According to the US Government, the Salton Sea could produce up to 600'000 tons of Lithium per year, which at today's spot price would be worth $26 Billion a year.

For a Sea that's turning into a chemically polluted swamp, that's an unexpected twist of fate!

Especially when it doubles down to being a pretty green way to produce that lithium, as direct lithium extraction technologies would co-locate with geothermal energy production.

But wait: isn't that too good to be true? Aren't Berkshire Hattaway, Controlled Thermal Resources, and Energy Source Minerals struggling a bit to unlock that resource? Didn't Simbol Materials actually... die on that spot as a company in that endeavor?

Well, it seems like Salton Sea lithium projects are about to seriously accelerate, as Controlled Thermal Resources just announced a $1 billion contract with Aquatech International to build the Lithium Refinery the site will need to reach battery-grade products for their customers, Stellantis and General Motors. 

Let's cut through the fog and review this aspiring Salton Sea miracle!

More information:

Vulcan's Project in Germany: https://dww.show/vulcans-clever-strategy-to-take-off-its-zero-carbon-lithium-sell-it-years-ahead/

The mysterious company that may well work with Berkshire Hattaway at the Salton Sea (my pure speculation): https://dww.show/the-game-changing-company-with-60-patents-thats-disrupting-the-battery-industry/

▶️ Watch the video version of this episode on YouTube    

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with 🎙️ Cris Moreno - Deputy CEO at Vulcan Energy Resources 

💧 Vulcan aims to decarbonize the transition to electric mobility through its world-first Zero Carbon Lithium Projects for electric vehicle batteries and its renewable energy business.

What we covered:

🥇 How Vulcan aims to become the world's first integrated lithium chemicals company while also producing renewable energy... 

0️⃣ ... and how they do all of this with net zero greenhouse emissions and without using any fossil fuels in their process 

🔁 How Vulcan's Zero Carbon Lithium projects feature a 24'000 t/y first stage and what might be the next ones 

💰 How Vulcan leapfrogged its path by acquiring an existing geothermal power plant in Hinsheim, Germany 

👨‍🔬 How the company tested various Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) methodologies to end up developing a proprietary sorption process 

🇪🇺 How this sorption material belongs to the Dow / Dupont / FMC / Livent family, but with the added touch that it's made in Europe 

🌊 How Vulcan desorbs it with fresh water, and how water availability is one of the perks of producing in the Upper Rhine Valley 

🤑 How the company plans an 84% EBITDA on its Zero Carbon Lithium product, despite a forecasted lithium price way below the current spot 

🚗 How, to whom, and under which conditions Vulcan sold its Zero Carbon Lithium product to battery and car manufacturers years ahead of actually producing it 

🏗️ How 2023 shall be pivotal for Vulcan to transform from a development company into an actual production company 

📈 How the Company has €120 Million in its bank account... and actively looks to increase its financing in order to cover for the first phase of the project 

🫰 How the Upper Rhine Valley is Europe's largest lithium resource, and a globally relevant one and how CAPEX might be the only thing to slow it down to cover for the entirety of Europe's lithium needs 

🛢️ How DLE combined with geothermal energy production might be seen as a complex mining project... or as a very easy oil and gas one! 

📅 Kicking off production in 2025, producing renewable power & heat, next projects in the Upper Rhine Valley - and on the French side, building the right team to execute the project, kicking off the commercial scale in Q3 2023... and much more!

🔥 ... and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 🔥

🔗 Come say hi to Cris on LinkedIn 

🔗 Check Vulcan's website

➡️ Check out the entire article on How Vulcan plans to take off its Zero Carbon Lithium assets in the Upper Rhine Valley

➡️ Reach out to me: [email protected] 

More episodes in this Series:

1 - Why Water Technologies Matter in Lithium Mining (And Why You Should Buy Now!)

2 - The Shocking Requirements of Spodumene Processing (and other Lithium 101 stories)

3 - Standard Lithium's 10 Simple Secrets to DLE Success">Standard Lithium's 10 Simple Secrets to DLE Success (and how that rolls out in El Dorado)

4 - How 'Reverse ZLD' made the World's Largest Water Company a Lithium Refinery Expert">How 'Reverse ZLD' made the World's Largest Water Company a Lithium Refinery Expert 

5 - The Game-Changing Company with 60 Patents That's Disrupting the Battery Industry 

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Cris Moreno is Deputy CEO at Vulcan Energy Resources. Vulcan aims to decarbonize the transition to electric mobility through its world-first Zero Carbon Lithium™ Project for electric vehicle batteries and its renewable energy business.

