(Also check my entire Lithium deep dive!)

with Andreas Müller – CEO at GF

GF is a sustainability and innovation leader aiming to provide superior customer value across three Divisions enabling the safe transport of liquids and gases, lightweight casting components, and high-precision manufacturing technologies.

Slider – the 222 Years Start-Up

Full Video – The 222 Years Start-Up

Teaser 1 – Can GF be the perfect partner for Start Ups?

Teaser 2 – Sustainability can only be sustainable if it makes economical sense

What we covered:

How a 222-Year-Old Company Innovates: the secrets of GF and its three divisions

Why Lithium Production Needs a Leap Frog, How GF is Helping and which solution comes with the best odds

What Sustainability Means for Lithium Production and EVs, and GF’s perspective to that challenge

How Old Unicorns Interact with Cool Kids: GF’s Approach to Startup Collaboration, and what it Takes to Lead a two-century old corporation

Why the Future of Lithium Production Hinges on Symbiotic Relationships between the various actors in the value chain

How GF’s Strategy Aims to Balance Profitability and Environmental Impact and Why People are at the Heart of GF’s Success

Why a ‘Startup Spirit’ is Crucial in Large Corporations and what lessons from GF you can apply in your own business

What the Key Success Factors in Direct Lithium Extraction Projects are and how one can influence those

How you can Tackle the Challenge of ‘Cultural Clash’ with Startups by copying some of GF’s tactics

Why ‘Stopping’ can be as Important as ‘Starting’ in a Business Journey – and how that’s maybe the best business advice you will ever get

How we need to reinvent Sustainability in the industrial sector and how GF and others are leading the pack and showing the way

Why Ultra-Precision is the New Gold Standard in e-Mobility

How GF is Closing the Loop: From Water Reclamation to Non-Revenue Water

Why GF Believes Profitability and Sustainability are Two Sides of the Same Coin and how that translate in very concrete terms

Why Going Global is Essential in Today’s Business Environment to have a substantial impact and how GF’s experience and support can be game changers

Why GF is Targeting Non-Revenue Water: A Look at the Future of Water Management and how GF’s Clean Water Foundation is Changing Lives Across the Globe

The EV Revolution from a GF Piping Systems, Casting Solutions & Machining Solutions perspective, the Water Sector trends GF is watching out for, building a cool place to work, water scarcity as a powerful shaping for the Water Sector, what GF does to solve the pressing need for clean water in remote areas… and more!

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Teaser 3 – Why you should always invest in sustainability

Teaser 4 – The Business Advice you shall apply Straight Away (from a $5 Billion Company CEO)

Teaser: The 222 Year Old Unicorn

Resources:

Come say hi to Andreas on LinkedIn

Check GF’s website

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Teaser: The 222 Year Old Start Up

Editorial: The 222-Year Old Start Up that supports Lithium’s Leap Frog

If you’ve listened to this Season 9 of the podcast, you’ve noticed how we covered the lithium and water nexus topic from a wide variety of angles. We’ve had the helicopter view with Tony Strobbe, the project developers’ inputs with Robert Mintak, Christopher Brown, Cris Moreno, and Andy Robinson, and the technology stories with Teague Egan, Devesh Sharma, Ben Sparrow, Chris Wyres, and Jim Rieke.

Spoiler alert, given the success of this season and the topics we covered, we will continue the exploration as one of the topics of the next ones, so stay tuned; I’m currently interviewing more fascinating companies, and as I’m writing this, I’m about to take off to Argentina partially for that.

Still, there’s one aspect we had not covered so far, despite regular hints across all the episodes. Direct Lithium Extraction is a high-flow/high-stakes application. Evaporation Ponds involve a lot of water as well, and when it comes to lithium refining, be it from hard rock or evaporation ponds, you’ve got a sizeable bunch of waterish processes, which require to convey fluids, water, and chemicals.

As a process person, that’s the boring part. I know it; I’m a process person.

Piping Systems: Boring, yet vital

Because what can a piping system do, right? Work smoothly, and then it gets zero praise; it just exists, and nobody cares. Or not work, being blocked, leaking, becoming a hazard, and a net loss, and then everybody’s aware, and everybody is pissed.

So I thought it might be worth looking into a piping system company’s view on that lithium green field. To discuss how they’re in to help, how, at what stage, and what they have to propose. Of course, I’m a little bit biased in that story, as I am working for a piping system company.

But there’s more than just pipes, fittings, valves, sensors, engineering, prefabrication and process automation in today’s episode, as I reached out to the CEO of GF to come discuss all of that on my microphone, which means not only GF Piping Systems, but also Casting Solutions and Machining Solutions, which offers an interesting glimpse into the new Electric Vehicle vertical.

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi Andreas, welcome to the show! 

Andreas Muller: Hello, Antoine.

Antoine Walter: I’m super excited to have that conversation with you. I’m saying that quite often on the microphone because I’m super excited quite often to speak with people, but here, It’s quite of a special constellation. You’re the boss of the boss of my boss! So I have to make sure I don’t say anything too weird.

A postcard from Schaffhausen

We’re sitting together in Schaffhausen, and I have that tradition to open every interview with a postcard. So what can you tell me about Schaffhausen I might ignore by now?

Andreas Muller: It’s just a beautiful city! We also have the pleasure of having the biggest waterfalls in Europe. It’s not in height, but it’s in volume of water.

So you can also say that we have the «Niagara falls» here. I know, obviously, it’s the Rhine Falls, but I think this makes this place very livable. It’s obviously also the birth city of GF.

Antoine Walter: I counted before starting that interview, and it might be episode 181 of that Podcast. All of this episode start with this sentence: «This podcast is brought to you by GF Piping Systems.»

Introducing: GF – a 222 year old unicorn

Antoine Walter: I think we never officially defined what a GF piping system is and what the «GF» part in the «GF piping system» is. So maybe you can give me an elevator pitch to the company in general and then your touch to it?

Andreas Muller: GF is an industrial pioneer in Switzerland. Today, GF has three divisions, and one of the divisions is piping systems.

The other divisions are machining solutions, producing machine tools for all sorts of applications, milling, electronic discharging, laser taxing, and so on and so forth.

And last but not least, we have casting solutions. A group which provides lightweight components to the car/automotive industry.

GF is an amazing company with great people with a lot of potential to become better every day and deliver to its customers superior value.

Antoine Walter: Talking of value, what’s the size of the company?

Andreas Muller: GF is approximately 4 billion in terms of sales, and we have 15,000 people, we are present in 40 countries with 80 production companies and overall 150 companies across the world.

Andreas Müller leads GF for four and a half year

Antoine Walter: So you’re leading GF for three years now?

Andreas Muller: No, Four and a half years.

Antoine Walter: I hope you don’t hold that against me…

Andreas Muller: Absolutely, I Will!

Andreas Müller climbed the entire GF corporate ladder

Antoine Walter: But you’ve been with the company for 28 years, right?

Andreas Muller:  Exactly.

Antoine Walter: Can you still remember your first day at GF?

Andreas Muller: That would be a little bit too much asking. 28 years is quite a time! But I can tell I definitely left my first-day understanding that I didn’t know anything.

Antoine Walter: And how did that evolve over 28 years? When did you start to get a feeling that you understood something?

Andreas Muller: That didn’t take that long! But obviously, when you start as a youngster in a company, you first have a view only on the department you have been employed in, and suddenly you’re gonna start to learn more.

But hey, there is a company behind, there is a corporation behind, there are even other divisions behind. And I think that is something which evolves over time.

