RE:RE:88% buy.It should be on site by now.
POSCO held an event on August 1 at the Pohang Plant of POSCO PLANTEC to celebrate the transfer of a massive demo plant facility.
The facility, which features POSCO`s pioneering lithium extraction technology, will sail for 5 weeks to a port in Chile, after which it will travel by land for a week through the Andes Mountains, finally arriving at the Cauchari salt lake located in Jujuy, northwest of Argentina.
Once the massive 200-ton lithium carbonate demo plant is completed at the end of November, it will commence normal operation by the end of December, thereby rounding off the final-stage test of the direct lithium extraction technology. POSCO was the first in the world to develop the high efficiency extraction technology of lithium brine back in 2010, and operated the first 2-ton pilot plant in 2011. The company succeeded in demonstrating lithium extraction in 2013 after building the lithium carbonate pilot plant with an annual capacity of 20 tons in Chile.
The recovery rate of lithium has also increased from 20% to 80%, which proves its outstanding economic feasibility.
Tesla, an American electric car company, invested $5 billion in building a secondary cell plant in February and announced its goal to produce 500,000 electric cars a year. The expanding market for electric cars will lead to an upsurge in battery demand, which will result in the rapid growth of the market for lithium, the main material for batteries.
the entry barrier is extremely high for newcomers due to the restrictive policies implemented by governments in this region regarding brine development, not to mention technical limitations. Considering the entry barrier of the lithium market, POSCO`s lithium extraction technology, which is to be applied to mass production for the first time in the world, is expected to elicit considerable investor interest, given the difficulties faced in business progress due to technical limitations. -
CEO Oh-joon Kwon has demonstrated a steely ambition since inauguration to secure an unchallenged position in the global market by continuously developing the lithium business as one of the company`s new growth engines.