Century Lithium Corp. (TSX-V:LCE, OTCQX:CYDVF) CEO Bill Willoughby talked with Proactive about new test results confirming the company’s potential to recover rare earth elements from its Nevada-based project.
Willoughby discussed successful bench-scale tests carried out on the primary leach solution from Century Lithium’s Angel Island lithium project.
These tests used different ion exchange media and showed that between 99.4% and 99.8% of both heavy and light rare earth elements were recoverable into resin, without disrupting lithium recovery.
Proactive: Welcome back inside our Proactive newsroom. And joining me now is Bill Willoughby. He is the CEO of Century Lithium. Bill, great to see you again. How are you?
Bill Willoughby: I'm good. Thanks for having me on.
Appreciate it. So we've talked a lot about what's going on at your Angel Island lithium project in Nevada. We’ve talked about your lithium being able to help produce a battery for a company. And now you've come out with something to really add more value to the project. Is that a great way to describe it?
That's a very good way to describe it. Yes. We've had some very successful test work that was done back in August, but we finally got the assay results back. So we're reporting that today, and it's all around rare earths.
Yeah, that's exciting. A lot of talk about rare earths around the world these days. So tell me a little bit about what these test results are telling you.
Well, what we did is we took some bench-scale tests on our primary leach solution. We ran that through some ion exchange media — tried a couple of different media — and it worked quite well. We were getting, out of the heavy and light rare earths, about 99.4% to 99.8% back into the resin. And we were leaving the lithium that was in solution. So all of that is excellent. It points to the idea that we have a process that works. It's compatible with what we do, and it could be a nice add-on. I don't think it's going to surpass our other by-product, which is sodium hydroxide, but it could be a good income generator and certainly helps within the framework of the U.S. critical minerals supply.
Obviously there's a lot of talk about critical minerals. You mentioned that extra revenue supply and about trying to get every nickel and dime out of what you're taking out of the ground. I think that’s a key part — that every step you're de-risking the project and adding more value to it as you go.
Yeah. Well, it's not like we're trying to squeeze everything out. Our primary focus is the lithium and making good quality lithium carbonate. Our process speaks very well to the fact that we can take our lithium claystone with fairly simple processes — leaching, filtration, direct lithium extraction — and then finally making a lithium carbonate product. We make a very good product, and it all centers around our core alkaline process. So we think that's a very good approach, and it fits well with this story today about an additional possible revenue stream from rare earths.
Does this also give you the ability to potentially take some of that revenue and put it into the main source of what you're trying to do? Does that help fund it as you go along?
We haven't gotten to the part of looking at funding around that, but it certainly helps with applications to the U.S. federal government — in discussions with the Department of Energy and Department of Defense, and so forth. So, yeah, it's a good side story. Our primary focus is still on lithium and making sure we do a good product from mine to finished product. But we also know we have supplemental income that will come from sodium hydroxide, and now potentially these rare earths. The real achievement today was: our process works. It works for rare earths. And we were able to implement it successfully at bench scale.
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