And I think it didn’t take me that long because I was always curious. I wanted to learn! What is this company for?

But also, I may have to say, my father-in-law was actually 45 years with this company, so I did understand that GF has its headquarters in Schaffhausen, which was obviously very important when I applied for this first job.

By the way, I was a product manager for polypropylene and polyethylene. That was my first job.

A groundbreaking experience in Australia

Antoine Walter: Across your path, you had several positions. If you have to just take one story or one experience you had over these 28 years, which is the one you would pick?

Andreas Muller: This is really hard because I have done so many things, and I really enjoyed so many things…

But I have to say, one of the challenges I really had, when I just was freshly married and we had a son, I was asked whether I would actually embark to Australia and gonna support building up and integrating an acquired company there.

I think that was really cool because it was back in these days when you had a 24-hour journey to get to Australia. So you’re really gonna leave behind what you have established here. You have to socially, newly embed yourself and integrate yourself. The task was really very challenging but very interesting.

It was a combination of finance, operations, logistics, and customer service in the internal sales organization. So it was quite a big jump for me.

How Andreas became interested in Lithium as GF’s CEO

Antoine Walter: You’re offering me a very smooth transition because, actually, Australia, right now, as we speak, is the biggest place for lithium worldwide, where a lot of lithium is mined.

By the time you were in Australia, was it already a thing?

Andreas Muller: It was not so much a thing back then. We have been in the north part, we have been in mines. We have been supplying our sensor technologies or our ball valves. It was a good business, but it was not so much about lithium back then.

Antoine Walter: When do you get interested in lithium? What’s your driver? What’s the starting point?

Andreas Muller: When e-mobility became much more present to us as a corporation. I think everyone started to look into it. How does this battery technology evolve, and how can you actually make battery technology sustainable and ensure that an EV is sustainable?

It needs sustainable battery technology and components to turn an EV sustainable

You obviously need sustainable battery technology. That’s where you learn that lithium is one of the key ingredients. That was the moment when I started to look into it.

I obviously also learned about these evaporation pond processes by talking to my piping systems colleagues. Which also led me to learn about the refining processes and hard-rock mines.

So yes, it really drew my attention because it is something that human beings need to convert themself from fossil-based propulsion systems to more sustainable propulsion systems. That was the moment when I was really triggered, and I’m always technically interested. So I also engaged with the Fraunhofer Institute.

So we invited them when I was at Casting Solutions to give us presentations. This is quite a few years ago. In a nutshell: that was always on my agenda, at least, to be somehow informed.

How important is Lithium for GF?

Antoine Walter: You mentioned all the workshops in the world, and how GF is quite a large corporation. I guess you must be excited by many topics all year long!

Is Lithium just one of those, or is it really one topic you particularly invested time to try to wrap your head around it and understand it?

Andreas Muller: I think it is not the only one, obviously, but it is one of the few where we have, as a corporation, a really great potential. You’re absolutely right: with all our technologies, we are present in so many exciting industries.

We’re at the forefront; when Apple is developing its new gadgets at the same time, we might gonna supply one of our milling machines, or IDM machines, to SpaceX. So we are part of this mission.

This really gives us a lot of excitement, and I think sustainability overall is driving a lot of new business opportunities.

A lithium revolution needs to happen: GF intends to support it

Coming back to lithium extraction or direct lithium extraction. Let’s get that straight: we might need six times more lithium in the next 6-10 years than what we produce today.

This will require some new technologies, and new processes to service or supply these new needs.

Looking then at the direct extraction of lithium, this is really a process that can overcome these bottlenecks because evaporation processes, or hard rock mining, all have their downsides. 

Direct Lithium Extraction will be a game changer

Direct lithium extraction has the beauty that it can be a byproduct of another process. We have seen it combined with geothermal applications, but also other applications like producing other chemicals, taking the slurry, or taking the brine and «just» extracting a new material next to another material already being extracted.

This will make this process, going forward, a very attractive and very efficient field.

It also has huge advantages if compared to traditional technologies that produce or process lithium.

It reduces CO2 emissions by up to 90% – this is also by itself already a reason to look into it.

So I give it quite a lot of credit, and obviously, with GF Piping Systems, we are perfectly placed and perfectly geared to support this industry, developing their processes.

How will GF support DLE players?

Antoine Walter: If I get you right, there’s mining, which might have been an opportunity for GF in the past.

There are evaporation ponds, which you have supported as well, but the big focus is direct lithium extraction. How do you intend to support it at GF? 

Andreas Muller: We are always good to look into a market segment, to dedicate resources for a special market segment, to learn the language of this industry, of this segment. And then ultimately support, which is also part of our vision with intelligent solutions.

We have resources available, we have a pool of engineers. We have a deep knowledge of chemical processes. So combining this into these new technologies can be supportive of this industrialization process of direct lithium extraction.

GF can play a pivotal role

I think here, GF can play a pivotal role. We have prefabrication centers around the world. These centers can also support our customers to convert their ideas into Skids, which can then be used in the production process.

So I think the expertise handling chemicals or even ultra-pure chemicals, sometimes you’re going to need in the refinery process. Remember: a lithium being used in a battery needs to be super pure.

Antoine Walter: In this mini-series, I’ve been talking with companies like Veolia, who underlined how:

Jim Rieke: Some of these players in the battery markets, for example, are smaller companies. Being able to get those projects financed is a lot more feasible when you have someone like Veolia providing the process design!

Antoine Walter: When a company like Veolia is involved in a project, they also bring their credibility.

Because they’re well established, a large conglomerate with a broad history and with a track record of technology working.

How GF can enhance a lithium extraction project’s credibility

It makes me think that maybe GF as a player can have kind of a similar role if you have a process which requires to have water flowing all the time. 24 7, 365 days a year, and you say: “look, we engage our reputation, we engage our engineers, fabrication, everything you listed.»

That may sound like a good asset for a junior company which is trying to develop a project and needs to secure some financing and gain trust from the markets to invest the one, two, or three billion dollars of CapEx you need to take a project off the ground. Does stats make sense to you?

Andreas Muller: It definitely makes sense, and in many aspects, this process relies on very reliable piping systems.

If you’re gonna convey acid, if you’re gonna convey media, chemicals, whatever sorts of fluids. I think you’re gonna rely on that you have a leak-free installation.

Successful Lithium Extraction depends on reliable piping systems

Antoine Walter: That’s something we heard from Robert Mintak, the CEO of Standard Lithium.

Robert Mintak: What’s overlooked by analysts and commentators is it has to be a completely integrated process. You’re doing it 24 hours a day, every minute of every hour of the day. At a commercial scale, thousands of gallons per minute need to come into your facility, and it needs to operate in a way that at two o’clock in the morning, an operator is gonna make sure that the plant is running and that if there is an issue, that it’s addressable. 

Removing novelty from that as best you can and using industrial processes that you have confidence in that’s critical.

Andreas Muller: On the DLE side, the reputation of GF is that we can provide this leak-free installation with broad knowledge and also be one of the pioneers when it comes to plastic piping systems. I think you know our name.

Our brand is recognized as one of the industrial leaders when it comes to piping systems. We’re sourcing our credibility out of the experience we have accumulated in so many other projects and going to combine this now and bring it to an industrialization of direct lithium extraction.

GF’s support starts in the pilot phase and continues all the way to the commercial scale

We’re happy to support the pilot steps, not only in the pilot but then also coming ultimately to the first installed industrialized direct lithium extraction process.

Yes, it reinforces the credibility of the ones who are gonna have to invest in such production because, obviously, you don’t want to have this production unit failing, and you also want to have a sustainable solution.

