Silicon Valley startup Lilac Solutions has a method to get lithium for batteries that’s cheaper, easier on the environment and less water-intensive than mining: it plans to pull it from the Great Salt Lake.
The U.S. could become a major supplier of lithium for batteries in the next few years after the Trump administration took a stake in the developer of a massive mine in Nevada. But Silicon Valley startup Lilac Solutions thinks it’s got a better idea that avoids the higher costs and environmental harms of traditional mining: extract the pricey mineral from briny water at oil fields and sites like the Great Salt Lake in Utah instead of digging it out of the ground.
Oakland-based Lilac, which has been refining its patented ion-exchange technology for lithium extraction since its founding nearly a decade ago, is raising $250 million to build its first commercial processing facility at the Great Salt Lake that could produce 5,000 metric tons of lithium per year by 2028. If all goes well, that’s just the start as the company looks to help energy companies pull lithium out of massive underground brine deposits that are often a byproduct of active oil and gas fields across the U.S., such as the Smackover Formation, the remnant of an ancient sea that stretches from Texas to Florida, according to CEO Raef Sully.
Compared to the amount of lithium that can be pulled from conventional mines, “brine is probably orders of magnitude larger,” Sully told Forbes.
“It’s a much smaller environmental footprint. You’re not leaving a huge open-cut mine behind.”
Brine projects in the Smackover region that companies such as Standard Lithium, ExxonMobil and Chevron are developing promise to yield hundreds of thousands of tons of lithium annually. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated in a study last year there could be up to 19 million tons of lithium in the Smackover in Arkansas alone. “We estimate there is enough dissolved lithium present in that region to replace U.S. imports of lithium and more,” said USGS hydrologist Katherine Knierim, the study’s principal researcher.
Despite the Trump administration’s dramatic reversal of federal efforts to curb climate change, including killing incentives for electric vehicle purchases, demand for lithium for batteries is on the rise. Globally, the lithium market was worth an estimated $28 billion last year and demand could increase 26% to nearly 1.5 million tons this year, according to Mining.com. That’s driven mainly by growing EV sales, the top battery user representing over 75% of all lithium use, as well as energy storage. And though U.S. EV sales aren’t rising as fast as in China and Europe, demand for batteries for energy storage by utilities is exploding as they seek to hang onto surplus power from large-scale solar and wind farms.
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Most of the lithium used in the U.S. originates in Chile and Argentina, but is processed and refined in China. The need to create a stable domestic supply is why Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the government agreed last month to take a 5% stake in Lithium Americas Corp., the Vancouver-based developer of the Thacker Pass mine in Nevada, in addition to a shared 5% stake with General Motors. When it becomes fully operational, later in the decade, Thacker Pass is expected to produce about 40,000 tons of battery-grade lithium a year.
For similar reasons, the Trump administration in July took a $400 million stake in MP Materials, operator of the only U.S. mine supplying rare-earth minerals needed for electric motor magnets.
Workers at Lilac’s pilot plant in the Great Salt Lake.
Lilac Solutions
While the Thacker Pass mine contains a massive amount of lithium, its development has faced years of fierce opposition from tribal groups in the area and environmentalists. The project is a sprawling open-pit mine, spanning nearly 18,000 acres, with an on-site sulfuric acid plant to process raw ore into commercial-grade lithium. It’s also expected to consume 1.7 billion gallons of water a year in an arid part of the U.S. Southwest that’s seeing worsening droughts as a result of climate change.
By contrast, direct lithium extraction from brine is essentially a matter of pumping liquid through a processing facility and then sending it back where it came from.
“It’s a much smaller environmental footprint,” Sully said. “You’re not leaving a huge open-cut mine behind. You’re pulling brine out of the ground … and then after it’s finished, brine is going back into the ground. So you’re not really disturbing the water table. It’s much, much smaller in terms of land usage and environmental impact.”
