I've heard a lot about the difficulty in processing lithium into "battery grade" metal. Is there merit to this claim? If so, what's so hard about it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Environmental_issues :
> Environmental issues
> The manufacturing processes of lithium, including the solvent and mining waste, presents significant environmental and health hazards.[134][135][136] Lithium extraction can be fatal to aquatic life due to water pollution.[137] It is known to cause surface water contamination, drinking water contamination, respiratory problems, ecosystem degradation and landscape damage.[134] It also leads to unsustainable water consumption in arid regions (1.9 million liters per ton of lithium).[134] Massive byproduct generation of lithium extraction also presents unsolved problems, such as large amounts of magnesium and lime waste.[138]
> In the United States, there is active competition between environmentally catastrophic open-pit mining, mountaintop removal mining and less damaging brine extraction mining in an effort to drastically expand domestic lithium mining capacity.[139] Environmental concerns include wildlife habitat degradation, potable water pollution including arsenic and antimony contamination, unsustainable water table reduction, and massive mining waste, including radioactive uranium byproduct and sulfuric acid discharge.
Also from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Precautions :
> Lithium metal is corrosive and requires special handling to avoid skin contact. Breathing lithium dust or lithium compounds (which are often alkaline) initially irritate the nose and throat, while higher exposure can cause a buildup of fluid in the lungs, leading to pulmonary edema. The metal itself is a handling hazard because contact with moisture produces the caustic lithium hydroxide. Lithium is safely stored in non-reactive compounds such as naphtha.
I can only say that there are not very many companies that can do it and even those companies seem to struggle a fair bit bringing new supply to market. Many startup have for long time tried all kinds of ways of bringing new supply to market, and many have seen huge delay.
Lithium was (and still is) a tiny industry and these process are pretty immature. Most lithium never needed to be as high grade as is required now.
Every company seems to have a lot of its own secret sauce. The people that are really knowledge about the subject are very thinly distributed and given the growth of the industry I would assume there are very few veterans.
You can just go out get a bunch of veterans that have done it many times before, buy some standard equipment and get going.
Somebody in the comments here was involved in setting up such a project, so that person have some more insight.