Plastic Piping is a way for Lithium Miners to double down on Sustainability

I think in many aspects, yes, you could go for stainless steel, but you shall probably go for plastics.

Think about it. You may have a much higher longevity of your piping systems if you select and choose the right plastic piping systems.

It’s not too much of a secret. You also have to pick the right plastic material according to the chemicals you’re gonna convey.

But what’s sometimes overlooked is that the design of plastic piping systems is of utmost importance to make it last much longer. We have seen that with our installations, replacing other solutions, you can increase the longevity of that kind of installation by a couple of years.

Sometimes you’re actually gonna take it from six months only to five years, or even 10 years!

I think this adds value not only to the company which is extracting or producing the lithium, but it also adds value to the people because we have a much more sustainable solution.

GF is already quite active in the lithium extraction field

Antoine Walter: You mentioned experience in that field. Do you have some projects you can talk about?

Andreas Muller: Yes. We have projects like the one you discussed on your podcast: we’re suppliers to Vulcan Energy.

We are working together with several companies that are quite new in this field. I think that, as we speak, we’re piloting with five companies. It makes a lot of fun, and I think it is a business development where piping systems are really putting resources in.

Antoine Walter: Now, shameless plug. I am actually that resource GF Piping Systems is putting in right now.

So if you’d like to discuss your project and how we can support it, just reach out to me! 

Lithium production needs a leap frog – GF is willing to help!

Andreas Muller: We see going forward, there is huge potential. If you read the most conservative figures, they speak of some 20 billion that need to be invested in that kind of production technologies over the next 10 years. The lithium production needs to be increased by six times, as we already discussed.

That is quite a lot if you consider how much is already installed. Again, hard rock mining has its limits, such as transportation or the refining process that shall sit next to the hard rock mines. And sure, evaporation ponds can see an increase in their efficiency with better installations, as you’ve touched on your podcast as well, right?

Antoine Walter: Absolutely, that’s something Teague Egan, the CEO of EnergyX, underlined; there’s quite some potential left in those incumbent producers: 

Teague Egan: This massive evaporation takes about 18 months to yield lithium; they can be 15 square miles in footprint, and most importantly, they only recover about 30 to 40% of the available lithium that enters into the system. For us, there’s a lot of inefficiency in all three of those metrics.

We want something that is a lot smaller in a footprint that doesn’t harm the natural environment. We want something that takes a lot shorter time than the 18 months. And we want something that can recover hopefully near a hundred or at least over 90% of the lithium that enters the system. So you need to actually optimize these kind of sets.

Andreas Muller: But are you endlessly going to build these evaporation processes? I don’t think so. So Direct Lithium Extraction seems to be one of the most sustainable concepts to produce lithium, which also would then solve one of the topics that you keep going with this battery technology. This is the current most evident way you know that you propel cars with lithium polymer cells or lithium battery-based energy sources.

How does a 222 year old company successfully interact with the “Cool Kids”?

Antoine Walter: You mentioned a lot of times the sustainability word, so I’m gonna come to that. It’s a very important topic, but right before that, I have a devil’s advocate question. Sorry for that one. You mentioned Vulcan. Vulcan was my guest in that series. Cris Moreno, their CEO, was sharing a lot of insights on that microphone. We’ve also looked into Standard Lithium’s path with Robert Mintak, their CEO, and Andy Robinson, their President, and explored their direct lithium extraction path.

We’ve talked of new companies like EnergyX, HeliosX… Where I’m heading with that is that you mentioned also five pilots with junior companies. Here’s my devil’s advocate question. GF is a 222 years old company.

How do you avoid having a cultural clash when you’re working with a very junior company, a very agile startup company?

Andreas Muller: Now, this is a very good question, Antoine.

It’s a cultural exercise for a large group to keep a start-up spirit

But since you are also one of the GF employees, you have seen that we have put a lot of emphasis on our culture development. One of these culture elements is that we would like to have a very open mind.

We have a value, which we call: «learning is about having an open mind, and what will you change?»

And we inspire our people that they’re gonna take this kind of opportunities, being curious and learn and going to collaborate and cooperate with startup companies. But is it always the best to embed a startup company in an organization? I don’t think so, but that’s not necessarily only a GF issue.

I think it is more about that the people are inspired and motivated to take the opportunity and to develop their own approach and engage with startup companies, and we want to have this kind of modern style or this openness within our organization. It’s one of the reasons why we have put culture as one of the key pillars in our strategy for 2025.

We are actively working on this culture. 10,000 people underwent these experiments to experience our values, and this is actually something where we also foster the teamwork on the one end side. But also being open, and therefore, we should somehow be a sound base for startup companies.

How Andreas Müller, GF’s CEP, gives some of his time to the Start-Up Ecosystem

I just came, by the way, back from Venture. Venture is a Swiss-based startup accelerator incubator.

We have been discussing about 300 startup companies being on the list to be nominated when we are gonna engage with them. When I talk to these people, I think we can talk the same language. I talk about experience in a business, what makes a business successful, and what makes a startup successful to be in a business.

It’s not a cultural glitch. You can really smoothly intertwine these kind of things. And yes, I want us to have a little bit of this startup spirit.

After all, GF is a (very) successful start-up itself

If you consider our founder – it sounds odd, right, that you still quote a founder, which is, by the way, turning 250 years this year – but he was a maniac. He was passionate about innovation.

GF was always about innovations. Now you could actually even say, if you’re gonna look at the market cap today, we are a pretty old unicorn, right? If you think about that one.

And I think this kind of DNA is still within our organization. And I think this curiosity about new technologies, about innovations, is a very good nudge to collaborate with startup companies. And as you may have seen, all our three divisions have engaged with startup accelerators.

Defining a win-win relationship with the Start-Up Ecosystem

We look into that one, we wanna be part of this community, but we also have to be careful that we gonna make this process digestible for both sides, right? I don’t wanna have to startup companies always being on the hook just to print their best idea, to gonna find the investors. 

A customer-supplier relation for a startup company is, in many aspects, the better solution to have a smooth and seamless integration because, as you already mentioned, you know to me in an earlier discussion, if you can secure volumes from a startup company, when they are able to deliver a product, they get financing.

Look, there’s already a customer, a traditional company. We can sometimes provide resources much easier for them. We can enable them, or we can give them access to institutions because we have it. We have laboratories. We can tell ’em, look, we co-host you. We are just currently gonna do something like that in our casting solutions divisions in Germany.

A very amazing concept to produce special alloys, such as in Cornell, in a super-efficient way, which is only a fifth of the CO2 emissions compared to the legacy technologies. And we have given them in one of our factories, the facility, the space where they can now actually install their pilot installations with obviously all oral help they can use our procurement department.

I think this. Gives much more of a support. We are dynamic and young enough to do so.

Antoine Walter: What you describe sounds like a symbiotic relationship. You explained how lithium production needs to be multiplied by six towards the end of the decades and by a multiple, depends who you believe, 15, 20, 30 by 2050.

This is the typical growth rate of the unicorns you mentioned. When I spoke on that microphone with Chris Wyres, the CEO of Evove, he mentioned how:

Chris Wyres: Growth is limited by three things, really, capital, obviously you’ve gotta be funded well enough. And the second aspect you’ve gotta consider outside of capital and the attractiveness of the business to its end customers is really how quickly you can scale your manufacturing. Because if you can’t supply products, then you can’t make sales!

Antoine Walter: And there I could see a fit. Because you mentioned 80 production sites worldwide for GF, right. So the infrastructure is existing. What GF doesn’t do is GF doesn’t have processes or doesn’t have that end of the equation, but the startups do.

