From brine to battery: the evolution of lithium extraction
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Welcome to today's episode of Lexicon. I'm Christopher McFadden, contributing writer for Interesting Engineering. Join us as we talk with Teague Egan, CEO of EnergyX, about the future of lithium and its role in powering the global energy transition.

From innovative extraction methods to advancements in battery technology, discover how EnergyX is shaping sustainable energy solutions, revolutionizing the electric vehicle industry. But before our new episode, check out our educational platform, the IE Academy. From IE to data, we'll provide top quality courses with live and interactive workshops with professional instructors, and you're invited to join the community. Now let's continue with today's episode. Teague, thanks for joining us. How are you today?

I'm doing well, Chris. Thanks for having me. Our pleasure, of course. For our audience's benefit, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, please? Yeah, definitely. Well, I'm Teague Egan, and I'm the CEO and founder of EnergyX, which is a lithium extraction technology and production company. So started the company about six years ago in 2018.

And we've grown into one of the leaders in direct lithium extraction technology and have also expanded into additional lithium refinery capabilities. And now we're developing two large scale lithium projects, one in the United States and one in Chile, which cumulatively should be able to produce enough lithium for about a million electric vehicles a year.

Wow. Impressive. We'll get more into the specifics on that a bit later, but thank you very much. Start off with Ben. In your view, why is lithium becoming such a critical natural resource in terms of global energy transition? And how do you compare it to traditional fossil fuels as an energy system? Yeah. Well, so lithium's physical properties are

make it such that it's one of the best materials for storing energy. Um, lithium is number three on the periodic table, uh, which means that it's an extremely light element. Um, the only, the only ones lighter are, uh, or the only earlier ones on the periodic table are hydrogen and helium. So it's, it's really light, uh, yet it holds, it can hold a lot of energy. So it's energy density is really, really some of the best, uh,

known properties and uh that makes it very suitable for rechargeable batteries um

specifically for mobility applications like if you're trying to move weight around or hold a phone or if you just have a battery that's sitting on the ground and it doesn't really matter how much it weighs it could weigh a million pounds but it doesn't matter but if you have to move it in the car or move batteries around energy density is a really critical metric um so uh

That made it very important for batteries. Now, there's obviously other materials that go into batteries. It's not just lithium. However, most of the other elements that go into batteries are used for a lot of other applications, like, say, copper, for instance. Copper is used in electrical, you know, copper conducts electricity really well. And that's obviously used for a lot of stuff.

And therefore copper, the global production of copper is, you know, tens of millions of tons per year already. I think it's somewhere in the 25 to 30 million tons per year of copper annual production right now. So people already know how to produce it. There's a huge market for it. However, lithium, on the other hand, before batteries didn't really have a big market. The biggest applications for lithium were

where some, you know, some fringe pharmaceuticals, it's used in some glass applications. It's using some greases, but like the total global market for lithium is

was really in the low hundreds of thousands of tons, which isn't nothing, but it's not tens of millions of tons, right? So then electric vehicles became important and people really started paying attention to climate change and how to decarbonize our globe. And

being able to store energy without emitting carbon became a really important thing. And obviously with electric vehicles, batteries are the most important component and therefore lithium became really important. So, you know, that's, that's caused a huge uptick in people like me researching how to more efficiently produce lithium more cost-effectively. I mean, that's ultimately the critical component here, like how cost-effectively lithium,

can we produce lithium on large scales? But that's the underlying reason and why lithium has become so important over the last five, 10 years. Do you foresee that continuing for the next decade? I mean, there's research into many new battery technologies, especially like solid state. Again, we'll come into that later. Do you think lithium will keep its market position for another 10, 20 years, maybe more? Absolutely. There's not, I mean,

There's not a shadow of a doubt in my mind, but there's probably like a 99.99 statistical probability that it remains the material of choice for rechargeable batteries. The minimum rechargeable batteries, right? I explained the physical properties of the element a moment ago, which lends itself to that. Could other technologies...

