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The world contains vast quantities of lithium, an integral element in electric vehicle batteries. And though lithium is commonly mined from hard rock, the majority of the world’s lithium reserves are actually found in brine, extremely salty water beneath the Earth’s surface.

Today, brine mining involves evaporating the brine in massive, extravagantly colored pools over a series of about 18 months, leaving high concentrations of lithium behind. It’s a simple but inefficient process that takes up vast swaths of land and is ecologically disruptive.

As automakers around the world struggle to meet extraordinarily ambitious electric vehicle production targets, there’s growing interest in doing things differently. 

The auto industry requires a 20x increase in lithium supply, and there’s just no way to achieve that type of growth with conventional technologies,” said Dave Snydacker, founder and CEO of Lilac Solutions.

Lilac is one of a number of companies piloting a set of new and largely unproven technologies called direct lithium extraction, or DLE, which could increase the efficiency and decrease the negative externalities of the brine mining process.

Instead of concentrating lithium by evaporating brine in large pools, DLE pulls the brine directly into a processing unit, puts it through a series of chemical processes to separate the lithium, then injects it back underground. This process produces battery-grade lithium carbonate or hydroxide in a matter of hours, without the need to transport concentrated brine to a separate processing facility.

DLE could also help jump-start the domestic lithium mining market. Today, most lithium brine mining takes place in the Salar de Atacama, an expansive salt flat in northern Chile that contains the highest quality lithium brine in the world. But DLE technologies require much less land and can help unlock resources in areas where the brine contains less lithium and more impurities.

North American companies Lilac Solutions, EnergyX and Standard Lithium are exploring lithium resources in areas such as Arkansas’ Smackover Formation, California’s Salton Sea and Utah’s Great Salt Lake, as well as abroad in Argentina, Bolivia and Chile. The Chilean government has even announced that all new lithium projects will be required to use DLE technology.

“So the timing is right and ripe for this to see the light of day very, very soon,” said Amit Patwardhan, CTO of EnergyX.

Direct lithium extraction company EnergyX is building demonstration plants in Argentina, Chile, California, Utah and Arkansas.

EnergyX

Doing things differently

In a world before electric vehicles, traditional methods of brine mining and hard rock mining more than sufficed to meet global lithium demand.

“The world didn’t need DLE for the last 50 years. Lithium’s primary use was industrial — ceramics, glass and lubricants,” said Robert Mintak, CEO of Standard Lithium.

But with demand for EVs and the lithium-ion batteries that power them booming, now there’s a supply crunch. 

Over the last 10 years, 90% of new lithium production has come from hard rock projects. But hard rock projects are increasingly expensive as we go into lower grade resources. And if you add up all the hard rock projects, there’s just not enough resource out there to meet automaker goals. It’s the brine resources that are large enough to electrify the vehicle industry,” Snydacker said.

DLE is already being used to some extent in both Argentina and China, where the companies Livent and Sunresin are implementing commercial tech that combines DLE with traditional evaporation pond operations.

These companies both rely on a technology called adsorption, the only commercially proven approach to DLE. In this process, lithium molecules in the brine adhere to an adsorbant substance, removing them from surrounding impurities. But experts say that stripping the lithium from the adsorbents requires a lot of fresh water, a big problem considering many of the world’s best brine resources are in arid areas.

Livent’s most recent sustainability report indicates that it uses 71.4 metric tons of fresh water per metric ton of lithium carbonate equivalent, or LCE, produced. Lilac reported that in pilot testing it uses between 10 and 20 metric tons of fresh water, while EnergyX says it uses less than 20 metric tons.

China-based Sunresin says that it recycles all of its fresh water, and that its newer projects will operate without evaporation ponds.

But a host of other companies are now getting into the industry, testing out alternative technologies which they claim will not only eliminate evaporation ponds altogether, but increase yields while lowering energy and fresh water requirements.

New players

Bay Area-based Lilac Solutions is using a technology called ion exchange. It’s currently piloting its tech in Argentina in partnership with Australian lithium company Lake Resources.

“With the Lilac ion-exchange bead we’ve developed a ceramic material. This ceramic selectively absorbs lithium from the brine while releasing a proton. Once the lithium is absorbed into the material, we then flush the lithium out of the bead using dilute acid and that produces a lithium chloride concentrate which can be easily processed into battery grade chemicals,” Snydacker explained.