So it sounds like the yin and yang coming together. I acknowledge I might be subjective on that! 

Andreas Muller: It’s a fair judgment because what we also see very often, when you have new technologies, if you can combine it, then with traditional companies which have a sound footprint across the world, you obviously can scale it much faster.

That would be one of our perks, to really take the experience, which we have won, for example, in the project in Germany, but also in the US, that we can actually use that kind of knowhow and going to bring it to other places.

But even so, when one of these companies wanna build up their facilities across the world, GF is ready to fit and suit their demands across the world.

With our 17 fabrication centers at Piping Systems, I think we can really provide anywhere on this planet a standardized, high-level, quality solution. We can actually build the skids to their drawings, but we can also help them to engineer their skids as long as we understand their processes. This is really something where yes, we can help to scale.

GF’s involvement with the EV Revolution doesn’t stop at GF Piping Systems

Antoine Walter: You mentioned the link to GF Piping Systems, which is pretty natural, I would say, in the Direct Lithium Extraction. How about Casting Solutions? Casting solutions is pretty involved in the EV revolution. What’s the opportunity there, and is there a link to that lithium wave?

Andreas Muller: One of the links is obviously the propulsion concept. Having an e-car today, the most common battery technology is based on lithium and lithium-ion.

Ultimately, this battery pack comes with some weight. Weight is something that you don’t want to have when you have mobility, particularly individual mobility. Take a body mass of 80 to 100 kilograms, and you have a car of 2.5 tons.

The inefficiency is given by itself, and therefore it is of utmost importance to make cars light. And our casting solutions enable sustainable mobility by providing lightweight components into a car build.

GF Casting Solutions takes it to the next level

So, for example, you take a shock tower, you can build a shock tower out of sheet metals, bend them, weld them.

Maybe the shock tower is eight kilograms. A shock tower is something where the suspension is connected to your car. So you have two in the front. You have two in the back. Now you can actually produce then out of aluminum in a one-shot concept, which obviously streamlines already the production process, and it has only half the weight.

So you reduce the weight by making a car lighter with the technology GF can provide into a car. Compared to a conventional car, that car can be up to 200 grams lighter, which obviously helps a lot in terms of sustainability and e-cards by its nature because of the battery I have here. So you’re gonna have that one.

But nevertheless, we also look into the propulsion technology itself. So, for example, we are in battery rehousing. We are producing battery rehousing where you can host then all the cells in it, so to make a lightweight concept or the cooling processes. So we have one company which looks into this cooling process.

GF Machining Solutions also has its say!

Last but not least, we are also producing the e-engine housing. But let me also tell you one story that I’m always very passionate about it, so our machining solutions divisions with it. High precision machine tools are also al when it comes to making e mobility very energy efficient. An e-engine consists of a stator and a rotor.

A stator is some 300 sheets piled on each other with an insulation in between, and the rotor is the same. And now the precision of the gap between the rotor and the stator needs to be super accurate because as more accurate it is in a smaller, the gap is as more energy efficiency you have. You don’t want to have a short circuit because that would ultimately destroy a part of your e-engine.

And now our machine tool solutions come into play. A STEM to produce these sheets is approximately five meters, sometimes four meters, and two meters in size. So you have eight processes to make one sheet. And that needs to be within the tolerance of one to two microns only, and our machine tools can produce the stamps with an accuracy of one to two microns to produce ultimately this entire stamp being used to produce this sheet, which is piled up.

And nowadays, they need to be so accurate and sustainability in terms of. Many aspects always comes along with ultra-precision when you think about fuel cells and other things and applications. And here, our ultra-precise machine tools enable the industry.

Antoine Walter: If you look at a group like Volkswagen, which is currently turning its strategy on its heads and going almost full electric, they’ve invested from the car manufacturing down to the battery production down now to lithium extraction. There are major stakeholders in many projects we see around the world. That means that potentially they would be dealing with all the divisions of GF at different stages of the process. So it’s a vertical speaking to another vertical.

Andreas Muller: You are perfectly right. You’re absolutely perfectly right. We’re gonna talk exactly on all these various levels with our customers, which makes this corporation so, Super interesting being an enabler for sustainability, not only in a single business field but in multiple business fields.

Sustainability is a North Star for GF’s Strategy

Antoine Walter: You mentioned sustainability, which I do get, is one of the key drivers of GF’s strategy.

I think last year, for the first time, you reported your ESG and financial results together. What’s the reason behind that?

Andreas Muller: This is just a logical consequence that you’re gonna combine your financial and sustainability reporting. It’s also partially obviously driven, going forward, by regulations.

So you anyway gonna have to do it. And since the business itself is so much intertwined, our vision is to be a sustainability and innovation leader. So, therefore, it’s a logical consequence that a business which is intertwined with sustainability, is also being reported that way. But I would like to say something which is super important.

Sustainability can only be sustainable if it is making commercial sense. If you think that sustainable solutions can be inferior in terms of the economical benefit being provided to your customers, I think that would be the wrong narrative.

Our sustainable solutions are even more economical, and this is something that GF has to look into!

The sustainability rule in GF Piping System’s product development

Then since you are also a part of piping systems, you know exactly that anything that we are newly developing needs to have a sustainable benefit. 

We will not bring any product to the market which doesn’t address the sustainability needs of our customers. And this is also valid for direct lithium extraction!

It is about that we can actually have the flow control automized or done more efficiently. Or for example, we have recently now in investigated into a new PVDF material. Because as you may know, PVDF is a fluor polymer, so it’s not so easy in terms of recycling, but we have found solutions where we can actually produce a recycled PVDF system, which we can provide exactly in that kind of application.

We can even give a second life to certain piping systems. But this is always important to look into it, and this is creating a benefit for both sides. For gf, on the one hand side, being able to use a re-grain and the customer may benefit from availability, but maybe also some advantages in terms of the properties, and he can use the PVDF piping systems instead to maybe go through a downgrade to a PP system.

Antoine Walter: You mentioned Vulcan, and I think Vulcan’s tagline is Zero Carbon Lithium. Indeed, remember what Chris Moreno told us: 

Cris Moreno: Vulcan is a unique company. We’re aiming to become the world’s first integrated lithium chemicals company and renewable energy producer, and we’re doing all this with net zero greenhouse emissions. And not using any fossil fuels in our process.

Antoine Walter: There are some companies like Vulcan, which really take that at the heart of what they do, and some others do their best to do as sustainable as they can, but they’re also looking at the spot price of lithium thinking: I need to push it out of the door right now because that spot price might go down anytime soon.

Does Sustainability always come with the best reward?

And I better take the profit. That’s a tricky question I’m asking you because I know you have a financial background. If you had to choose finance or sustainability, profitability, or environmental impact?

Andreas Muller: To me, that’s a question of motivation, which can be instilled by the profitability of such a product.

What do I mean? If the profit is gigantic, you might lose your track on optimizing your process. But in general terms, if you insist on a very sustainable process, normally, it comes along with a very efficient production process. If you wanna avoid energy waste in a process, that comes along, that you have less CO2 emitted in a process.

So, if you don’t need energy, you have less cost. In my opinion, sustainability is never contradicting improving a process’ efficiency.

Now, if I would have insanely high margins, would I dedicate a portion of that one to become more sustainable? Absolutely. I would. Absolutely, I would. I think this is my conviction, but as I said, it needs to be commercially sound.

