Direct Brine Lithium Extraction: Our Investment in Lilac Solutions
We are very excited to announce our investment in Lilac Solutions’ Series B financing round. Lilac Solutions has developed and patented the world’s first modern, high-performance, and environmentally friendly lithium extraction technology. With the investment, Lilac will ramp production of its ion exchange beads, expand its teams of engineers and field operators, and begin to deploy its technology globally.
The market for lithium is well established and demand has been historically (relatively) consistent. However, lithium is a key component to electric vehicle batteries, and at current levels of production, there will be a massive shortage of lithium worldwide needed to supply the aggressive ramping of the electric vehicles widely expected to take place over the coming decade.
The world’s largest salt flat, located at Laguna Verde, Bolivia.
Lilac’s technology is poised to unlock additional reserves of lithium in brines—naturally occurring deposits of salt water—due to its direct extraction technology (DLE), which is based on an ion exchange process that flows brine directly through proprietary modules to extract the Lithium. Here is a snapshot of the process:
While there are a variety of technologies being applied in this space, including alumina absorbents, phosphate precipitation, solvent extraction, and open pit mining, they all have shortcomings in the following areas:
Lithium selectivity. This is the efficiency or rate of recovery of the lithium extraction operation. In other words, how much lithium can be recovered from a given amount of brine. This has implications for the extracted cost and time required to recover the lithium reserve. Lilac is ~10,000x faster than today’s techniques.
Process durability. Brines are famously heterogenous and can contain a wide variety of elements, such as sodium, magnesium, and calcium. The durability of the extraction technique (in this case the replacement rate of the proprietary absorbent) is crucial to the overall cost of the lithium that is extracted as the more absorbent that is used, the higher the cost of the end-product. Lilac’s process is highly durable, which can unlock much of the world’s latent lithium resources that are currently too low-grade to be conventionally harvested.
Environmental impact. Lithium extraction today is not a “green” process, which both contributes to CO2 emissions and can be risky to local fresh water supplies. Lilac’s novel approach will both remove hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 pollution, as well as provide near-zero risk to water supplies.
Lilac’s ion exchange bead offers an unparalleled combination of these three factors (selectivity, durability, and impact) that enables Lilac to offer a uniquely high-performance lithium extraction system applicable to a wide range of brine resources.
From Left to Right: Lilac Solutions’ CEO Dave Snydacker and BMW i Ventures’ Scott Walbrun and Kasper Sage, at Lilac Solutions’ pilot plant in Oakland, CA.
With this investment, we are incredibly excited to join other sustainability focused investors, including Lowercarbon Capital and T. Rowe Price, that are supporting Lilac on its mission to scale lithium supply for the electric vehicle era.