come up and be more important. You know, what I, the way that I logically think about that is that the lithium ion battery was invented back in 1982 by Dr. John Goodenough. And, you know, today it's, we're in 2024, right? So 42 years since the invention and it's just,

picking up steam um it's just gaining momentum in terms of its viability and its its usefulness in large commercial applications like car like cars like obviously we've been using it in phones for 15 20 years right but and even that said you know we unequivocally know that lithium is better than using a lithium battery in a car that doesn't emit any carbon is is

is orders of magnitude better than fossil fuel cars. But there are still hundreds of millions of fossil fuel cars out there and oil and gas is still incredibly prominent and important, right? Like you couldn't just cut off oil and gas today. The economy would, you know, the world might explode. So,

Even if the next best thing was invented today, and maybe the next best thing, you know, people have been working on solid state batteries, for instance, that you mentioned, all those still use lithium. They're lithium based solid state batteries. But even if something better than say, a lithium based battery came out, like, theoretically, hydrogen could be better, right? But people have been working on that. And it seems like lithium won out.

Um, I mean, it doesn't seem like that lithium did win out. Like all the, all the car companies that you, you can't, you can't really go buy a hydrogen powered car today. Like if, even if you want it to, right. People have known about that for a really long time. So even if the next best thing was invented today, it still would probably take what I just said, 42 years since the lithium ion battery was invented. It would still take decades. And that's why, um,

You know, there's a lot of momentum. It's only getting bigger. The penetration of electric vehicles is now somewhere between 16 and 20 percent globally in places like China. Over 50 percent of new manufactured automobiles are electric vehicles. I mean, that is. And in Norway, I think it's over 95 percent.

are EVs. So, you know, all signs and momentum is pointing towards further market penetration of electric vehicles and therefore more demand for lithium. Yeah. Yeah. China is really the engine behind this. I don't know the exact number. There's hundreds, isn't there, of separate EV producing companies over there. As I could put it, name five from America and Europe.

Just the biggest, biggest EV company. I mean, you said there's hundreds, the biggest EV company over there, BYD, uh, produced 4 million electric vehicles this year. Yeah. That's insane. Yeah. Um, so, I mean, you've kind of answered my next two questions. And, uh,

get into the next one, right? So how does direct lithium extraction differ from traditional lithium mining and what environmental benefits does it offer? Yeah. So call it, you know, 15, 20 years ago when lithium was not important at all. Lithium was actually a byproduct of other salt production. So lithium is raw state that...

is used in batteries is essentially like a white powder. It's lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide. And the predecessor compound that's then converted into one of those two is called lithium chloride. What you eat on your steak, the salt that you eat is sodium chloride. This is just lithium chloride. And so it's very similar in nature. I actually have a bunch right here.

And it literally just looks like salt. Um, so that was produced using these big evaporation ponds that, uh, traditionally were used for potassium chloride, which is another compound, right? So sodium chloride, potassium chloride, lithium chloride. The reason that you have a chloride is because all of these compounds need charge neutrality. So sodium, potassium, lithium are all positively charged, uh,

elements chloride is negatively charged you always need to maintain that charge neutrality um but potassium chloride what is used for fertilizer uh for agriculture it's called potash and uh one of the biggest companies in chile built these massive evaporation ponds where they would pump the brine out of the the salar but it's sitting these big ponds

and the water would evaporate and the potassium well first the sodium chloride would come out there's you know billions and billions of tons of that that's why salt is so cheap um

But then potassium chloride would come out and they would use that for fertilizer. And then as the evaporation continued to occur, lithium would come out at the end and it was really viewed as a byproduct of this potassium chloride or potash production process. As lithium became more important, those ponds really turned into, okay, how do we optimize these for lithium? But

the process is still incredibly antiquated. It takes 18 months to go through this sequence of ponds. At the very end where the lithium is basically harvested, they only recover 30 to 40% of the initial lithium that comes out of the ground. These take up tens of square miles of land footprint.

