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.”
The U.S. Commerce Department is conducting a national security investigation into imports of semiconductor technology and related downstream products, according to a Federal Register notice put online Monday.
The official document — which calls for public comments on the investigation — further confirms that chips and the electronics supply chain will not be excluded from U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff plans despite his statement on Friday that many of those products were exempt from his “reciprocal tariffs.”
As part of the probe, the Commerce Department will investigate the “feasibility of increasing domestic semiconductors capacity” in order to reduce reliance on imports and whether additional trade measures, including tariffs, are “necessary to protect national security.”
The investigation encompasses a wide range of items, including chip components such as silicon wafers, chipmaking equipment, and “downstream products that contain semiconductors.”
Semiconductors play a role in essentially every type of modern electronics, giving the investigation massive implications for Trump’s global trade war as he seeks to boost U.S. manufacturing.
While exemptions have been made on a range of electronic products, Trump and some of his officials said over the weekend that the reprieve was temporary and part of plans to apply separate tariffs to the sector.
The semiconductor investigation — first initiated by the secretary of commerce on April 1 — sets the grounds for such tariffs to come into effect.
First, the Commerce Department will allow for public comments on the investigation to be submitted no later than 21 days from Wednesday.
However, on Sunday, Trump reportedly said he will be announcing new tariff rates on imported semiconductors over the next week, and that flexibility will be shown to certain companies.
On the same day, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told ABC News’ “This Week” that separate tariffs for semiconductors and electronic products were coming in “probably a month or two.”
Trump’s Commerce Department cited the probe under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which can permit the U.S. president to impose tariffs on the grounds of national security.
The justification is being used for a similar investigation on pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical ingredients, which was also disclosed on Monday.
The U.S. is heavily dependent on semiconductor technology imported from markets like Taiwan, South Korea, and the Netherlands.
However, for years, Washington has been implementing policies aimed at onshoring more of the semiconductor supply chain, including through industrial policies such as the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act.
Nvidia, the chipmaker powering much of the artificial intelligence boom, announced on Monday a plan to design and build factories that, for the first time, will produce NVIDIA AI supercomputers entirely in the U.S.
Last month, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world’s largest chip foundry, announced its intention to increase its existing investments in advanced semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. by an additional $100 billion.
An Adobe sign hangs along Main Street during the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 27, 2025 in Park City, Utah.
David Becker | Getty Images
LONDON — Adobe has invested in Synthesia, a British artificial intelligence startup, in a bet that the technology will transform video production.
Synthesia told CNBC that Adobe’s venture capital arm injected an undisclosed amount of funds into the startup as part of a “strategic” partnership, without elaborating further on financial and commercial terms.
The startup, which says it serves more than 70% of the Fortune 100, sells a platform that businesses can use to develop videos with life-like avatars generated by AI. Individuals can make their own AI avatars, either at one of Synthesia’s production studios or on a personal device.
Adobe, a creative technology powerhouse valued at roughly $150 billion, is best known for the Photoshop image editing tool. The company also makes Premiere Pro, a video editing platform widely used by professionals in broadcast media, advertising and other industries.
“We’re building the world’s leading AI video platform for enterprise, and Adobe’s investment validates that direction,” Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli told CNBC. “We share a vision: democratizing high-quality content creation and making enterprise communication faster and more effective.”
It’s not the first time Adobe has placed a big bet on a venture-backed startup. It previously tried to acquire design platform Figma for $20 billion, but called the deal off following scrutiny from European Union and U.K. regulators. Adobe is also an active venture investor, backing startups such as Captions and VidMob.
Profitability ‘not an immediate focus’
In addition to the investment from Adobe, Synthesia also announced that it hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) — a measure of annual revenue generated from subscriptions that renew each year.
“We’ve grown approximately 100% year-over-year, driven by strong customer expansion and best-in-class unit economics,” Riparbelli said.“Surpassing $100 million in ARR puts us in a very small group of AI-native companies with real commercial traction.”
The startup remains lossmaking, however — and is not focusing on making a profit anytime soon.
In 2023, Synthesia reported a pre-tax loss of £25.2 million on revenues of £25.7 million, according to a U.K. Companies House filing. Profitability is “not an immediate focus,” Riparbelli told CNBC. “But the path is clear.”
Synthesia was most recently valued at $2.1 billion in an investment round announced in January. Its rivals include Colossyan, DeepBrain AI, Invideo AI, Filmora and Veed.io. The startup also faces competition from OpenAI, whose text-to-video model Sora can create realistic video clips based on user prompts.
Visitors look at the display of SK Hynix Inc. 12-layer HBM3E memory chips at the Semiconductor Exhibition (SEDEX) in Seoul, South Korea, on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
South Korea announced Tuesday a support package of 33 trillion won ($23.25 billion) for its vital semiconductor industry, as heightened uncertainty over U.S. tariffs threatens domestic companies.
In a social media post Monday, Trump vowed to investigate the “whole electronics supply chain” on national security grounds.
The U.S. Department of Commerce also released a notice saying it will initiate an investigation “to determine the effects on national security of imports of semiconductors, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and their derivative products.”
South Korea’s funding support was about a quarter more than the 26 trillion committed last year, according to a press release from the finance ministry.
As part of the measures, the government will subsidize the construction of underground power transmission lines to semiconductor clusters, as well as increase the funding ratio for infrastructure in advanced industrial complexes to 50% from 30%.
A total of 20 trillion won of low-interest loans to semiconductor companies will be offered between 2025 and 2027, up from the current 17 trillion won.
Other measures include introducing training and research programs for domestic master’s and doctoral students as well as global joint research programs for foreign talent.
South Korea is home to some of the world’s top chipmakers, including Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, with semiconductors a key export of the country.
On Tuesday, the South Korean Kospi was up 0.68%, with Samsung climbing 1.07% and SK Hynix up 0.17%.
In 2024, South Korea’s exports of semiconductors stood at $141.9 billion, just over 20% of the country’s $683.6 billion exports.
On Monday, acting South Korean president Han Duck-soo reportedly said that Trump had “apparently” instructed his administration to conduct immediate tariff negotiations with South Korea, according to local media outlet Yonhap.
