PERTH (miningweekly.com) – ASX-listed Vulcan Energy Resources has marked an important development milestone at its Zero Carbon lithium project, in Germany, with the City Council of Landau voting to support geothermal energy production.

The company said that the City Council of Landau, which covers part of Vulcan’s geothermal production licence at Insheim, as well as the Landu Sud production licence where Vulcan has a brine offtake agreement with the operator, had voted not only to support geothermal energy production in the area, but also to take a positive stance towards the extraction of lithium from geothermal brine.

“We welcome the City of Landau’s positive decision as an important step to support renewable, geothermal energy and lithium extraction. The Council has recognised that, in addition to being a source of renewable baseload heat, deep geothermal energy can also be used to extract lithium for electric vehicle battery production with a zero-carbon, zero fossil fuel footprint of production,” said Vulcan MD Dr Francis Wedin.

“This marks an important step forward along the journey of the development of our dual geothermal energy and Zero Carbon lithium business, which is widely recognised as vital not just to energy and critical raw materials supply security in Europe, but also to meeting Germany’s climate goals.

“In addition, we note that we have further expanded our licence footprint in the Upper Rhine Valley Brine Field, which adds to our growing pipeline of projects expanding out from our producing core of the field. In the coming weeks, we hope to provide further updates on our definitive feasibility study, pilot and demo plant, Upper Rhine Valley Brine Field resource modelling, and closer strategic integration within the battery and electric vehicle supply chain.”

Vulcan’s Zero Carbon lithium project aims to produce both renewable geothermal energy, and lithium hydroxide, from the same deep brine source.