And it's just a, it's just an incredibly inefficient process. So that is ultimately where, because of the importance of lithium, the uptick in demand, people started looking at this and saying, this is, this is not an efficient way to produce lithium, you know, from what used to just be a by-product. How do we reinvent the way that we actually obtain the lithium that we need from this brine? And that's where direct lithium extraction was invented. Uh,

looking at it from a first principles perspective and saying, you know, how do we use today's technology with separations and refining to bring the bra, you know, obviously you just still need to bring the brine up. You're basically pumping from a water well, but then just take the lithium out of this brine. Brine is heavily concentrated salt and water. How do we just take the lithium out in like,

basically a chemical processing plant. And then we can just re-inject the brine back into the subsurface minus the lithium that we've extracted. So that's, that's the main, that's like the huge step change, um, where instead of the 18 months processing time, it takes one to two days instead of the 30% recovery rate. Uh, we see 90 to 95% plus recovery rates, um,

you know, it's instead of using tens of square miles of footprint with these massive evaporation ponds that are like really thousands of football fields, we use one 100th the land size or the land footprint. Um, yeah, it's just, and ultimately what that all leads to is more favorable economics. Of course. And traditional mining uses a lot of waters. Is that right?

Yeah, the water. So in a brine resource type, the water is just being evaporated.

So you're, you're basically losing all the water and then you also need additional water to fresh water to process. So in a, in a direct lithium extraction scenario, you bring up the brine, you extract the lithium and then you re-inject the water. So it doesn't like,

crush the the water table that you know is important for indigenous communities for agriculture and things like that the actual pools themselves are very um very toxic to wildlife and yeah i mean they're it's it's insanely corrosive uh yeah it's you know this is 30 percent it's um

For instance, the Dead Sea in Israel. There's a reason it's called the Dead Sea. Nothing lives in it. It's corrosive to the most possible extent. Yes.

you wouldn't go swimming nose pools oh yeah it's actually a problem that see you actually go there and float because it's so uh dense that's right and uh but definitely don't don't get that in your eye and don't mix that salt up the lithium salt up with your table salt i'm sure that's yeah um

So what innovations in battery technology, uh, in your view are helping to improve energy storage for renewable sources like wind and solar power? I mean, a lot of, a lot of our, a lot of capital is now going into innovation in battery technology, uh, which is exciting. You know, it's, uh, it's not quite Moore's law, right. Where it doubles every 18 months. Um,

we're still trying you know there have certainly been moderate improvements on the the main the main uh the main two metrics are energy density so how much energy can this battery hold per unit of mass um you know the other kind of two one b is uh is um

So that's called gravitational energy density, right? What's the mass of this thing? This one B is volumetric energy density. So like what's, how much energy can this store per volume? Yeah. Per volume. So, so energy density is critical, right? And,

We haven't necessarily seen the huge spike in, or certainly not Moore's law where it like doubles every 18 months, the way that a semiconductor can double in, uh, storage capacity. I mean, if we, if we had seen that we would have, you know, easily like multi-thousand mile cars, multi-thousand mile range cars, you might even be able to use them in airplanes by now. Um, the cost per kilowatt hour is coming down a lot. Um,

So basically like how much it costs to make batteries. And that has to do with the supply chain, like such as lithium, how much does lithium cost? How efficiently can we make lithium? You know, the, the, the volume of these raw materials then actually the processing or, or manufacturing of the battery. Like there's a lot of steps in a supply chain to make a battery from the raw materials to the actual like manufacturing process.

of the components and then the assembly of the components into a battery. So that's the other thing, right? It's, it's, you know, it used to be $500 per kilowatt hour when Tesla started. Now, you know, you're, you're under a hundred, right. Which is, which is a five X, um, improvement. The goal is probably to get down into the like 30, 40, $50 per kilowatt hour.