Lilac Solutions is developing a direct lithium extraction facility in Argentina in partnership with Australian lithium company Lake Resources.

Lilac Solutions

Lilac expects to have its first commercial-scale module operating before the end of 2024. The company is backed by BMW and the Bill Gates-funded Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Ford has signed a nonbinding agreement to buy lithium from its Argentina plant.

EnergyX, which is based out of both San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Austin, Texas, uses a combination of technologies that it can tailor to the specific brine resource. Step one is traditional adsorption, followed by a method known as “solvent extraction,” in which the concentrated brine is mixed with an organic liquid. The lithium is then transferred to the organic before it’s stripped free and concentrated. Membrane filtration is the final stage, which removes all remaining impurities.

“So you see these all these loops and synergies that come out of combining these technologies. And that is another big differentiator in what EnergyX does and what really drives the cost of the technology much lower compared to anybody else,” said Patwardhan.

EnergyX is building demonstration plants with undisclosed partners in Argentina, Arkansas, Chile, California and Utah, and is aiming to have the first two up and running by the end of this year. Recently, the company secured $50 million in funding from GM to help scale its tech.

Vancouver-based Standard Lithium also has big backers. The public company’s largest investor is Koch Industries, and it’s been running a demonstration plant in South Arkansas for the last three years, producing lithium at a preexisting bromine plant.

The company uses both ion-exchange and adsorption technologies, depending on the resource. It expects to begin construction on a commercial-scale DLE facility next year and is expanding into Texas as well.

“We have an opportunity as we expand from Arkansas to Texas to be the largest producing area for lithium chemicals in North America, utilizing in an area that’s not under water stress, that has a social license to operate,” said Mintak.

Companies such as Standard Lithium, which are leaning into the U.S. market, stand to benefit from the Inflation Reduction Act, which ties electric vehicle subsidies to domestic sourcing of battery materials. Automakers can also receive the full EV credit if they source from countries that have free trade agreements with the U.S., such as Chile.

While Chile has announced that all new lithium projects in the country will be required to use DLE technologies, it has not announced what companies it will be partnering with for these new projects.

Neighboring Bolivia was considering technology from both EnergyX and Lilac Solutions to help unlock the country’s vast but largely undeveloped lithium resources. The government ultimately tapped a consortium of Chinese companies, led by battery giant CATL, to spearhead DLE efforts in its salt flats.

Most new lithium supply will continue to come from hard rock projects for the rest of this decade, Snydacker said. “But by the end of this decade, we’ll see very large-scale brine projects coming online …” he predicted. “And going out into the next decade, this technology will provide a majority of new supply.”

Overall, lithium production from DLE is projected to grow from about 54,000 metric tons today to 647,500 metric tons by 2032, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. That’s forecast to be worth about $21.6 billion.

“But when we place it in relative terms against the rest of the global market, that only represents around 15% of total supply,” said James Mills, principal consultant at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. “So we’re still going to have to rely on traditional forms of production for the lithium units, whether it’s evaporation ponds or hard rock mining.”

Watch the video to learn more about the companies looking to bring direct lithium extraction into the mainstream.

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Tesla must pay portion of $329 million in damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

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Tesla must pay portion of 9 million in damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says

A jury in Miami has determined that Tesla should be held partly liable for a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash, and must compensate the family of the deceased and an injured survivor a portion of $329 million in damages.

Tesla’s payout is based on $129 million in compensatory damages, and $200 million in punitive damages against the company.

The jury determined Tesla should be held 33% responsible for the fatal crash. That means the automaker would be responsible for about $42.5 million in compensatory damages. In cases like these, punitive damages are typically capped at three times compensatory damages.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys told CNBC on Friday that because punitive damages were only assessed against Tesla, they expect the automaker to pay the full $200 million, bringing total payments to around $242.5 million.

Tesla said it plans to appeal the decision.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs had asked the jury to award damages based on $345 million in total damages. The trial in the Southern District of Florida started on July 14.

The suit centered around who shouldered the blame for the deadly crash in Key Largo, Florida. A Tesla owner named George McGee was driving his Model S electric sedan while using the company’s Enhanced Autopilot, a partially automated driving system.

