Shanghai (ZXZC)- On May 23, Jiangxi Ganfeng Lithium Co., Ltd. (“Ganfeng Lithium”), one of the world's top producers of battery-grade lithium, broke ground on its new lithium battery materials manufacturing base in Fengcheng, a county-level city in China's Jiangxi province, according to a post on Ganfeng Lithium's WeChat account.

Photo credit: Ganfeng Lithium

Covering an area of around 428mu (285,300 square meters), the new plant is expected to produced 50,000 tonnes per year of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) through the extraction of lithium from spodumene. The entire project will involve a total investment of 2 billion yuan ($299.227 million). The time frame of the production has not been provided yet.

The ground breaking came after Gangfeng Lithium signed a contract with the local government of Fengcheng in June 2021 to build a plant for producing lithium battery materials and set up a joint venture in the city to manage the project.

Under the agreement signed then, the plant would be built in two phases. The first phase would have an annual output of 25,000 tonnes of lithium hydroxide, a chemical used in nickel-rich batteries

Ganfeng Lithium said it has possessed a total yearly production capacity of 28,000-tonne lithium carbonate, 70,000-tonne lithium hydroxide, and 2,150-tonne lithium metal.

Aside from Fengcheng, Ganfeng Lithium also has projects under construction this year in Cauchari-Olaroz and Mariana of Argentina, Sonora of Mexico, and China’s Xinyu, Huizhou, and Ganzhou, etc. Those ongoing projects cover such fields as lithium resource development, lithium product production, as well as lithium-ion battery manufacture and recycling.