How new lithium extraction technology could help us meet electric vehicle targets

Published

2 years ago

June 5, 2023

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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.

Technology

Meta wins FTC antitrust trial that focused on WhatsApp, Instagram

Published

2 hours ago

November 18, 2025

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Meta wins FTC antitrust trial that focused on WhatsApp, Instagram

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Meta won its high-profile antitrust case against the Federal Trade Commission, which had accused the company of holding a monopoly in social networking.

In a memorandum opinion released Tuesday, Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., said the FTC failed to prove its argument. The case, initially filed by the FTC five years ago, centered on Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

“Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now,” Boasberg said in the filing. “The Court’s verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so. A judgment so stating shall issue this day.”

Boasberg dismissed the case in 2021, saying the agency didn’t have enough evidence to prove “Facebook holds market power.” In August of that year, the FTC filed an amended complaint with more details about the company’s user numbers and metrics relative to competitors like Snapchat, the now-defunct Google+ social network and Myspace.

After reviewing the amendments, Boasberg in 2022 ruled that the case could proceed, saying the FTC had presented more details than before.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former operating chief Sheryl Sandberg, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom and other current and former Meta executives all testified in the trial, which began in April.

Meta shares were little changed on Tuesday. The stock is up about 2% for the year, badly underperforming broader indexes and most of its megacap tech peers.

“The Court’s decision today recognizes that Meta faces fierce competition,” the company said in a statement. “Our products are beneficial for people and businesses and exemplify American innovation and economic growth. We look forward to continuing to partner with the Administration and to invest in America.”

The FTC didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The ruling comes a little over two months after Google avoided the harshest possible penalty from an antitrust case it lost last year. While Google was found to hold an illegal monopoly in its core market of internet search, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta decided the company would not be forced to sell its Chrome browser, bucking the Department of Justice’s request. Google was, however, ordered to loosen its hold on search data.

Former FTC Chair Lina Khan on Meta antitrust trial regarding Instagram, WhatsApp ownership

In the Meta case, the FTC claimed the company shouldn’t have been allowed to buy Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, and the agency called for those units to be divested. The commission also alleged that there were no major alternatives for apps like Facebook and Instagram that people use to communicate with friends and family in a online, social space.

However, a major challenge for the FTC, according to the judge, was in proving that Meta is breaking antitrust law today, not years ago when the primary use of social networks was very different and based on sharing other kinds of content.

“To win the permanent injunction that it seeks here, the FTC must prove a current or imminent legal violation,” he wrote.

Boasberg ultimately sided with Meta’s argument that the technology industry has evolved since the early days of Facebook, and the company now faces a wide variety of competitors like TikTok.

“While each of Meta’s empirical showings can be quibbled with, they all tell a consistent story: people treat TikTok and YouTube as substitutes for Facebook and Instagram, and the amount of competitive overlap is economically important,” Boasberg wrote. “Against that unmistakable pattern, the FTC offers no empirical evidence of substitution whatsoever.”

Big changes in social

Much of Judge Boasberg’s conclusion was built on the transformation that’s taken place in the social media market in recent years and Meta’s changing position within it. User trends have moved heavily in the direction of video, where TikTok and YouTube have massive user bases and huge network effects.

“The most-used part of Meta’s apps is thus indistinguishable from the offerings on TikTok and YouTube,” Boasberg wrote.

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Boasberg explained that there was enough evidence to show “that consumers are reallocating massive amounts of time from Meta’s apps” to those services and others, which has “forced Meta to invest gobs of cash to keep up.”

“Meta is not a monopolist insulated from competition,” he wrote. “The Court finds the evidence favoring Meta on this issue both credible and convincing.”

Boasberg also cited various documents and testimony from “industry insiders” that show how other tech companies like TikTok and YouTube viewed Meta as serious competition.

“TikTok and YouTube tracked Meta’s products as competitive threats,” Boasberg wrote.

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Technology

Waymo says it will launch in more Texas and Florida cities in 2026

Published

3 hours ago

November 18, 2025

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Waymo says it will launch in more Texas and Florida cities in 2026

A Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar taxi drives along a street on March 14, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.

Mario Tama | Getty Images

Waymo on Tuesday said it will bring its robotaxi service to new cities in Texas and Florida in 2026.

The Alphabet-owned company said it plans to start operating its vehicles with no human driver assistants in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Miami and Orlando in the coming weeks before opening service in those markets to the public next year, the company said in a blog.

“Waymo has entered a new phase of commercial scale, doubling the number of cities we operate without a human specialist in the car,” Waymo Chief Product Officer Saswat Panigrahi said in an emailed statement Tuesday.

Waymo had previously announced plans to launch its robotaxi service in Dallas and Miami in 2026, but Tuesday was the first time the company said it planned to launch service next year in the other cities. Waymo will first offer fully autonomous trips to its employees in those markets, a spokesperson said.

The company has been gearing up to expand its paid robotaxis service in 2026. The company previously announced plans to expand to Detroit, Las Vegas, Nashville, San Diego, Washington, D.C., and London in 2026.

Waymo has also begun testing vehicles in New York City and Tokyo.

Last week, Waymo began offering freeway routes in the San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles markets. The Google sister company will gradually extend freeway trips to more riders and locations over time.

Already, Waymo operates its paid robotaxi service in Austin, San Francisco, Phoenix, Atlanta and Los Angeles. The company has provided more than 10 million paid rides since first launching in 2020, the company said in May.

Waymo’s Florida and Texas expansion announcement comes the same day that Amazon-owned Zoox began allowing select San Francisco users to hail its driverless vehicles. San Francisco is the second market where Zoox now offers a free service, after its launch in Las Vegas in September. Zoox has deployed a fleet of 50 robotaxis between San Francisco and Las Vegas, the company told CNBC in September.

WATCH: Waymo launches paid robotaxi rides on freeways