JV partner Lithium Australia in Metals News.LIT aim to control the greatest lithium resource base of any entity worldwide. Good to see Alix feature in their plans:
https://www.metalsnews.com/Metals+News/MetalsNews/Dr.+Allen+Alper/FEATURED1076029/Lithium+Australia+(ASX+LIT)+Revolutionizes+Lithium+Recovery+with+New+Process+Currently+Working+in+Europe+and+Australi.htm
By Dr. Allen Alper on 1/27/2016 
Adrian Griffin, Managing Director of Lithium Australia (ASX: LIT) updated readers of Metals News on the progress that his company has made in working on their lithium projects.
Griffin said, “I started life in mining with some big companies like BHP. In the 1980s, I got involved with some smaller companies during the gold boom. I’ve been with a wide range of companies and a wide range of commodities. I’m one of the few people in the world who has worked on every continent including Antarctica. I’ve covered everything from alumina to zirconia.”
Currently, he is working on lithium in Australia, Europe and Mexico. Said Griffin, “I became involved with the company about five years ago where we were assessing iron ore deposits in South Africa. South Africa has experienced some fairly difficult political times and wasn’t a favored destination for investment. We decided to go to a different area and focused on gold-copper projects in Chile. We discovered that it would take far too much money to explore. We decided that we needed to look for something else.”
That something else turned out to be lithium initially in his own back yard. Griffin said, “I have had an interest in recovering lithium from micas for many years. It came from a train ride in Perth. The guy I was talking to said that he was working on lithium recovery techniques from mica, the most abundant lithium mineral. I decided that if this guy was successful, there would be material for everyone all around the world. At that time, during the mid-80’s, there wasn’t a lot of reason to resolve the issue, but I have been casually looking at mines with a lithium scope ever since.”
Griffin’s opportunity to get involved in lithium came just a few years ago. He said, “About six years ago, I got involved in a company called Potash West. I put together a team to crack the chemistry and to get the potassium out of the mica. We chose a hydrometallurgical process to do that. There has been 100 years of research on glauconite, our targeted potassium mica, but no-one had managed to commercialize the process. We took a different route and that route was successful. Having developed the technology to recover potassium from mica, it became obvious that we could recover other metals from mica, including lithium.”
Griffin used similar methods to resolve the lithium problem. He said, “We used the same development team to look at lithium. At that time, Lithium Australia, fresh out of the copper and gold in Chile, was out of money and didn’t quite know how to tackle it. It was an unprecedented opportunity, but we just didn’t have enough money to do it, but it was so compelling we had to give it a shot. We brought a company in to help us with the technology. They gave us an exclusive license for Western Australia to use the technology. We set about doing the work and found that based on our research with mica, we could do it remarkably easily. Armed with that information, I started looking at deposits on a global basis. Lithium mica deposits were pretty common in Western Australia. They weren’t explored because there was no viable way to recover the lithium from them”
Since their discovery, the company has gone on to work on projects on three continents. Said Griffin, “In Western Australia we have a deal with Pilbara Minerals, to assess the viability of lithium micas on their Pilgangoora project. We are working with Canadian listed Alix Resources in Mexico and also have a non-binding deal on the giant Cinovec deposit in the Czech Republic. Cinovec is an historic tin/tungsten producer, in an altered granite that contains abundant lithium mica. Due to a lack of viable lithium processing options, Cinovec remained unevaluated as a lithium deposit until we became involved. Within three months in 2014, we had reevaluated the lithium potential and elevated that to the status of the fourth largest lithium deposit in the world. It is very likely to be elevated to the largest with a bit more in-fill drilling. Potentially that will double in size to make it a billion tonne resource.”
We have applied out technology to recover lithium, as lithium carbonate, from three deposits in Europe and a handful in Australia. We have access to a mini-plant in Australia, capable of processing on a continuous basis. 
During 2016, the company has plans to expand. Griffin said, “The next step will be to build a pilot plant and run it on a continuous basis. We’d like to do that by June of this year.
In a significant recent development, we have taken the rock from Lepidolite Hill and converted it to lithium carbonate and further processed that material to produce much more valuable lithium hydroxide. If you look at the plants that people run to do that, they generally suffer a large loss of lithium in conversion. We believe we can do it with little lithium loss and at an operating cost marginally greater than the lower value lithium carbonate. This is a great value-added step that will potentially generate final product at a cost far lower than competitors. For the next 12 months, we will be running more tests using large scale commercial equipment. I would like to be in a position by the end of 2016 to commit to the construction of a commercial demonstration plant.” Griffin said that he is also working on improved lithium extraction processes to reduce recovery costs from spodumene which contains a higher percentage of lithium than the lithium micas. Cracking that process may result in a paradigm cost shift for producing lithium chemicals from the more conventional hard rock lithium resources..