While driving, McGee dropped his mobile phone that he was using and scrambled to pick it up. He said during the trial that he believed Enhanced Autopilot would brake if an obstacle was in the way. His Model S accelerated through an intersection at just over 60 miles per hour, hitting a nearby empty parked car and its owners, who were standing on the other side of their vehicle.

Naibel Benavides, who was 22, died on the scene from injuries sustained in the crash. Her body was discovered about 75 feet away from the point of impact. Her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, survived but suffered multiple broken bones, a traumatic brain injury and psychological effects.

“Tesla designed Autopilot only for controlled access highways yet deliberately chose not to restrict drivers from using it elsewhere, alongside Elon Musk telling the world Autopilot drove better than humans,” Brett Schreiber, counsel for the plaintiffs, said in an e-mailed statement on Friday. “Tesla’s lies turned our roads into test tracks for their fundamentally flawed technology, putting everyday Americans like Naibel Benavides and Dillon Angulo in harm’s way.”

Following the verdict, the plaintiffs’ families hugged each other and their lawyers, and Angulo was “visibly emotional” as he embraced his mother, according to NBC.

Here is Tesla’s response to CNBC:

“Today’s verdict is wrong and only works to set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla’s and the entire industry’s efforts to develop and implement life-saving technology. We plan to appeal given the substantial errors of law and irregularities at trial.

Even though this jury found that the driver was overwhelmingly responsible for this tragic accident in 2019, the evidence has always shown that this driver was solely at fault because he was speeding, with his foot on the accelerator – which overrode Autopilot – as he rummaged for his dropped phone without his eyes on the road. To be clear, no car in 2019, and none today, would have prevented this crash.

This was never about Autopilot; it was a fiction concocted by plaintiffs’ lawyers blaming the car when the driver – from day one – admitted and accepted responsibility.”

The verdict comes as Musk, Tesla’s CEO, is trying to persuade investors that his company can pivot into a leader in autonomous vehicles, and that its self-driving systems are safe enough to operate fleets of robotaxis on public roads in the U.S.

Tesla shares dipped 1.8% on Friday and are now down 25% for the year, the biggest drop among tech’s megacap companies.

The verdict could set a precedent for Autopilot-related suits against Tesla. About a dozen active cases are underway focused on similar claims involving incidents where Autopilot or Tesla’s FSD— Full Self-Driving (Supervised) — had been in use just before a fatal or injurious crash.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration initiated a probe in 2021 into possible safety defects in Tesla’s Autopilot systems. During the course of that investigation, Tesla made changes, including a number of over-the-air software updates.

The agency then opened a second probe, which is ongoing, evaluating whether Tesla’s “recall remedy” to resolve issues with the behavior of its Autopilot, especially around stationary first responder vehicles, had been effective.

The NHTSA has also warned Tesla that its social media posts may mislead drivers into thinking its cars are capable of functioning as robotaxis, even though owners manuals say the cars require hands-on steering and a driver attentive to steering and braking at all times.

A site that tracks Tesla-involved collisions, TeslaDeaths.com, has reported at least 58 deaths resulting from incidents where Tesla drivers had Autopilot engaged just before impact.

Read the jury’s verdict below.

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Crypto wobbles into August as Trump’s new tariffs trigger risk-off sentiment

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Crypto wobbles into August as Trump's new tariffs trigger risk-off sentiment

A screen showing the price of various cryptocurrencies against the US dollar displayed at a Crypto Panda cryptocurrency store in Hong Kong, China, on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025. 

Lam Yik | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The crypto market slid Friday after President Donald Trump unveiled his modified “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries.

The price of bitcoin showed relative strength, hovering at the flat line while ether, XRP and Binance Coin fell 2% each. Overnight, bitcoin dropped to a low of $114,110.73.

The descent triggered a wave of long liquidations, which forces traders to sell their assets at market price to settle their debts, pushing prices lower. Bitcoin saw $172 million in liquidations across centralized exchanges in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGlass, and ether saw $210 million.

Crypto-linked stocks suffered deeper losses. Coinbase led the way, down 15% following its disappointing second-quarter earnings report. Circle fell 4%, Galaxy Digital lost 2%, and ether treasury company Bitmine Immersion was down 8%. Bitcoin proxy MicroStrategy was down by 5%.

