Prairie Lithium: All’s well that ends (lithium) well

Lithium materials in various stages of extraction. Photo supplied by Government of Saskatchewan. Lithium is having a moment in Saskatchewan, and it doesn’t seem to be disappearing any time soon.

Prairie Lithium has drilled the first-ever targeted lithium well in Saskatchewan, according to Zach Maurer, president and CEO. The idea for the company was established in early 2017 when he was interested in what resources were needed in the future, where they came from, and how they are mined.

“One of the resources that kept topping the list was lithium associated with batteries and electric vehicles (EVs),” Maurer says. “At the time in 2017, batteries and EVs were still more ‘if’ than ‘when’; they weren’t as mainstream as they are today.”

Lithium piqued Maurer’s interest as a lot of it was coming from saltwater brines, something that Saskatchewan has plenty of as a by-product of oil and gas. Maurer asked himself if anyone had

Prairie Lithium’s dedicated lithium well being drilled near Torquay. Photo supplied by Prairie Lithium. In 2020, the company developed their own extraction technology that essentially eliminated the need for evaporation ponds, allowing them to pump brine and remove lithium so that they can return the brine back in the ground without any lithium.

sampled those brines. He then proposed a master study to the University of Regina to understand the origin and evolution of lithium. Working evenings and weekends outside of his day job throughout 2017 and 2018, Maurer began to understand the hydrochemistry happening in the subsurface and pinpointing why lithium was located in certain areas.

“That research led me to incorporating Prairie Lithium in 2019,” Maurer says.

Nowadays, Prairie Lithium is a lithium resource and technology developer situated in Williston Basin, Saskatchewan. Maurer describes the company as a two-headed monster with dual streams: technology and resource. In 2020, the company developed their own extraction technology that essentially eliminated the need for evaporation ponds, allowing them to pump brine and remove lithium so that they can return the brine back in the ground without any lithium. Currently, lithium can only be mined two ways: evaporation ponds and hard rock. This method of mining reduces that superficial environment of what is originally thought of lithium mines.

“Our process is identical to oil and gas, but we’ve eliminated the inefficiencies associated with conventional lithium mining, shrinking that environmental footprint by 95 per cent,” Maurer explains. “We also reduced the freshwater intensity of that process.”

“Once we had the process where we were comfortable with commercialization, we focused on resource acquisition and verifications in 2021,” Maurer says. Prairie Lithium then purchased land through a Crown mineral sale in spring 2021 to conduct their resource assessment. “We hired a drilling team to put together a program and went out to drill the well in September, and production and pump testing throughout October. What we saw from results were very encouraging.”

Prairie Lithium qualified for both the Saskatchewan Advantage Innovation Fund and Saskatchewan Petroleum Investment Incentive, and also recently signed an agreement with Saskatoonbased DEEP (Deep Earth Energy Production), which forms an area of mutual interest for lithium exploration. Maurer says they applied for the Advantage Innovation Fund right out of the gate in 2019 to develop their extraction technology. They were successful in the first and second rounds. The fund was solely dedicated to the technology development throughout 2020 and first half of 2021.

As for the Investment Incentive, a royalty-accredited incentive program, Prairie Lithium submitted their eligible expenditures to get 25 per cent of those expenditures back in the form of royalty credit. As a result, they ended up with credits to apply against future resource production.

“As a developing company in exploration stages, we don’t pay a royalty in production because we don’t have production, so we can sell credits at a discount to a company,” Maurer says.

Prairie Lithium’s goal for the next few years is to commercialize lithium extraction technology as the demand for batteries and EVs increase because the demand for lithium will increase as well.

“What we see is there are not enough mines to meet that demand, so we need to get this technology commercialized and go into production in the next five years,” Maurer says.

For more information, visit prairielithium.ca.