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A mining company from Cornwall said it has become the first in the UK to produce lithium hydroxide monohydrate (LHM).

LHM is a key element of lithium-ion batteries and found in electric vehicles, grid scale battery storage and batteries in consumer electronics.

Cornish Lithium has repurposed a former china clay quarry and used patented low-carbon processing technology to produce LHM extracted from Cornish granite.

Founder and executive chairman Jeremy Wrathall said it was an important day for his company and the UK.

“We can test every single stage of it on an industrial scale, that’s why it is such an important day for us,” he said.

“Our faith in investing £10m in this project has been vindicated.”

Experts said it was a major step forward for Cornwall, but would also help secure a domestic supply of a key material for UK industry.

James McFarlane, a technical mining consultant, said: “The company was only founded in 2016 and I believe only started really looking at the hard rock potential in St Austell, in 2019.

“So to get from there to producing LHM domestically from their own deposit, is a massive milestone and one that really needs to be applauded for the amount of hard work that has gone into it.”

Cornish Lithium said it planned to build a full-size lithium processing and refining plant with an annual capacity of up to 10,000 tonnes.

It could be in full-scale production in 2029, potentially creating 300 jobs and injecting £800m into the UK economy, it said.

A group of creditors to bankrupt auto-dealership lender PrimaLend cited “grave concerns” over its Chapter 11 filing, especially the exclusion from the process of what they called its “most distressed” entity.

The ad hoc group of holders of $75 million of bonds issued by PrimaLend’s main holding company, which stopped paying interest on the debt several months ago, said the move to leave out the entity was designed to reduce the influence of unsecured creditors like them. It also objected to PrimaLend’s request for court approval to access bankruptcy financing, which sought to force a guaranty and legal releases by the entity, PCAP Holdings.