PARIS (Reuters) – Imerys unveiled its second lithium-related project on Thursday, with a plan to extract the resource in the United Kingdom that should see the company become Europe’s largest producer of the in-demand battery metal. electric vehicles.

The title of the French group of industrial minerals and metals gained 4.8% at 10:10 GMT Thursday after this announcement.

Imerys aims to produce around 20,000 tons of lithium carbonate equivalent by the end of the decade in its mining area in Cornwall, in the south-west of England, in partnership with British Lithium.

That would be enough to power some 500,000 electric vehicles with batteries, or two-thirds of estimated UK demand by 2030.

The project is expected to cost “hundreds of millions” of euros in investment, Imerys chief executive Alessandro Dazza said in a call with reporters, adding it was too early to give specific figures.

The project is not as large as the extraction planned by Imerys at Beauvoir, in the Allier, where the company is aiming for a production of around 34,000 tonnes thanks to an investment of one billion euros. According to the leader of the group, the British site offers the advantage of being an open pit mine with a processing facility nearby.

Production could potentially start around the same time as that in France, at the end of 2028, thus benefiting from the synergies between the two projects, Imerys said.

The French company announces that it has acquired an 80% stake in the partnership with British Lithium and specifies that it will provide “its lithium mineral resources, its land and its infrastructure” while its British partner will provide a technological, logistical and human contribution.

(Report Gus Trompiz, with contributions from Clara Denina in London and Benoit Van Overstraeten in Paris; Victor Goury-Laffont, edited by Kate Entringer)

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