When I look at our own corporation, whenever we are able to reduce CO2 emissions, it comes along with a process optimization. It’s less thermal heat required in a process. It’s less material in a fitting itself. It’s a much more efficient injection molding process. It always comes a lung, with an optimization, which is also having an economical benefit.

You should not actually decouple them. If you start to decouple, I think that will be the end because you will not be successful going forward, in my opinion. So it needs to be always intertwined. You have to focus on both things, but you’re absolutely right. If the profits you make are too huge, you might gotta lose a little bit of track of sustainability.

Therefore, I really like the slogan of Vulcan Energy, that they’re gonna go on the CO2 neutral with them, which in my opinion is super important. Because the battery pack is still quite a substantial portion of the CO2 emissions in an e-car.

The importance of people to turn GF’s Strategy into actual Impact

Antoine Walter: It’s actually in line with what you said about what’s the driver of a successful lithium project.

The way Vulcan goes to zero carbon is that they colocate with geothermal energy and geothermal heat. So when you combine the three together, then you get a better picture. And that’s also what Standard Lithium was sharing with their El Dorado project, where they colocate a carbon capture pilot because, at the same time, you’re extracting water from the grounds.

You have the opportunity when you’re circulating that water back to capture some carbon and also potentially produce some chemicals, which then you use in your process. So you’re really closing that loop. You covered very thoroughly the economical and environmental aspects of sustainability.

What about the people’s aspect? So the human interaction, is it something you’re looking into as GF?

Andreas Muller: GF was already, with his entire history, very much on the people on the social aspects. So we have been one of the first in our sector to launch a healthcare insurance.

We have been one of the first to introduce pension systems for our people. We always looked into how to improve the working conditions for our people. I think people play the biggest role in a corporation with all the assets. Without having people, you will not actually turn anything into good.

GF’s ESG commitments and more

And I think, therefore, the focus on people within GF has always been high, as you may have seen. We have ESG targets, we wanna reduce accident rates. We look into that one. But we also want to have, let me say, equal treatment in various aspects. We want to have diversity, not only in gender, but also in terms of ethics, but also in terms of age.

I think we very much focus on that one. And since GF has been doing that for many, many decades, It is also quite easy for us to promote it, and it has become very genuine. So people really believe when we talk about sustainability, and yes, it is attractive, and I think nowadays we hear a lot from young employees that they have been appealed by the ESG or sustainability pathway GF is promoting.

And actually also showing! And I think, since it is not only makeup, it is really genuine, it is also so easy to talk about.

Antoine Walter: I can relate, but I want to be objective as much as possible, so I won’t double down here. To close that deep dive, you mentioned how you are leading GF for four and a half years.

I have a crystal ball question for you. You can see the Andres Müller of 2030 or whenever you want to put yourself in the future. What will tell you that that person had an impact?

Andreas Muller: This is a tough question now. I think first of all, if we can actually improve and become a little bit better every day in these next 10 years, I think this is already quite a big achievement.

The current vision we have. If we gonna turn that into reality and we gonna keep that path going forward. I think GF has become very attractive and very interesting, as it is already today an industrial player. And I think this is something, which I believe you should all work together on it, and I think it should also be a place and be recognized where people like to work for.

It should be an inevitable place. If the people are gonna say, this is a cool corporation solving the needs of humanity. I think that is something which is making us all proud going forward.

Antoine Walter: And do you have a personal KPI?

Andreas Muller: I want to see our corporation to be balanced over cycles so that we can deliver a decent return so that we have the freedom to invest into things, new opportunities, becoming an attractive solution provider to our customers.

Antoine Walter: Well, thanks for everything you shared in that deep dive; I am rounding these interviews with rapid-fire questions, so if that’s fine for you, I will switch to that last section!

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Rapid Fire Questions

Antoine Walter: So the rule is: I have short questions which aim for short answers, and usually I’m the one side tracking, so don’t worry. My first question is, what is the thing you’ve learned the hard way?

Andreas Muller: Sometimes the hard way is really that you’re gonna have to have a signpost and then really gonna make a bold decision at one point of time because you cannot leave it endlessly.

And I think that fits very nicely in a new culture. We wanna be bold on new opportunities, but we also have to accept if new opportunities don’t turn into success? Stop it. I think stopping it is a very important statement. What we all gonna have to learn. It’s much easier to keep things going on, but you have to stop it because then you have the resources to go into something new, which might gonna turn out more successful.

Antoine Walter: If you had to define your leadership style in three words?

Andreas Muller: Collaborative, communicative, but also decision driven.

Antoine Walter: Is there something in your job you’re doing today that you will for sure not be doing in 10 years?

Andreas Muller: The question is whether I wish or not wish, but I think, if we could reduce a little bit, the meetings.That wouldn’t be the worst! 

Antoine Walter: The top three on that microphone are reducing meetings, reducing travels, and reducing emails. So you’re, you’re good.

Andreas Muller: I would never reduce travel, to be honest, Antoine, because I think that is one of the most inspiring parts of your life, right? If you can travel, if you can talk to people, I think it’s not only being able to go onsite, but it’s also the exchange with all sorts of people across this world.

I think I would not give up on that one. If I could actually free time of meetings to travel. I would travel, so I would never give up on traveling.

Antoine Walter: I mentioned that I would be the one sidetracking. So let me open a sidetrack here. I’ve been following you on LinkedIn. You’ve been sharing some of these travel encounters you made with people working for GF.

How important is that to you? We are in, in a brand new building, which is absolutely nice. You have a nice office, a nice floor with lots of people working around you. You could be staying here and seeing nobody, and probably you could be running that company that way. But you do it differently. You go out, and you meet with people in the sales companies. Listen to their stories. How important is that to you?

Andreas Muller: First of all, let me address your statement. I strongly disagree!

You cannot run a company not being out in the markets. I think it is super important, because normally what are gonna do when I meet our people, first of all, you get such great stories back, right?

The people feel inspired. But I am also feeling inspired. So I think it’s a win-win, right? Meeting people across the world and meeting with these people then with our customers. I think that’s even more inspirational. And so, therefore, I don’t think that you could run a corporation and not be in the markets, not being with the people.

You’re gonna have to feel somehow the pulse of your organization. And by the way, as I said, this is one of the fun parts of my job, if you don’t like that… I like people, and I like talking to people, and I think this is something, which you might gonna have to bring along. Otherwise, it gets a bit cumbersome running such a company.

Antoine Walter: What is the trend to watch out for in the water sector?

Andreas Muller: One of the trends, I think we all talk about non-revenue water. So we do know that we lose a lot of water, on the way, to consumption. This is one of the trends that may gonna lead ultimately that we are gonna need to reclaim much more water, whether it’s regionalized, whether it’s even, much more localized.

What we are doing today, we all have to understand conveying water is also some energy intense process, so it’s not coming for free. That water flushes all over our households, our cities, and I think. Therefore, I believe reclaiming water may be one of the trends. We have seen it in San Francisco.

We might wanna see it much more across Europe, for instance, with the water scarcity we faced just a year ago… 

Antoine Walter: I have the funny sidetrack and then the serious sidetrack here. The funny sidetrack is that we are in Schaffhausen. Whenever I meet someone in Rotterdam, I say to them, you’re reclaiming water because whatever we flush in Schaffhausen is their drinking water resource down the Rhine River.

Sometimes they don’t appreciate that transparency, but it’s true. Now the serious sidetrack is you mentioned non-revenue water, and I mentioned that we are in a brand new building, and in the entry of that building, you have the opportunity to put three products you choose to highlight one product, which is going after this non-revenue water.

So I guess that’s kind of the testimony of walking the talk?