This exploration of the Lithium World has taken me far from home. Canada, USA, Mexico, Australia, Argentina, Bolivia, UK... But one of the most exciting projects in this new wave actually happens to be a dozen kilometers away from where I cut my wastewater engineering teeth, and Vulcan, the project developer, just signed an off-take agreement with a car factory I can see if I climb up my village's hill.

And this makes sense for a ton of reasons! First, the Rhine Valley used to be a Salt Flat, exactly like the Atacama Desert nowadays, and this was just 35 million years ago. So on the geological scale of things, it makes sense. 

Then, it is a geothermal region, and Germany actively pushes to add more geothermal plants to its energy mix, which means thousands of cubic meters of water that are pumped from that lithium-rich aquifer anyways, which allows you to emulate the example we heard from Standard Lithium, piggy-backing on Lanxess' Bromine business. 

But maybe most importantly, Europe is actively building about 30 battery gigafactories. And that's a staple in the zero-carbon transition of mobility! But to feed those factories, Europe will need lithium at some point. Today, 97% of that lithium is imported from China. And with China's own plans to further build up the battery value chain, they may well use all their lithium themselves, which would leave Europe without any white oil.

So Vulcan's endeavors in the Upper Rhine Valley, today on the German side and anytime soon on the French side, would not only be one of the largest lithium projects in the World. But from 2026 on, it might also be Europe's EV strategy lifeline - as long as I'm not fully up to speed with my own backyard project. 

So what's Vulcan's plan to a - quote unquote - "Glorified Water Processing Facility" able to deliver 24'000 tons of lithium hydroxide in its first phase, but also 300 GWh of renewable power and 250 GWh of renewable heat? Cris will be our guide, just after this reminder that if you like what you hear, if all of this is of any value to you, please take this episode and share it with a friend, a colleague, your boss, or your team, and I'll meet you on the other side!

➡️ Check out the entire article on how Vulcan enabled its Zero Carbon Lithium project by selling its products years ahead, including a teaser, a slider, and a full transcript on the (don't) Waste Water website!

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with 🎙️ Teague Egan - CEO & Founder of EnergyX 

💧 EnergyX is on a mission to become a worldwide leader in the global transition to sustainable energy

What we covered:

🌵 How the story of EnergyX started in the salt flats of Uyuni with Teague Egan's initiatory journey to Bolivia 

🗓️ How EnergyX has a masterplan and how this one goes beyond "just" supplying lithium extraction technology to the World 

🔒 How the company's claims of a disruptive approach to direct lithium extraction are backed by an impressive amount of patents all along the value chain 

☀️ What the problem with existing lithium evaporation ponds is, and how that offers significant potential for improvement for new technologies 

📜 How lithium-ion battery legend and Nobel Prize recipient John Goodenough endorsed EnergyX's efforts in the battery space and how the company breeds his legacy 

4️⃣ The four key aspects to consider when working on a lithium extraction process 

🚱 How EnergyX's take at Direct Lithium Extraction needs water neither on the membrane nor on the solvent extraction side 

🛑 How the company got kicked out of Bolivia's lithium tender for questionable reasons, and how they might come back in the game given their unique technological perks 

🚼 How pure end-to-end DLE probably is the future of lithium extraction, but how DLE enhanced ponds are the best hybrid for a smooth transition 

💰 How Global Emerging Markets Group placed a $450 million check on the table for the day EnergyX goes public, what it enables, and what it involves 

🚀 How you scale a lithium extraction approach from pilot to demo and ultimately down the road to commercial-scale applications 

👨‍🔬 EnergyX's Edisonian approach, the special sauce to the company's lithium extraction process, the lowest permissible lithium concentration for their technology (and why it's different than their competition), the company's bet as to the place where it will go full-scale first... and much more!

🔥 ... and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 🔥

🔗 Come say hi to Teague on LinkedIn

🔗 Check EnergyX's website

➡️ Check out the entire article on How the Lithium King and his 60 Patent-Company may well disrupt the Battery Industry

➡️ Reach out to me: [email protected] 

More episodes in this Series:

1 - Why Water Technologies Matter in Lithium Mining (And Why You Should Buy Now!)