Utah’s Department of Environmental Quality hasn’t identified problems with Lilac’s Great Salt Lake plans and is reviewing results of its recently completed feasibility study, said Benjamin Holcomb, who manages the agency’s standards and technical services
Globally, two-thirds of lithium come from evaporative ponds of brine, mainly in South America, in which the pricey metal is collected as a residue. Though the kind of direct lithium extraction, or DLE, approach Lilac is pursuing isn’t widespread in the U.S. yet, it’s in commercial use by other companies in South America and China, said Cameron Perks, a director with London-based researcher Benchmark Minerals Intelligence.
“Where I think it gets interesting is that by 2035, DLE processing technology will produce 51% of brine supply.”
CEO Raef Sully
Lilac Solutions
Crucially, Lilac believes its approach is also cheaper than mining. The mineral’s price has been volatile in recent years, but it currently sells for about $10,000 a ton, which is about what it costs to mine a ton of lithium. While the concentration of lithium in brine from the Great Salt Lake is only about a quarter or a third as much as what’s found in particularly rich brines in Chile, Argentina or the Smackover, Sully estimates Lilac’s production costs in Utah will be about $7,000 per ton. Brine from the Smackover Formation, with a higher lithium content, may lower the production cost to about $5,000 per ton, or half the cost of mining.
If he’s right, that could result in dramatically cheaper EV batteries someday.
Ion-exchange technology has been around for a while, commonly used in water-softening systems (in which calcium and magnesium ions that make water “hard” are removed as it passes through resin beads). Lilac’s solution uses specially engineered beads it manufactures in Nevada that extract tiny bits of lithium as the pumped-in brine passes over them. Collected material is rinsed with a diluted acid solution, yielding a pure lithium-ion solution that Lilac then processes into battery-grade lithium, Sully said.
It’s far from the only company with a high-tech approach for pulling lithium from brine. Last year, researchers at Stanford University said they’d also developed an extraction technique capable of producing lithium at less than 40% of the cost of mining, while also using less water and chemicals. Likewise, scientists at Rice University, Penn State and Argonne National Laboratory have also announced promising breakthroughs.
Lilac Solutions’ pilot plant next to the Great Salt Lake.
Lilac Solutions
California remains optimistic that its Salton Sea region, rich with super-hot volcanic brine brewed deep underground in the San Andreas fault, could be a source of cheap lithium. So far, however, extracting and separating it from all the other materials that brine contains–including arsenic, lead, cadmium and even radioactive elements–has proven more challenging than initially hoped. Lilac briefly pursued a project there in 2020 with startup Controlled Thermal Resources, but abandoned it soon after.
“There are challenges related to the very high temperature and the materials, including toxic materials, that are dissolved into it,” Lilac founder Snydacker told Forbes in 2022. “You need a way to handle those hazmat issues and put everything back underground.”
Those toxic elements aren’t an issue at the Great Salt Lake. And brine from the Smackover Formation looks far more attractive to energy and minerals companies because the concentration of lithium is so high, especially in Arkansas.
“When you get into the bottom of Arkansas, you get 300 [parts per million] up to a little over 600 ppm, which is pretty prime,” said Erik Pollok, a geoscientist who manages the Stable Isotope lab at the University of Arkansas. “There’s good evidence that the Texas side of the border has concentrations that might even exceed that. It’s really an Arkansas-Texas play, and maybe a little bit in Louisiana. As you go further to the east, the economics don’t bear out.”
Bethany Sam, with the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, speaks in opposition to the Thacker Pass lithium mine in December 2023 in Reno, Nevada.
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So while Lilac is developing its own plant in Utah, its goal is to supply its tech to larger firms going forward. The Great Salt Lake facility it’s planning follows a successful test project there as well as in Argentina, a partnership with Neptune Energy in Germany and work in other regions. Sully said the company has raised about “two-thirds” of the $250 million targeted for the Utah facility, and wants to complete the round in the first quarter of 2026. Since its founding by president and CTO Dave Snydacker in 2016, Lilac has raised $315 million from backers including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BMW i Ventures and Earthshot Ventures.
“There’s so much diversity in the types of brines to get out there that clearly one technology isn’t going to take the whole business, but I think there’s a chance for us to be in the top three to five,” he said. “I want to be part of building that domestic supply chain here in the United States.”