Andreas Muller: I think you’re absolutely right. Then I got heard again. I think we are here to address one of the most pressing needs of today’s population. And I think, therefore it was just one reason why we actually put that product up there.

It’s also a very innovative part. It’s a product which has been co-developed or which is based on the development of a startup company coming out from Oxford. It’s called Oxford Flow, and I think GF has collaborated with them, and we are now industrializing it because managing the pressure in urban infrastructures is one of the best means to avoid water loss.

Antoine Walter: Last question for me. Would you have someone to recommend me that I should definitely invite on that microphone as soon as possible?

Andreas Muller: I met someone you know, which I really liked, is a company called a startup company called Open Version. They have a concept developed a very simple concept to purify water in remote areas.

So giving me some 2 billion people the opportunity to have drinking water on site. And might gonna reduce these long distance walks and therefore gonna have, let me say, a better life. I was very inspired by that young lady who’s running together with obviously her colleagues.

This company, it’s a biodegradable fil filtration system. I, I really liked it. I think it’s a concept. You mentioned before that we also have a clean water foundation where we are gonna bring clean water to remote areas. And I think this is something in which It’s a, maybe, a slightly different topic, but it’s a very good purpose.

What this young company is trying to do, and I was really very convinced about the simplicity of this solution. It is the simplicity of the solution which makes it sustainable in this kind of remote area.

Antoine Walter: Well, it’s a topic extensively covered on that microphone; these 2.2 billion people who still don’t have access to water.

And probably the solution will come from companies bringing innovation, simple, sturdy, proven, to the field. So really excited to look into that. I don’t know that specific company, but I, I’m gonna look into it. So thanks for the recommendation. If people want to follow up with you after that conversation, where shall I redirect them?

Andreas Muller: The best? Very easy, knock on my door, go to my assistant, go get an appointment, send me mail, and I will try my best to make time available!

Antoine Walter: Andreas, thanks a lot for your time. I’m the testimony that you made some time available, so thanks for that, and I will talk to you soon.

Andreas Muller: Thank you very much, Antoine.

Other Episodes:

FREDsense: Revolutionizing Water Quality Monitoring with Biosensor Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 7 May 2025

Swirltex: Revolutionizing Wastewater Treatment with Bubbly Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 30 April 2025

Blue Foot Membranes: The Next Evolution in Water Filtration

By Antoine Walter | 16 April 2025

Echo River Capital: Pioneering the Future of Water Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 3 April 2025

1001 Fontaines: Engineering Sustainable Water Access Through Social Entrepreneurship

By Antoine Walter | 22 March 2025

Amazon’s Water Footprint: Tech Giant’s Quest for Water Sustainability

By Antoine Walter | 19 March 2025

Turing: The AI Revolution Quenching the Water Industry’s Thirst for Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 26 February 2025

Altillion: Pioneering Digital Intelligence for Water Asset Management

By Antoine Walter | 6 February 2025

Flocean: Pioneering Ocean-Based Water Solutions

By Antoine Walter | 15 January 2025

Botanical Water Technologies: Harvesting Liquid Gold from Plants

By Antoine Walter | 4 December 2024

The post This Start-Up has been around for 222 Years and is Still Going Strong appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

(Find out more with my entire Lithium deep dive.)

with Andy Robinson – President and COO of Standard Lithium

Standard Lithium coins itself America’s 21st century Lithium Company. They’re expected to become the first lithium developer in the World to produce direct-extracted lithium at a commercial scale in El Dorado

Slider: The 5 Rules to Successful Direct Lithium Extraction

What we covered:

How a bromine plant in Arkansas is being converted into a lithium extraction mine to create a revolution in lithium production

Why lithium plays an integral role in clean energy initiatives, powering everything from electric cars to grid storage

What challenges are faced when extracting lithium from natural brine, and how innovative companies are overcoming them

How Standard Lithium is integrating sustainability into its lithium extraction process to make it more environmentally friendly

Why Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) may become the preferred method in the lithium industry, potentially shaping the future of the sector

What role lithium plays in the electric vehicle revolution, and why is it indispensable for battery production

How we can exploit the significant financial potential of lithium production, as hinted at by industry leaders like Elon Musk (which I may still have outsmarted)

Why a full disclosure of the entire flow sheet, from resource to end-product, is essential for building investor confidence in lithium extraction

What the future of lithium demand looks like, and how production companies are preparing for a potential structural deficit of lithium chemicals

How the incorporation of carbon capture technology into lithium extraction processes reduces the environmental footprint and promotes a more sustainable industry

How continuous chemical processing redefines lithium extraction methods and raises industry standards

What the key factors considered by Standard Lithium are when identifying potential lithium extraction sites

Why stakeholder approval and local government permitting is crucial for the success of lithium extraction projects

How the use of existing infrastructure in Arkansas simplifies the permitting requirements for new lithium extraction plants

What a day in the life of a lithium extraction plant looks like, and what’s the path of lithium from entry to final product

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Resources:

Come say hi to Andy on Linkedin 

Check Standard Lithium’s website 

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Teaser

Key Take-Aways

This interview of Antoine Walter with Andy Robinson discusses the extraction and processing of lithium, specifically from brine water, which is commonly found in certain geographical locations like the Smackover Formation. This discussion provides a comprehensive overview of the lithium extraction and processing process that Standard Lithium is developing. Here are the key takeaways:

1. Lithium Extraction: The technology developed by Standard Lithium leverages the existing infrastructure and operations of a bromine extraction plant. The bromine extraction process already pumps a large amount of brine from the ground, which happens to contain lithium as well. Standard Lithium’s technology takes this brine and extracts the lithium from it.
2. Extraction Process: The extraction process relies on a sorbent material that selectively absorbs lithium from the brine. This sorbent is designed to release the absorbed lithium when exposed to a simple sodium chloride (table salt) solution, allowing for the recovery and subsequent purification of lithium.
3. Efficiency and Sustainability: The process has demonstrated high efficiency, with 88% lithium recovery from the brine. It also operates at low temperatures, which helps to minimize energy consumption. Furthermore, the lithium extraction process can operate continuously, unlike other methods that require batch processing.
4. Challenges: Challenges encountered in the process include handling natural brine, which can behave unpredictably and differs significantly from synthetic brines used in lab settings. Moreover, financial and regulatory aspects present additional challenges. For instance, in Arkansas, they are not allowed to sell the lithium they produce until a royalty structure has been established for the mineral.
5. Future Developments: The interview also discusses the possibility of additional projects such as carbon capture and the conversion of lithium chloride to hydroxide. The ultimate goal of the company is to create a “responsible” lithium product that supports the transition to cleaner energy technologies.

Editorial

It’s now several weeks that we’re exploring together the depth of the lithium World, and we’ve heard quite a lot of things about Direct Lithium Extraction, or DLE. For instance, we’ve heard from Cris Moreno, the very recently-appointed CEO of Vulcan Energy Resources how: DLE is already commercial and accounts for 10% of the World’s Lithium.

And yet, you’ve heard many of my other guests on that microphone discuss with me how DLE is not yet commercial, and might be the next big thing, assuming it gets to that commercial scale. So where’s the truth?

Well, everybody’s right here. What Cris Moreno refers to is that in Argentina and China, companies have been using DLE as one step of the lithium extraction process while still leveraging evaporation ponds as a sequel step.

What’s still not reached yet, though, is a company or process that would be leveraging DLE and getting rid of evaporation ponds. And that is the game-changer that would unlock many more geographies and resources across the World, hence the legit excitement around it.

