direct lithium extraction, clay-hosted resources, and battery recycling. A detailed case study follows a hypothetical African lithium operation from ROM ore through crushing, sorting, DMS, flotation, magnetic cleaning, calcination, sulphuric-acid baking, leaching, impurity removal, precipitation, crystallisation, and production of battery-grade lithium carbonate, with a lithium hydroxide variant.

Readers will find practical guidance on:

• Lithium mineralogy, deportment, sampling, and geometallurgy
• Crushing, grinding, classification, and sensor-based ore sorting
• Dense-medium separation, magnetic separation, and flotation
• Spodumene calcination and sulphuric-acid conversion
• Water leaching and lithium recovery
• Iron, aluminium, magnesium, calcium, boron, and other impurity removal
• Ion-exchange polishing and battery-grade quality control
• Lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide production
• Brines, DLE, clay-hosted lithium, and recycling routes
• Mass balances, reagent stoichiometry, water and energy balances
• Process control, materials of construction, safety, and commissioning
• Tailings, residues, environmental performance, and project economics
• Lithium markets, value-chain decisions, and African downstream development

The book also includes worked examples, reference tables, design criteria, flowsheet-selection guidance, analytical methods, materials-of-construction guidance, testwork templates, product specifications, and a consolidated project design checklist.

A central theme throughout is that the ore selects the flowsheet. Different lithium minerals respond differently to physical concentration and chemical conversion, and successful plant design begins with understanding mineralogy, liberation, impurities, and variability rather than simply applying a standard lithium process.

Part of the Mineral Process Engineering Series, this handbook is intended to be used at the desk, in the design office, during testwork programmes, and alongside real projects. It combines practical engineering judgement with worked calculations and integrated flowsheets to help readers understand not only how lithium is processed, but how to design a plant capable of producing an in-specification product at a competitive cost.