SLB Says Lithium Breakthrough Brings Full-Scale Plant Closer to Reality

SLB, the world’s biggest oilfield services provider, said it achieved results at a lithium project that prove it can some day produce the battery metal at a commercial scale with less impact on the environment.

In what it called “technical milestones,” SLB recovered 96% of the lithium from brine at a Nevada demonstration plant that’s about one-tenth the size of a commercial facility. The proprietary technology that involves so-called direct lithium extraction can produce the metal 500 times faster using a smaller area than more conventional recovery methods that rely on evaporation, the Houston-based company said Tuesday in a statement.