Li-FT eyes processing Yellowknife lithium into battery chemicalsOllie Williams·Updated:March 3, 2026Wednesday March 4, 2026 at 5:50am MTLi-FT's Francis MacDonald offers a piece of lithium-bearing spodumene to a resident at a Yellowknife public meeting in April 2024. Ollie Williams/Cabin Radio
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Li-FT, the company exploring for lithium east of Yellowknife, wants to do more than mine the metal – it wants to process it into a finished product for battery manufacturers, with a facility most likely in Alberta.
In a news release this week, Li-FT said it had begun a scoping study for a lithium carbonate converter that would take raw material from its Yellowknife Lithium Project and turn it into battery-grade lithium carbonate, a chemical used in the production of lithium-ion batteries.
The planned facility would produce 30,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year.
Li-FT executive chairman Anthony Tse told Cabin Radio the plan would see lithium concentrate from a future Yellowknife mine trucked to the South Slave and taken by rail to Alberta for chemical processing.
“The most obvious place” for a lithium carbonate converter is in the industrial heartland of Alberta, Tse said, because of the infrastructure needed to run a chemical processing facility, including access to natural gas and electricity.Advertisement.Advertisement.
Tse – who joined Li-FT last summer – said the lithium business should not be thought of as simply a mining operation, which is why the company is beginning to pursue processing, too.
“The real value add and the value capture of producing lithium is actually to go through to produce chemicals,” he said.
Asked what a 30,000-tonne-per-year facility might cost to build, Tse said similar projects in parts of Asia run to $250-$300 million but that in North America, the cost would likely be multiple times higher. “Obviously, we still need to go through the study work and the feasibility,” he said.
Chief sustainability officer April Hayward stressed the Yellowknife Lithium Project itself is still in “the really early stages,” never mind the possibility of an associated processing plant. (Li-FT remains in the exploration phase at its deposits along the Ingraham Trail northeast of Yellowknife.) Tse said the scoping study is being launched now so work on the converter does not lag behind work on an eventual mine.Advertisement.Advertisement.
He said the lithium market has improved since bottoming out last summer, asserting that prices had risen from US $7,000 per tonne to more than $20,000 per tonne, and noting that Li-FT was able to raise capital in December as a result.
Where previously Li-FT has talked of one finite window in which to launch an NWT mine before the moment passes and lithium from other parts of the world becomes more viable, Tse spoke instead of cycles.
He said the company is currently trying to capitalize while “sentiment is good and pricing is high,” and he voiced a rosier outlook for lithium’s future in the territory.
“Every time we go through these price cycles, the lows tend to correct to higher lows, and the highs tend to correct to higher highs,” he said.
“From a trajectory perspective, pricing is a lot higher than where things were in the previous cycle and the cycle before that.”
Hayward, who has represented Li-FT in the NWT for several years, said the project should be seen in the context of the territory’s economy as diamond mines wind down.
“We have to continue to look at what’s happening in the economy in the Northwest Territories with the sunsetting of the diamond mines,” Hayward said.
“It’s really important that we bring in some additional industry.”
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