Summit Nanotech Corporation has launched operations at its new Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) demonstration plant in Santiago, Chile. The facility is designed to provide rapid, commercial-grade validation for lithium developers who need to accelerate project schedules and reduce technical risk before making major capital investments.
Building on a successful field deployment in Northern Chile in 2025, the Santiago plant is engineered to replicate site-specific brine compositions and operational stressors. This approach gives developers early visibility into the performance, efficiency and scalability of Summit’s denaLi™ DLE technology under realistic conditions. The modular design can be tailored to different brine sources, allowing asset owners in the region to assess viability without the cost and delay of a full-scale pilot.
According to Paul Barbaro, Summit’s general manager in Chile, the demonstration plant “surpasses anything our customers have seen elsewhere” by offering customized test plans that reflect each resource’s unique characteristics. Summit is now accepting brine samples from global projects and has already scheduled testing programs with two mining companies operating in the Lithium Triangle.
The Santiago operation complements Summit’s existing pilot facility in Denver, Colorado, which serves North American customers. Both sites produce the detailed datasets required for commercial design, including performance metrics, mass and energy balances, process definitions, equipment lists, indicative plant layouts and CapEx/OpEx estimates. These deliverables support projects targeting more than 5,000 tonnes per year of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE).
“Developers need certainty before committing hundreds of millions of dollars to large-scale plants,” said Joe Arencibia, Summit’s president and COO. “Our system delivers that certainty in a quarter of the time and at a significantly lower cost.” By providing clear technical and economic data early in the project lifecycle, Summit’s centralized testing approach helps de-risk decisions and strengthen the engineering basis for commercial DLE lithium production.
Source: PR Newswire