That really makes electric vehicles affordable to the masses. And then on the other side, so the kilowatt hour, right? Ultimately, a dollar per kilowatt hour, but you want bigger, you want more energy. So if the dollar per kilowatt hour is low, you could just have a smaller battery in your car. But if you want a bigger battery in your car,

it would be correlative to the price yeah and then you could just go further right yeah of course do you see um recycling of old lithium batteries uh key to that process or absolutely absolutely i mean these are these are these are things that theoretically should be very recyclable um it's like such a big thing that like as your battery degrades

you could take it in and swap it out for a new battery after 10, 15, 20 years maybe. And then there's processes in place to recycle that battery. That's the idea, right? That's the goal. I think that there's two major components to think about. One is from recycling said battery, are you producing the raw materials at...

an equal or competitive price with what you can source them initially? And number two is, is it also environmentally friendly? Like you would think that it would be more environmentally friendly to recycle than have to do more mining

So that, so yeah, that box is checked, but obviously if it's not economic or economically friendly, like say it costs double to get the raw material from a recycled battery and that's, you know, that's prohibitive in ways. Well, yeah, I don't know how much lithium there is on planet earth, but presumably the more it's mined, the rarer it will become. And you'll probably get to a point where obviously, yeah, recycling batteries will be on par and then perhaps cheaper.

Exactly. And that's the ultimate goal, yeah. Yeah. And is there any specific places on Earth where you can, they can actually extract lithium this way, either direct mining or traditional, sorry, traditional mining or your direct extraction method? So is it like special geological circumstances you require to actually get the lithium? Yeah, absolutely. So lithium 101, there's really three,

main resource types. One is brine, which is what we've been discussing this whole time, which is salt dissolved in water. And that is the most environmentally friendly way, also the most economic, the most efficient. Number two is hard rock mining. So your traditional open pit mine, and you're basically digging up rock and ore and leaching out lithium.

there's less ability to introduce new technology the way that we talked about the step change between these evaporation ponds and you know a lithium refinery um you obviously can't avoid digging up or digging a huge pit in the ground because that's your your feedstock as opposed to you know drilling a hole and just bringing up subsurface fluid um

So hard rock is number two. And number three is clay. Today, there's not any commercially produced lithium from clay. The only lithium in all of commercial existence is from brine or hard rock. However, clay, people are working on clay. There's a big clay project in the United States.

uh there's a few other clay projects that people are working on trying to get the technology it's essentially a direct lithium extraction esque technology mixed with you know digging up huge chunks or blocks of clay um yeah let's lead on to the kind of what's getting to is um a bit like with oil fields um as they get used up easy ones get used up you have to move on to harder ones so yeah i was gonna if yeah you're

The direct extraction could be modified in other ways, which sounds like it could be potentially the same with clay, lithium clay. Yeah. So, so there's, there's two trains of thought, like oil fields, you know, or yeah, as oil fields get used up, there's obviously less oil and you need to move on to other ones.

Theoretically, the same principle would apply to lithium. Like you're, what you're doing is just bringing up subsurface water instead of oil. Um, and the water has trapped or has had these salts dissolved in them because of the volcanic geologic formation.

So like the best lithium resources in the world for brine are in the Indian mountain range in South America. Um, there's a place called the lithium triangle. It's basically the, a triangle that covers Northern Chile, Northern Argentina and Southern Bolivia. It's where some of the assault flats in the world were formed. Um, and theoretically, um,

that would deplete but on the other hand a lot of these subsurface formations have consistently flowing water so it's like almost replenishing to an extent whereas oil and gas may not be replenishing because that is is deriving from you know fossils right uh but

the water is continuously flowing and it's basically becoming saturated or at least the salts are dissolving because of the rock formations. So, you know, we don't really know. But there is an argument to say that like the lithium is replenishing from the rock, from the volcanic formations that have formed hundreds of millions of years ago. So theoretically, you could synthetically make your own brine then if you've got the right

sort of minerals in a rock deposit yeah you need the water um yeah i don't know i don't know how liquid like simulating a volcano or something yeah i mean we make we make synthetic brine to test yeah but you get water and you pour salt in it right you pour lithium salt in it obviously yeah yeah so theoretically then it could be well not not endless but uh