2 - The Shocking Requirements of Spodumene Processing (and other Lithium 101 stories)

3 - Standard Lithium's 10 Simple Secrets to DLE Success">Standard Lithium's 10 Simple Secrets to DLE Success (and how that rolls out in El Dorado)

4 - How 'Reverse ZLD' made the World's Largest Water Company a Lithium Refinery Expert">How 'Reverse ZLD' made the World's Largest Water Company a Lithium Refinery Expert 

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Teague Egan is the CEO and Founder of EnergyX. EnergyX is on a mission to become a worldwide leader in the global transition to sustainable energy with breakthrough direct lithium extraction and refinery technologies, as well as more effective battery and energy storage solutions.

Imagine you're listening to "The End" - the famous hit of The Doors. You vaguely remember there's something pressing on your to-do list, but hey, who can resist the captivating voice of Jim Morrisson, right? 11'44 passes by, and you return to that to-do list. What's on top? Oh yeah, submit that folder for Bolivia's Direct Lithium Extraction tender.

But... 11'44 was 1'44 too long, and time is over; you're out. Kind of bitter, right? I obviously romanticized the anecdote, and I don't know if Teague is a fan of The Doors, yet one part of that story is true: EnergyX got kicked off of Bolivia's DLE tender for submitting 10 minutes late. 

I wouldn't allow myself to joke about it if Teague wasn't seeing the positives in it: EnergyX leverages 60 patents across the lithium value chain, and they've leveraged Bolivia and Uyuni as a great proof of concept! Their technology suit stands the field test, and they're able to produce lithium in a country that maybe boasts the World's largest lithium reserves, but also a quite demanding 25 to 1 magnesium to lithium ratio that defeated many challengers in that race to get Bolivia's white oil off the ground.

In today's conversation, you'll get to explore how a Direct Lithium Extraction pure player builds its path to a future EV supply chain vertical, how there may be bumps on the road, but also how exciting it is to move an Idea from the lab to a pilot then a demonstration stage and down the line, a first commercial reference. 

You'll hear of the lithium godfather and Nobel Prize recipient, John Goodenough, which is the second Nobel Prize winner we get to hear in this lithium series after Barry Sharpless that collaborated with Standard Lithium; you'll understand how an investment fund committed 450 million dollars on EnergyX and how Teague won his crown as Shale Magazine named him the Lithium King. 

➡️ Check out the entire article on how the Lithium King got 60 patents  for its battery vertical pure player, including a teaser, a slider, and a full transcript on the (don't) Waste Water website!

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with 🎙️ Jim Rieke - VP of Process Engineering at Veolia Water Technologies 

💧 Veolia Water Technologies specializes in water treatment solutions while providing a complete range of services for industrial & public authorities

What we covered:

👷 How HPD onboards all its hires through its service and commissioning groups and how that's the best learning experience to Veolia Water Technologies' portfolio 

🤝 How the milestone Naraha Lithium Refinery reference started through a collaboration between Orocobre (now, Allkem) and HPD and what was the step by step road to success 

🚢 What's the magic that turns Lithium Carbonate in South America into Lithium Hydroxide Monohydrate in Japan 

🧩 How there might be standard building blocks but how every lithium carbonate is slightly different and hence requires a tailor-made lithium refining process 

🏭 Where do impurities appear in a lithium refinery process and how to remove them to guarantee a battery-grade output 

🧰 How extracting lithium from clay is still a very new process and what it changes in the lithium refinery set up 

🛠️ How Veolia Water Technologies' holistic approach is a key differentiator in the development of a lithium refinery 

🌍 How geopolitics and government incentives play a role in the economics of a lithium refinery 

👰 How the newly wed SUEZ and Veolia offer an even broader portfolio of complimentary technologies to better serve the lithium market 

📈 How DLE "suddenly" makes much more lithium available and how HPD's lithium refinery process copes with the source's specificities 

♻️ How batter-grade lithium is just one of the outputs of a lithium refinery: Veolia Water Technologies' expertise also allows to valorize several more by-products along the way 

💰 How Veolia Water Technologies' involvement in projects can help get junior lithium companies get financed as a valuable reference partner 

🗺️ Building a Lithium Refinery step by step; leaching, evaporation, crystallization, ion exchange: the lithium refinery keywords; lithium refining in the broader scheme of the EV battery vertical; turning sodium sulfate into sodium hydroxide and sulfuric acid; empowering circularity... and much more!

