Prairie Lithium

Photo courtesy Prairie Lithium

Prairie Lithium rig by Panther Drilling

The organization

Prairie Lithium is a lithium resource and technology developer working in the Williston Basin in southeast Saskatchewan. It has come a long way in the five years since Zach Maurer, Prairie Lithium’s CEO and Geoscientist-in-training, first started researching lithium to know how to find it and extract it in Saskatchewan.

Maurer explained how he came to develop his interest, ability and experience in lithium. Southeast Saskatchewan is known for its oil and gas industry, which Maurer worked in during his high school and university years. After graduating high school, he moved to Calgary to get a geophysics diploma from SAIT in 2012.  He returned to Saskatchewan and obtained a geology degree from the University of Regina, but had to reconsider his path in oil and gas when the price of oil dropped substantially in late 2014 and throughout 2015.

“There were massive layoffs in downtown Calgary so it was pretty obvious to me at that time that I was going to have to diversify my skillset for any form of job security in the future.”

Upon graduating university, he found employment as an environmental consultant, among those jobs were cleaning up oil and gas sites that were no longer producing. But his real interest was in resource exploration. He was intrigued with trying to understand what resources were going to be needed in the future. The why, where and how they were mined drove him to research.

“Lithium is a resource that kept topping the list and was associated with this large potential demand in batteries and electric vehicles,” said Maurer, who received his geology degree in 2016.

Maurer knew lithium was being mined in South America. He knew some had sampled saltwater brines for lithium in Alberta. He wondered what had been done around the resource in Saskatchewan.

“There have been a couple high-level studies done, but nobody had ever really focused on trying to understand the commercial opportunity of lithium in Saskatchewan, which ultimately led back to no one really trying to understand the origin or evolution of the resource to date,” said Maurer.

In early 2017, Maurer proposed a Master’s study to the University of Regina aimed at understanding the origin and the evolution of lithium in the subsurface brines in Saskatchewan. While still working full time as an environmental consultant, he studied in the evenings and on the weekends.

“Towards the end of 2018, I really started to crack the code on the hydrochemistry and hydrogeology of the subsurface, and really started to understand why the lithium is concentrated in certain formations in certain areas and not concentrated in certain formations in other areas as it pertains to Saskatchewan,” said Maurer.

By 2019, he was ready to start a business. He incorporated the company now known as Prairie Lithium, issued himself 100 shares for $100 and went to work. Bringing Dr. Ian Ireland on board, Prairie Lithium’s current chief technology officer, was an important move.

“He was a natural fit as I had an understanding of the resource and the subsurface and he had a really in-depth understanding of the surficial chemical process that was going to be required to process all this brine” said Maurer.

The third partner brought into the business was Isobrine Solutions, an Alberta-based oil and gas service company specializing in geochemical fingerprinting of co-produced water and natural gas samples for baseline studies, hydraulic fracture evaluation, reserve allocation and out-of-zone fluid identification. Those at the company have extensive experience and a large geochemical database covering much of the Williston Basin.

“We spent much of 2019 building that foundation, using a small amount of capital to purchase some very small properties and to start looking at these different direct lithium-extraction technologies that were being developed in the world,” said Maurer.

“2020 is when we really hit the gas on developing our direct lithium-extraction technology,” said Maurer.

Early in the year, they were working with test tubes and beakers pulling lithium out of 500 millilitres of brine a day. Through the year, they scaled up so that in the fall, they had a proof-of-concept unit in the field that peaked at  50,000 litres of brine through put per day. “We scaled our process 100,000X in eight months, during a global pandemic, this is unheard of.”

Through this scaling up, they like everyone else dealt with the pandemic.

“When COVID hit, there was zero stability to know where the money was going to come from and how we were going to fund this and  get it off the ground.”

“So, we just kept our heads down, worked hard and put forth good science, and the science prevailed and attracted investment.”

Achievement #1

A lot was done by the company in 2021, but it was the third-party verification of their Prairie Lithium Ion Exchange (Plix) technology that was vital.

“It’s the most important step when developing a resource project is making sure that everything’s third-party verified,” said Maurer.