Yeah, supply of lithium might not be a problem for a long time then, really, running out, from what it sounds like. I mean, everything in the world is finite to a certain extent. But yeah, we think that these deposits of lithium that are basically these brine deposits, that the brine is deriving from the rod formation and the water that is

you know, flowing underneath the ground, uh, could be replenishing. Yeah. Excellent. It's presumably similar around, um, sort of hydrothermal events and under the sea, I guess. I mean, that's very expensive to do now, but potentially in the future. Yeah. Yeah. Lithium brine, um, rigs potentially in the future. Yeah, exactly. Interesting. Okay. Um, yeah.

So we mentioned solid state batteries. Um, how, how close do you see to that? See them becoming mainstream? Uh, and what advantages would they offer over current lithium ion batteries? I think it's, I think it's closer than a lot of people think. Um, it's not one of these things that's like always 10 years away. Like there are already examples of companies commercially using solid state batteries. Uh,

Solid state batteries just means that there's no liquid electrolyte inside the battery. And that liquid electrolyte is basically used as a buffer. So in a battery, battery one-on-one, you have an anode, a cathode, and a separator that separates the two. And the lithium moves back and forth between the anode and the cathode. And when you're applying the battery to whatever it's powering,

uh the electron and the lithium leaves the lithium and goes and powers the thing and then when uh it's out of battery you plug it into the wall and the lithium goes back to the cathode and an extra electron comes from that power source onto the lithium and that is how you charge your battery

The liquid electrolyte is kind of this gel-ish buffer that separates the anode from the separator and the separator from the cathode because you don't want those things touching or else there'll be what's called thermal runaway, which will set a fire and cause the battery to explode.

The concept of a solid-state battery is to eliminate that liquid electrolyte, which thereby decreases the weight in the battery. And of course, we talked about if you have lower weight, then you have higher energy density. So the higher energy density, of course, the better the battery. And there's a lot of people that have now been working on this for 5, 10 years. And a lot of research...

R and D capital has gone into that. And like I said, they're already commercially being used for some applications when it will become mainstream. I mean, this could be within a handful of years, like a lot of Korean companies, Japanese companies, um, are producing these on large scale. Now it's about like going through, uh, safety cycling and making sure that they don't explode. Um,

But yeah, it's really on the verge of commercialization, I think. And with current lithium-ion batteries, like you mentioned, potential for them with thermal runaway and explosions. There's lots of videos of electric cars bursting into flames when they've had accidents and whatnot. Do you think that's putting people off buying EVs? No, I don't think so. I mean, at least not to a large extent. I mean, this is... The amount of times that happens is like... I mean...

It needs to be zero, right? But it's... I don't know how often that happens. I don't know if it's one in 100,000 or one in a million. I don't know the safety KPIs of how often a battery bursts into flames like that. I think it's so rare that it's not really... It might put off a few people that are...

what's the word where like they're always fearful like you know some catastrophic event happening but i don't think that it like really is affecting any meaningful amount of people it must be rare because when it is in the news it's big news so if it was common it's nobody would report on it right so yeah it would just be common everyday thing yeah it's fair enough um

Again, you've kind of touched on this, but beyond electric vehicles, what are some future applications for lithium batteries? Things like, say, grid-scale storage devices or even battery-powered airplanes? Yeah. So I did these calculations, and it was a long time ago. It might be a little rusty. But oil and gas, like gasoline or oil and gas also has energy density, right? Like how much energy it can...

produce per unit of mass and that is like 2,500 if I recall yeah call it 2,500 watt hours per kilogram batteries are still at you know people are really working to get from

200 to 300 yeah 200 to 300 i think solid state batteries are you know you're trying to get up to five six seven hundred maybe there are future theoretical iterations of lithium sulfur batteries or metal batteries or lithium air batteries they're up at like