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Bitcoin falls below $115,000

The stock moves came amid a new wave of risk off sentiment after President Trump issued new tariffs ranging between 10% and 41%, triggering worries about increasing inflation and the Federal Reserve’s ability to cut interest rates. In periods of broad based derisking, crypto tends to get hit as investors pull out of the most speculative and volatile assets. Technical resilience and institutional demand for bitcoin and ether are helping support their prices.

“After running red hot in July, this is a healthy strategic cooldown. Markets aren’t reacting to a crisis, they’re responding to the lack of one,” said Ben Kurland, CEO at crypto research platform DYOR. “With no new macro catalyst on the horizon, capital is rotating out of speculative assets and into safer ground … it’s a calculated pause.”

Crypto is coming off a winning month but could soon hit the brakes amid the new macro uncertainty, and in a month usually characterized by lower trading volumes and increased volatility. Bitcoin gained 8% in July, according to Coin Metrics, while ether surged more than 49%.

Ether ETFs saw more than $5 billion in inflows in July alone (with just a single day of outflows of $1.8 million on July 2), bringing it’s total cumulative inflows to $9.64 to date. Bitcoin ETFs saw $114 million in outflows in the final trading session of July, bringing its monthly inflows to about $6 billion out of a cumulative $55 billion.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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Google has dropped more than 50 DEI-related organizations from its funding list

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Google has dropped more than 50 DEI-related organizations from its funding list

Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 20, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Google has purged more than 50 organizations related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, from a list of organizations that the tech company provides funding to, according to a new report.

The company has removed a total of 214 groups from its funding list while adding 101, according to a new report from tech watchdog organization The Tech Transparency Project. The watchdog group cites the most recent public list of organizations that receive the most substantial contributions from Google’s U.S. Government Affairs and Public Policy team.

The largest category of purged groups were DEI-related, with a total of 58 groups removed from Google’s funding list, TTP found. The dropped groups had mission statements that included the words “diversity, “equity,” “inclusion,” or “race,” “activism,” and “women.” Those are also terms the Trump administration officials have reportedly told federal agencies to limit or avoid.

In response to the report, Google spokesperson José Castañeda told CNBC that the list reflects contributions made in 2024 and that it does not reflect all contributions made by other teams within the company.

“We contribute to hundreds of groups from across the political spectrum that advocate for pro-innovation policies, and those groups change from year to year based on where our contributions will have the most impact,” Castañeda said in an email.

Organizations that were removed from Google’s list include the African American Community Service Agency, which seeks to “empower all Black and historically excluded communities”; the Latino Leadership Alliance, which is dedicated to “race equity affecting the Latino community”; and Enroot, which creates out-of-school experiences for immigrant kids. 

The organization funding purge is the latest to come as Google began backtracking some of its commitments to DEI over the last couple of years. That pull back came due to cost cutting to prioritize investments into artificial intelligence technology as well as the changing political and legal landscape amid increasing national anti-DEI policies.

Over the past decade, Silicon Valley and other industries used DEI programs to root out bias in hiring, promote fairness in the workplace and advance the careers of women and people of color — demographics that have historically been overlooked in the workplace.

However, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to end affirmative action at colleges led to additional backlash against DEI programs in conservative circles.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order upon taking office in January to end the government’s DEI programs and directed federal agencies to combat what the administration considers “illegal” private-sector DEI mandates, policies and programs. Shortly after, Google’s Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi told employees that the company would end DEI-related hiring “aspirational goals” due to new federal requirements and Google’s categorization as a federal contractor.

Despite DEI becoming such a divisive term, many companies are continuing the work but using different language or rolling the efforts under less-charged terminology, like “learning” or “hiring.”

Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai maintained the importance diversity plays in its workforce at an all-hands meeting in March.

“We’re a global company, we have users around the world, and we think the best way to serve them well is by having a workforce that represents that diversity,” Pichai said at the time.

One of the groups dropped from Google’s contributions list is the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which provides training, assistance, and public awareness campaigns on the issue of violence against women, the TTP report found. The group had been on Google’s list of funded organizations for at least nine years and continues to name the company as one of its corporate partners.

Google said it still gave $75,000 to the National Network to End Domestic Violence in 2024 but did not say why the group was removed from the public contributions list.

WATCH: Alphabet’s valuation remains highly attractive, says Evercore ISI’s Mark Mahaney

Alphabet's valuation remains highly attractive, says Evercore ISI's Mark Mahaney

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