Now, excitement often comes as well with wide-ranging creativity, and right now, the DLE scene is blessed with blossoming companies trying out a wide range of technologies, let’s face it, it’s also because of that, that the lithium field is so thrilling for a water nerd like me.

But before further exploring these technical takes, I thought it would be worth following Ben Sparrow and Robert Mintak’s advice and getting Andy Robinson on the microphone. Why so? Well, because if Standard Lithium is set to be the first company in the World to bring DLE to the commercial scale, without any evaporation ponds, it’s probably because of him.

As you’ll hear in a minute, he won’t admit it, and he’ll refer to luck, as Robert Mintak did before him. But still, from picking the right place to go all-in on DLE, to testing out a bunch of processes from lab to demo-scale continuously over the past three years, to the next steps on the horizon from lithium carbonate to hydroxide conversion and to carbon capture, it takes a sound methodology, and a cool head approach, which can probably inspire many in that field.

So without further due, let me leave the floor to Andy, to explore his 5-step rule for a good lithium project and learn from his learnings in El Dorado.

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi Andy. Welcome to the show.

Andy Robinson: Thank you, Antoine. Pleasure to be here.

Antoine Walter: I cracked you the secret of it before starting. You have been warmly recommended by two of my very recent guests, so I have high expectations for today’s discussion, and I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to outperform those expectations.

So before I jump straight into the topic, let me start with my opening tradition, which is the postcard. What can you tell me about the place you’re at, which I would ignore by now?

Andy Robinson: I am currently located in Vancouver in North Vancouver, which is a lovely part of the world. I’m not from here originally. I am an Englishman by birth. But I’ve lived here in Vancouver now with my wife and family for 17 years. We’re longtime residents here in Still love coming back home to Vancouver every time I travel to various parts of the world. It’s an amazing part of the world to come back to.

Antoine Walter: I told you that you came in warmly recommended. Let me just let you listen to what Robert Mintek told me. So how does one get in the top two in lithium extraction globally?

Andy Robinson: Hard work and time served to be honest, Antoine. I’ve been working with Robert now since 2014, so we have a long track record and through that entire history of working in the lithium industry, we’ve been solely focused on using modern extraction.

Processing techniques to get lithium out of an existing resource that has being processed and developed using conventional brine evaporation techniques. So that was in the Clayton Valley in Nevada and the us and then since, 2017 onwards working in the smackover formation in Arkansas and more recently in Texas to, trying, testing, breaking every single type of, lithium extraction technology that’s available.

Creating our own using other people’s, et cetera and really just spending the time. The bench scale and, in the laboratory literally sort of test tube beaker scale right the way through to, where we are right now, which is a very large demonstration plant, which runs 24 7 in Arkansas.

And just about to, moving towards commercialization, like making it even bigger again yet. I would argue with Robert, whether I’m one of the experts we’ve just been lucky. We’ve surrounded ourselves with really smart people they’ve done all the hard work.

 I just get to tell people about the work that they’ve done, frankly.

Antoine Walter: That’s an interesting pattern. I think Robert mentioned 15 or 20 times during my conversation with him how lucky he has been so. maybe you are very lucky the two of you, or maybe there’s a bit more than luck involved in what you’re developing in El Dorado. I’m really looking forward to dive a bit deeper into that.

Before I’ve listened to your appearance on Joe Lowry’s podcast, and I’m a water guy, so I had to get myself educated to this lithium word. So jewelry has been my primary source of getting that starting point , in understanding that the lithium and it keeps repeating that lithium is not a commodity, it’s a specialty chemical and it is a very special field.

So

What’s your position there in the sense of really breaking new grounds? You might be leveraging stuff which exists for a while in terms of mining, exploration, stuff like that, but you’re also creating a full new category within all of that.

Andy Robinson: Yeah. I mean, the lithium world is a very rapidly evolving industry. for many decades it was a very niche industry with a very small number of players and processing techniques. And the products that they made were, very carefully tailored.

The entire industry is undergoing, a revolution frankly, in terms of the amount of lithium, which will need to be produced over the next several decades to enable electrification and energy transition story, which is happening around the globe. And the role of suppliers such as ourselves, the standard lithium, and the people who will use the lithium products that we will be making, that’s also gonna need to evolve Antoine types of materials , that we will make from the lithium contained within the smackover formation in Arkansas and Texas.

That’s gonna be used to fuel an entire new generation of vehicles stationary storage facilities, et cetera. And so, Joe is absolutely correct , that lithium currently is not a fungible good. It’s not an instantly tradable commodity. It is still very much a material is made by a producer and then it is qualified and used by an end user in their particular process, whether they’re making cathode materials or whatever they’re using the lithium chemicals for.

So there is still very much a bios seller, relationship, which is not, there again, a normal sort of commodity type relationship. but it, will evolve. I’m not. Really not going to sit here and try and predict where that relationship will sit in five years time or 10 years time, other than say, our function, the standard lithium, is to find resources, build the technology , to extract those resources and turn them into a very high purity end product that, potentially can be sold to multiple different eventual consumers of that product.

there’s a long way to go Antoine in the industry as a whole. It will evolve and develop over the next few decades for sure.

Antoine Walter: You mentioned your project in the smackover formation. If I’m right, you are the person who pointed that place and said, that’s where we have to go. So what indicated you that was the best place , to start that journey and what were you looking for? What were these indicators? Which put you on the way?

Andy Robinson: there’s a couple key things there. One is clearly indication of grade. So whilst we are, you are right, we are a water pro processing business. It’s still, has to have a mining mentality. And as, as with almost everything in mining great is king.

The concentration of the thing that you want to get out of the stuff that surrounds it is still extremely important because it’s a very fundamental lever on the economics of extracting that particular material. So grade is very important and there was a wealth of historical data throughout the smackover formation that pointed towards a very significant lithium grade contained within the brines.

So there was enough data there to point that, okay, grade looks to be very favorable there. The other aspect and again, I think this kind of came from Robertson mine experience working in the Clayton Valley in Nevada, was that size of the resource is also fundamental. A very small high grade resource could be good, but it’s not a great, story to tell when you’re trying to build a large company like, Robertson, my.

Job and ambition is to build a very large Lithium producing company, , the North American market. And so you need a very large resource. And certainly the scale of the smackover, I think is completely unparalleled, more or less anywhere else on the planet. To the best of my knowledge, it truly is a gargantuan resource.

The other thing then is a little bit more arcane and a bit more technical, which is I’ve spent a large amount of my sort of professional career working in and around groundwater resources. And so I always whenever I think about how to envisage a fluid based resource, I always given a preference, would want it to be in a porous media formation rather than a fractured media formation.

That means the distribution of the resource, the way at which behaves when you induce a pressure gradient on it, when you try and pump it or put it back into the formation in a porous media, it’s much more predictable. You can understand how it will behave over not just days and years, but decades and centuries potentially.

And the smack over formation again is geologically fantastic in that regard? Because in the key horizon. It’s almost a perfect lytic limestone. It’s just this beautiful granular, porous medium that behaves very predictably. And therefore, when we think about resources it’s much easier to understand and to predict its behavior.

So those are some of the aspects as a project developer, We always think about permitting stakeholder approval. How receptive are the people who live in the area and actually own the resources? How amenable are they going to be to people turning up from Canada, particularly people with funny accents like mine saying, Hey, we’d like to do something in your backyard.

And southern Arkansas and East Texas certainly tick the boxes there for us as places. , there’s certainly open , to resource extraction and processing type industries cuz there’s so much of that goes on there. And then one of the reasons that we also kind of ended up where we did was that there’s this amazing history of brine processing in the area in southern Arkansas.