Prairie Lithium is extracting lithium in their own way.  Maurer explains that others in the world have mined lithium and extracted it in one of two ways. The first is hard-rock strip mining. The lithium is identified in the rock, which is drilled to explore it. When the mine is ready to go into production, the rock is blasted to reach the lithium and convert it into a battery quality lithium chemical.

The second, which is done in South America, uses evaporation pond processing. Like the lithium being mined by Prairie Lithium, they drill to bring the brine to the surface. It goes into massive ponds in a desert area. The brine evaporates over 18 to 24 months, so the salts precipitate out and a concentrated lithium solution is left. This solution can be converted into a battery-quality lithium chemical.

What Prairie Lithium does is different. It developed direct lithium extraction technology which involves bringing the brine to surface. Instead of letting the brine evaporate, the technology selectively separates the lithium ion from other impurities in the brine  —  in minutes. The brine is then returned underground.

“The advantage is a much smaller surficial environmental footprint, reduced freshwater intensity, reduced waste generation and it’s more efficient,” said Maurer.

In May, Prairie Lithium announced its core Plix technology was third-party verified by Coanda Research & Development at lab scale to achieve an average of 99.7 per cent lithium extraction from brine produced in Saskatchewan over a series of tests.

That’s not all that was accomplished in 2021.

“Prairie Lithium is really a two-headed beast in terms of our technology development and then our resource development,” said Maurer.

“In 2020 we developed this really great patent-pending extraction process so that coming into 2021 we could really focus on our resource acquisition.”

Achievement #2

Bringing the brine to the surface so their technology and process could extract it required Prairie Lithium to drill what is believed to be the first lithium brine well in Canada. In advance of that, the company increased its land holdings to over 362,000 acres across southeast Saskatchewan.

“Much of 2021 was focused on acquiring the land we needed to build out the project, do our inferred resource assessment on the property we purchased and then ultimately go out and de-risk the resource,” said Maurer.

That de-risking of the resource led to the drilling program in the fall. On Sept. 21, drilling for the Discovery #1 lithium well near Torquay in southeast Saskatchewan began and was completed four days later.

“Doing that initial inferred resource assessment with historic data was fine to set the stage to pick the location of our first well,” said Maurer.

“The goal of that program was to prove out our resource theories,  because nobody has ever drilled a well to measure lithium concentrations in this formation, in this area before. This well was required to connect the dots in the subsurface. It was a high-risk wildcat well.

“If it hit, it was going to prove out a lot of things of what we think we know is happening in the subsurface in terms of lithium and brine in Saskatchewan.”

The company announced when the well was completed that early results showed it produced some of the highest known lithium brine concentrations in Canada.

“I guess I could say all of our resource hypotheses to date have been correct and we encountered what we consider a fairly high-quality lithium brine resource in Canada.”

In addition to that first well, to correlate the resource across its property, Prairie Lithium conducted a re-entry on another well in the area. The company will continue to delineate the lithium across its land base through additional drilling and re-entry opportunities.

In 2021, Prairie Lithium finished assembling its testing and laboratory facility in Emerald Park, Sask.

The team

Establishing and growing the company requires Prairie Lithium to employ many types of engineers.

“Hydrogeology is number one. There’s not a lot of hydrogeologists that specialize in deep Williston Basin brines,” said Maurer.

“Number two is the hydrochemistry, because you need to understand how the hydrogeology and hydrochemistry affect one another in the basin. To properly understand the resource you need to understand why the brines are changing chemical compositions as a result of the hydrogeology.

“It’s a pretty niche skillset because everyone in the past has always been focused on oil or gas, potash or some other resource.

Petroleum engineers are necessary to plan the drilling. Chemical, electrical, structural, mechanical and environmental engineers will also be needed.

In addition to Maurer, those APEGS members who are part of the team are:

Mark Caplan, P.Geo. – Resource Manager

Chelsey Hillier, P.Geo. – Geoscience Manager

Jordan Alberton, P. Eng. – IMS Manager

Sakib Ahmed, Engineer-In-Training – Junior Process Development Specialist

Don Bender, P.Eng. – Engineering Manager