🔥 ... and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 🔥

🔗 Come say hi to Jim on Linkedin  

🔗 Check Veolia's website 

➡️ Check out the entire article on How 'Reverse ZLD' made the World's Largest Water Company a Lithium Refinery Expert 

➡️ Reach out to me: [email protected] 

More episodes in this Series:

1 - Why Water Technologies Matter in Lithium Mining (And Why You Should Buy Now!)

2 - The Shocking Requirements of Spodumene Processing (and other Lithium 101 stories)

3 - Standard Lithium's 10 Simple Secrets to DLE Success">Standard Lithium's 10 Simple Secrets to DLE Success (and how that rolls out in El Dorado)

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Jim RIeke is Vice President of Process Engineering at Veolia Water Technologies. Within the Veolia Galaxy, we focus today on HPD: Large-scale, highly-integrated process solutions utilizing evaporation, crystallization, and more.

If you recall what Tony Strobbe shared on this microphone a couple of weeks ago: "if you ship spodumene concentrate across the ocean, you ship 6% what you want, and 94% what you don't want."

6% is the highest you will get in lithium from hard rock, after onsite concentration from the natural 1.5% lithium content in the best spodumenes. 

To get to the battery grade 99.95%, you hence need to refine that lithium, a quite specific and key process along the EV material supply chain, in which HPD specializes - in a way Jim will explain in a minute.

That said specialization doesn't stop at lithium from hard rock, though, as we'll discover with use cases from clay, Direct Lithium Extraction, and maybe the most spectacular example, with Veolia's latest reference in refining lithium from evaporation ponds.

The way these projects are built is quite revealing of the pace of this sector as well, as Jim will describe how it can sometimes take up to seven years to freeze the process design. It's also a fascinating blueprint for circular economy and resource recovery, as by-products can be upcycled and sometimes even directly used again in the refining process. 

From a business perspective, it's also an interesting configuration at the edges of the traditional EPC approach, an integrator path, and sometimes a service and operation play. 

Wanna get how a 200-headcount division of a Water Giant became a leading lithium refining actor? Then you're at the right place

➡️ Check out the entire article on how 'reverse ZLD' perfectly defines the Lithium Refinery process including a teaser, a slider, and a full transcript on the (don't) Waste Water website!

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😮 Anaergia's flagship asset, the Rialto Bioenergy Facility, just filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. What happened? What are the problems? What's next? Let's review ⬇

Last year, I spoke with Andrew Benedek and Kunal Shah on this podcast, and I came out of those two episodes deeply convinced that Anaergia was changing the World for the better.

🏆 Last month, that feeling got comforted at Global Water Intelligence (GWI)'s awards ceremony, when the company won two trophies as "Net Zero Carbon Champion," but also indirectly as a contributor to the "Wastewater Project of the Year."

So I was shocked when reading GWI's last weekly briefing and discovering North America's largest organic waste-to-energy plant was in deep trouble!

But when analyzing what happened, I started noting some very familiar patterns to anyone deeply involved with the Water Industry.

To me:

3️⃣ Rialto has 3 Problems (which I detail in this episode)

🤦‍♂️ It's not the first time Regulation has come in the way of Water Companies

📜 Paul O'Callaghan's thesis on the Dynamics of Water Innovation once more helps us understand what's going on

🕯 I think Anaergia will get to the light on the other end of that tunnel

... and frankly speaking, I hope so!

▶️ Watch the video version of this episode on YouTube    

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with 🎙️ Robert Mintak - CEO of Standard Lithium

💧 Standard Lithium coins itself America's 21st century Lithium Company. They're expected to become the first lithium developer in the World to produce direct-extracted lithium at a commercial scale in El Dorado

What we covered:

5️⃣ How Standard Lithium built a plan to grow to commercial direct lithium extraction (DLE) scale in five years

🔁 How you can't take lithium extraction processes off-the-shelf and how you can't copy-paste what works on a lab scale for a commercial scale

💧 How there's an overlooked part of DLE: managing high brine volumes and flows

🎁 How Standard Lithium "surprised" Lanxess with a lithium add-on to their bromine business

