Telescope Innovations Corp. announced it has filed a provisional patent application (63/606,069) on a disruptive new technique to purify lithium carbonate, a critical mineral building block for lithium ion battery production and particularly for low-cost LFP battery chemistries. This is Telescope's second application related to processing battery raw materials, the first of which provides a low-temperature method for generating lithium sulfide.

The current provisional application describes a single-step process that produces battery-grade, >99.9% lithium carbonate from crude material of 20-95% purity. This technology can dramatically reduce the requirement for pre-processing of crude lithium brine feeds, which conventionally accounts for up to 80% of refinement costs.