The Integrated Plant
Sydney, Australia
Scaling from pilot to production: a 20 tpa refinery.
Government-backed
~$10M AUD
federal grant awarded
Stage
Delivery
procurement underway
Target completion
H1 2027
battery-grade lithium carbonate
Proving ground
Novalith SION™
first full deployment
The plant
Proving the plant, not the chemistry
Where the Pilot Plant proved the chemistry, the 20 tpa Refinery proves the plant. The Pilot Plant answered the chemistry question: spodumene in, battery-grade lithium carbonate out, with consistent yields and excellent quality. What it could not answer is whether the same process holds together as a plant: fully integrated, at scale, on equipment that replicates the commercial flowsheet.
That is what the 20 tpa Refinery will demonstrate: the same process steps as the pilot line, built as a plant rather than a rig, producing battery-grade lithium carbonate at a scale where recovery, loop efficiency, utilities, and uptime mean something to the commercial design.
Benefits
De-risking
Recoveries, reagent consumption, and recycle loops at a scale which de-risks the path forward.
Fully integrated
The fully integrated refinery will yield millions of data points which will allow for faster process optimization and feed valuable insights into our digital twin.
Operator expertise
Leveraging our in-house optimization tools to prove control strategies, train operators, and shorten commissioning, the refinery shifts the timeline for operators to master the plant.
SION™ Proven
The 20 TPA refinery is the first deployment of SION™: a digital twin of the line that runs alongside it, carrying the same process model the design was built on.
It means the plant is optimized from the day it starts rather than instrumented after the fact. Every campaign feeds the model, and the model informs how the next one is run. Smarter engineering, applied to a plant small enough to learn on and shaped like the one that comes after it.
What SION™ measures here is what the commercial design inherits: recovery, loop efficiency, utilities, and uptime, tracked across every run rather than reconstructed from a campaign report.