🤝 How you need to know what you know but also know when to team up and get support to take your project off the ground

💰 How Standard Lithium used a simple trick most companies wouldn't dare to apply: paying their partner to kick things off

🗺️ How the Lanxess project will serve as a Blueprint for replication across Arkansas' Smackover formation

⚔️ How there's no silver-bullet universal lithium extraction process and how you need to tailor it to your regional parameters

⚡ How to be future-proof and keep all options open to the evolutions in battery technology

📍 Why El Dorado, Arkansas is the absolute best place to build a lithium chemical business in North America

👍 How having a positive impact and walking the talk is key to be serious about supporting the energy transition and the EV Revolution

🌇 Fluid handling as a boring but necessary evil, developing win-win agreements, relationships to Koch Engineering and Lanxess, California and further Arkansas projects... and much more!

🔥 ... and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 🔥

🔗 Come say hi to Robert on Linkedin 

🔗 Check Standard Lithium's website 

➡️ Check out the entire article on Standard Lithium's 10 Simple Secrets to DLE Success  

➡️ Reach out to me: [email protected] 

More episodes in this Series:

1 - Why Water Technologies Matter in Lithium Mining">Why Water Technologies Matter in Lithium Mining (And Why You Should Buy Now!)

2 - The Shocking Requirements of Spodumene Processing">The Shocking Requirements of Spodumene Processing (and other Lithium 101 stories)

3 - Standard Lithium's 10 Simple Secrets to DLE Success">Standard Lithium's 10 Simple Secrets to DLE Success (and how that rolls out in El Dorado)

4 - How 'Reverse ZLD' made the World's Largest Water Company a Lithium Refinery Expert">How 'Reverse ZLD' made the World's Largest Water Company a Lithium Refinery Expert 

Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Robert Mintak is the CEO of Standard Lithium. Standard Lithium coins itself America's 21st century Lithium Company, and indeed, they shall become the first lithium developer in the World to produce direct-extracted lithium at a commercial scale in El Dorado.

What's not to love about Direct Lithium Extraction or DLE? We've seen in the first two episodes of this series how the World needs to scale from about half a million of yearly Lithium Carbonate Equivalent to 2, 3, or maybe even 5 million by 2030. And sure, you can probably extract more spodumene in hard rock mines. You can probably also evaporate more lithium-rich brines in the south american lithium triangle. But will that be enough? For many, that's still an open question, and not the only one.

How and where do you refine that lithium? Who does it? Where and how do you ship it around? And what if the ones with lithium don't want to sell to the ones with battery gigafactories. 

To answer many of these questions and more, Direct Lithium Extraction comes in pretty handy. Indeed, with DLE and the extended CRC (if you don't know that acronym, you probably shall dive into the first episode of this series with Ben Sparrow), you have an all-in-one approach that turns low-concentration brines into battery-grade lithium carbonate or hydroxide. 

Black oil fields can get a second life as a source of white oil. Geothermal projects can now kill two birds with one stone, leveraging the heat AND the lithium content. And existing brine operations, like the one Robert will talk about in a minute at the Lanxxess site in El Dorado, can start to multiply their value by adding an additional revenue stream. 

Hence my question: what's not to love about Direct Lithium Extraction?

Well, yes, it leverages processes we know quite well in the Water Industry, such as adsorption, ion exchange, membrane, thermal or electrochemical processes.

And yes, in a quite specific shape, it's been partially used since the 90s in Argentina and China.

But as an end-to-end process where unconventional brines flow in and battery-grade lithium gets extracted on the other end, it's never been scaled up to commercial sizes. There have been impressive lab studies and pilot plants, and even a handful of demo plants, one of them being Standard Lithium's one in El Dorado, another, Vulcan's one in Germany we'll discuss in a future episode. Yes, that's a spoiler. But never, ever, a full-scale plant. 

So the ability of pioneers such as Standard Lithium to manage the rollout of commercial scale DLE is something that's closely watched by an entire industry. 

How do you pick the right place to roll out? How do you build the right team? What are the decisive parameters to monitor? What's often overlooked? What makes a potential world's first full-scale Direct Lithium Extraction project? I'll let Robert take it from there.

➡️ Check out the entire article on the 10 Simple Secrets of Standard Lithium's probable world-first commercial DLE, including several teasers and a full transcript on the (don't) Waste Water website!

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