1,000, 1,200 maybe, but that's still half the energy density of gasoline, right? So it's not as energy dense as gasoline yet. You know, this is where new innovations of batteries and Moore's law could come into play. But that, that,

that limits certain applications like commercial jetliners and things like that. You know, we're starting to see some EV tolls, electric vertical takeoff landing. They're calling them air taxis. Companies like Lilium, companies like Jetson, you know, there's a handful of other ones. So like it could be...

for electric, you know, EV tools. I think that another really, really big one could be humanoids. Uh, I know how, you know, Elon's been talking about a billion humanoids in the next, however many years, next 10 years, everybody will have a humanoid. These are theoretically the same battery packs as cars, but just on a smaller scale. Uh, if a, if a car, you know, I think

So like a regular, my, my Tesla model S is like a 75 kilowatt hour battery pack. They make ones that are a hundred, you know, most, most battery, like I think model threes, generally speaking are like 50 kilowatt hour battery packs. A humanoid might be five or 10, but if you have a billion of them, that could be a really, really big application for batteries.

So yeah, everything is moving towards electric, uh, everything. Um, and all of those things will need batteries. Of course. Yeah. Okay. Um, so with that in mind then, um, what steps do you think the lithium industry can take to ensure growing need for lithium doesn't lead to environmental or supply chain issues down the road? Yeah, I think that, um,

the esg mindset is is critical like we all have to remember why why we're doing this in the first place uh and that is to have like ultimate ultimately we're going through the energy transition to have a more or a cleaner more environmentally stable energy economy

The amount of carbon that humanity is pumping out into the atmosphere on like a, not even hourly, like minute, minutely basis is astronomical. And ultimately we need to stop emitting so much carbon. And that's the whole purpose of lithium. Like once you generate the energy, if you store it in batteries, it's,

that doesn't burn you're not creating the power by burning something uh you're doing it based on electrons moving so yeah i mean net net like lithium is better unequivocally um we obviously try to source it as sustainably as possible and we put a lot of thought into that um

But at the end of the day, having lithium and utilizing it is better than not having lithium and not utilizing it. True. So yeah, you see it always as being a, just an energy storage unit, whether the, the powered up using fossil fuels or even nuclear power stations, you're going to, yeah, it's just a way of saving energy, right? Like in a computer game, you can move around. Yeah. It's, uh, yeah, it's a way of saving it, but it's also a way of, of, of utilize utilizing it. Um,

Like I did these calculations as well. So driving an ice car compared to driving an EV car, man, I'm blanking on the exact calculation, but like the, the average car emits, I think it is, uh, four metric tons of CO2 on an annual basis. Um, so by having an EV, um,

you eliminate four metric tons of CO2 emission into the atmosphere. Even if you were charging your EV with energy or power that is derived from fossil fuels, it's still a lot, it's still like, I don't know this exact number, but it's still significantly less than if you were to use gasoline and burn that. Of course, yeah.

And then obviously if you are charging your battery with renewably produced energy, like wind or solar, then there's zero emissions in the whole circular ecosystem. So yeah, nuclear is the holy grail. If we can start producing power from nuclear on a real global basis, then it's all...

sustainably sourced, no carbon emissions. And then you use that power to power the batteries for mobile applications. Absolutely. Yeah. Then that are truly on the right path. Yeah. I'm all in for nuclear personally. And the fear of it appears to be disappearing. So that's a good sign. Yeah. Yeah. But I don't think we've even begun to see the potential applications for things like lithium batteries. Like I think you,

Some companies provide ways you can use your EV car as like a backup battery for your home, for example. That's one out of the box kind of way of thinking about it. Even with the human noise you mentioned, that could become like a portable, well not generator, but power pack for you. And yeah, any things you could potentially do with these things. Yeah. Fantastic. That's all of my questions. You've answered a lot without me asking you.

Thank you very much for that. Is there anything else you think we should mention before we end the interview? No, this was great, man. This was great. A lot of fun chatting with you, Chris. Thank you for your time, T. That was great. Very interesting. Thank you. That concludes this episode of Lexicon. Thank you all for tuning in and being our guest today. As always, follow our social media channels for the latest science and technology news.

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