Kings Mountain: All the Elements of a Lithium Ecosystem

Sept. 16, 2024

Less than an hour’s drive from Charlotte, North Carolina, lies Kings Mountain, a city that straddles a mineral-rich area that has played host to miners and prospectors since gold was discovered there in the 1800s. Kings Mountain is also home to one of the most sophisticated sites for advanced lithium material development. 

Albemarle has owned what is now a 1,200-acre site in Kings Mountain for nearly a decade, and we’re continuing to invest in the site as part of our long-term mine-to-market strategy. Today, it houses one of our lithium conversion facilities and a state-of-the-art research and development center. It’s also the home of a former lithium mine that Albemarle may redevelop by resuming mining operations.  

“Because of what we do at Kings Mountain, we’re able to tell the entire lifecycle story of lithium, from the natural spodumene deposits to how we convert it into raw materials, how those materials impact the performance of batteries, and ultimately, how that lithium can be recycled back into raw materials,” says Job Rijssenbeek, vice president of lithium research and development at Albemarle. “It’s not often you can go to one place and see that whole cycle represented.” 

Take a look at the site’s history, its present and its future. 

The first Kings Mountain mining operations began in 1834, after gold was discovered in the area. The Kings Mountain Gold Mine operated intermittently until the early 1900s. Gold wasn’t the only element in the region. 

In 1880, prospectors found tin, and there were attempts to extract cassiterite, or oxidized tin, from what became known as the Carolina Tin Belt. But these operations never achieved large- scale production, despite decades of trying.  

A turning point came in 1935, when L.M. Williams found large spodumene deposits, which are a key source of lithium. What is now known as North Carolina’s Tin-Spodumene Belt is one of the largest known spodumene resources in North America. It’s no surprise, then, that lithium extraction has been the focus of the Kings Mountain site ever since Williams’ discovery.  

Kings Mountain lithium production ebbed and flowed during the following decades as appetite for military, industrial, agricultural and other applications came and went. Production peaked in the 1950s, but lithium demand fell over the subsequent decades, and mining ceased at the site in the early 1990s.

Seeing increasing lithium demand from battery-powered handheld devices and electric vehicles, Albemarle purchased the Kings Mountain site from Rockwood Holdings in 2015. Kings Mountain offers great potential for the future of our energy storage business. 

A lithium conversion facility and a fully equipped technology center operate at the site now. 

The lithium conversion facility processes lithium carbonate from our Silver Peak, Nevada, and La Negra, Chile, extraction facilities. Each year, it produces about 5,000 metric tons of lithium compounds, including lithium hydroxide, battery-grade lithium metal and lithium alloy powders, that are used to manufacture several everyday products.

Our technology center, which opened in 2012, pioneers new and better ways to move, power, protect and connect, with a focus on lithium and battery technologies. As one of our main research and development facilities, it offers a wide range of labs and spaces dedicated to creating new lithium-based products and processes. We have continued to invest in this facility to enhance our technology leadership and drive customer relationships. 

Since 2021, our Battery Materials Innovation Center has served as a world-class battery materials synthesis and testing facility. It includes battery cell fabrication and testing facilities, which help us accelerate material development while understanding and anticipating application challenges that our customers may face. 

The Lithium Process Innovation Center opened in March. It’s where our technical teams expect to develop new lithium process technologies – from building a fundamental understanding of lithium extraction, purification and concentration technologies to developing commercial processes for producing high-purity lithium chloride.  

Our Process Development Dry Room, which also opened in March, allows us to scale up processes to make and commercialize the next generation of lithium metal anode products. This is expected to advance our capabilities to meet ever-growing demand for energy storage solutions, particularly for electric vehicles. 

The Albemarle Lithium Innovation Center of Excellence is at the heart of our technology center. It includes meeting and educational spaces that facilitate knowledge sharing, training and internal and external cross-functional collaboration. We also have an R&D, process and product showcase that demonstrates our existing capabilities and our focus on innovation. 

“Our team is very early in the innovation cycle, meaning that we work on materials discovery and invention on a small scale in the lab. Over the past few years, we’ve built out our ability to scale out what we do,” says Rijssenbeek. “In particular, the LPIC and PDDR facilities give us a bridge between the lab and a full-scale plant. We can now reproduce large-scale unit operations in a controlled way so that we can optimize them and understand things like energy use, water use and sustainability.” 

Long-term plans at Kings Mountain include a proposal to resume mining operations. Two grants from the US Department of Defense and the US Department of Energy are contributing to our investments in the site.  

We’re in the planning stages, which include conducting feasibility studies, gathering project permits, engaging with the local community, building key local and national relationships and assessing potential environmental and social impacts of the project. As an important step toward dewatering and reopening the mine, we’ve built a temporary water treatment plant that is expected to clean and filter the mine pit’s accumulated rainwater before pumping it to Kings Creek for discharge. 

As we move forward, we plan to align with the standard set by the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA). The IRMA Standard for Responsible Mining is a comprehensive and rigorous set of expectations that independent auditors use to assess mining operators’ practices to reduce adverse environmental and social impacts, create benefits for local communities, and increase transparency and accountability. 

“Increasingly, our customers are not just expecting our lithium materials to offer a certain level of performance, but also a certain level of sustainability and environmental performance,” says Rijssenbeek. “Standards like IRMA allow us to measure, and then communicate and showcase how we do that.” 

Learn more about our Kings Mountain site.