There’s this , hidden industry that even most people in Arkansas have no idea is actually there. But you know, 40% of the world’s bromine comes from the smackover formation, brines. And so there’s this very well established regulatory environment where it’s well understood that you can drill a hole, drill a well into this formation, you can pump a brine solution to the surface.

You can extract a mineral, historically in the case it’s been a bromide ion has been removed to make elemental bromine. And then you can put that same bromine less or bromide less brine back into the formation again. And they’ve been doing that for six decades. So it lends as a very high degree of stakeholder and regulatory support.

Where people are just familiar with the concept that, oh yeah, you’re gonna pump something out, extract some value from it, and put it back it where it came from. Yep. We’re good with that. lots of those. Aspects came together , in the smackover formation. That’s, that was really what drew me there.

And when we formed the company and got it going, that was front and center of where we wanted to be. And I’m still very excited to be there for sure.

Antoine Walter: if I get you right, that ticks five boxes. You have the grade of the resource, you have the size of the resource, which is huge. You have the fact that you understand the underground and that it’s a porous material which gives you a good understanding of how it flows underground.

You have the permitting, which is especially in lengths as or dissolved because they’re extracting that brine, which also links to number five, which is this processing of the brine already happening. So you have all that context to extract lithium, but at that stage, you’re still not. Extracting anything, you’re just tick boxes.

So what I’m interesting is how do you go to the next step, which is, I guess I’m not a big specialist, but in was pretty impossible to have Evaporation Ponds, that was lending itself to D L E.

Andy Robinson: absolutely. Yeah.

Antoine Walter: But how do you pick the type of D l e, which you ended up

Andy Robinson: Yeah, this is also one of the central tenets of when we formed the company. So yeah, you really nicely laid out sort of those five key factors when we think as a project developer, like what, as a lithium project developer, what do we wanna see there?

But when we think about the D L E technology, the philosophy was always not, I know the best technology. Like I have found an amazing D L E technology and I’m going to make it fit in the smackover formation. It was always very much okay. First of all, we’re always gonna work with real brines.

I’m never gonna do the work with synthetic solutions. And we will effectively at the start, I think we’d be very open. It was, let’s throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. Because there are so many different ways that you can think about selectively extracting lithium from a continuous brine stream.

And so we honed in we tried lots of things and lots of things worked. You can get a lot, right? You can make almost anything work at a bench scale. So almost all technologies look fantastic on the bench scale for the most part. But we applied a critical eye to those ones.

We found ones which seemed particularly well suited to the smackover formation brains. And then we adapted, adopted optimized and de-risked. So we went through multiple. Technologies, which looked to work we then started to scale test them at larger scale. And we kept an open mind all the way throughout.

And that really was, the process that we went through. and the key thing for us, Antoine, is that, D L E is really just a name. A philosophy given to, what’s being contemplated in lithium extraction, really what we are doing is continuous chemical processing.

D L E in my mind encompasses absolutely the entire flow sheet, frankly in a lot of sort of d l e providers, it’s just kind of one unit operation inside a multiple unit operation flow sheet. In my mind it’s an integrated chemical process from the start to the finish.

And that’s been very much the attitude that we take and that’s why we spent, frankly, a lot of money of our shareholders money when we designed and built this large demonstration plant and installed it. El Dorado, it was a relatively aggressive, bold move , on our part.

We spent a lot of the money that we had available to us as standard lithium at the time to do that, but it was absolutely so that we could try to integrate a continuous flow sheet at that plant using real brine every single second of the day. And maybe we’ll get into this a little bit better, but the difference between running processes in a laboratory, even when you sort of do some scale up or in a 40 foot ccan somewhere where you might run a process for a week or two and then, you’ll swap over your feed, et cetera, to then actually running a real continuous process with the real brine that you’re gonna be processing in the commercial plant.

Those are night and day. They genuinely are. There’s a lot of learning that takes place in those smaller piloting type operations. Not to say they’re not worthwhile, but the difference in learning and understanding between those sort of smaller, more discreet batch processing style operations versus running something and running millions of liters of brine through it on a continuous basis.

And that’s real brine, which Natural feedstocks vary over time. Like you see changes even, at a core scale, they look very similar. You still see variations and those all have processing implications, which are not always apparent when you’re just running small amounts through for a kind of a short period of time.

Antoine Walter: there’s one specific question I have on that part, which is this upscaling when you go from the pilots , to the demonstration plant where you’re running, not at the commercial scale, but still continuous,

Andy Robinson: Yeah.

Antoine Walter: Is there an unexpected source of pain?

I mean, you might be controlling the process, but all of a sudden , there might be like a boring part, like ensuring that water flows.

Andy Robinson: yeah.

Antoine Walter: not exactly what you would be looking for in a pilot, but still that’s the hygiene factor is, and maybe. That might be on the critical path. I’m trying to find out what is the most unexpected, overlooked, touchy part, which can be troublesome when you go from pilot to demo.

Andy Robinson: some of them are extremely mundane. And some of them are, a little more chemistry focused. there’s a whole series. Thinking about sort of the chemical side or the process side. Those elements which are present at what would seem to be very small concentrations or very low concentrations can cause all sorts of unpleasant side effects , in your process.

And whilst they are not wholly unexpected, the way in which you actually have to deal with them, never the same. So they are the usual bad actors in any sort of water or brine processing operation. And they’re the same, things that cause all of the issues in produced water management at any oil field or gas field around the planet.

But they’re things such as silica, iron, manganese sulfur compounds, et cetera. , these things are present at low levels in almost every natural brine feedstock. And where you are riding a continuous chemical process, they have an effect. And so understanding exactly what effect they will have and it may not be on the lithium extraction part, it may be some other part of the flow sheet.

Understanding the real effect of those is hard to estimate ahead of time and problematic and challenging to deal with, to actually create a solution that will work at the commercial scale. Because again, these are things that you have to deal with on a continuous basis.

They are always present and they’re always slightly fluctuating, and therefore you need a flow sheet. And so you do see a lot of other people involved in this field who you’ll see them say, oh, these are the normal contaminants. We’re just gonna use industry standard processes to deal with them.

And whilst, on the face of it, that is true the practical reality of that is it’s still quite complicated and challenging to figure it out. And you have to figure it out before you go commercial. Like otherwise, your plan will not work. So that’s one of those sort of the chemistry aspects on the sort of the more mundane side.

Managing suspended solids is always an issue. It again sounds incredibly simple and straightforward. Hey, you just filter it. it’s not that simple and straightforward , in the real world on a continuous basis. So that’s always a challenge. And then one of the other aspects is whichever technology , you would end up using whichever combination of unit and process operations that form your flow sheet.

There is a lot because you’re constantly processing flow with changing chemistry all the way through your flow sheet. There’s a lot of instrumentation, monitoring and control, and you’re in an aggressive environment like you are dealing with a fairly hostile brine. And in our case it’s relatively straightforward and it’s chemistry, but you still have to control the process and things like, Sensors, pumps in line, online measurement, et cetera, all play a role in process control.

And so building a robust flow sheet where the control systems don’t get fouled, where you can control flow rates, pH, conductivity, timidity, all of those things in real time, cuz you need to understand those things to build an operating chemical process. Those are also things that go wrong a lot.

And so we’ve spent a lot of time figuring out, okay, what equipment actually works in this environment? And again, it’s not what equipment works for a two or three week campaign of testing. It’s what equipment works day in, day out for almost three years now. We’ve been really lucky, right? So because we are effectively piggybacked into Xi’s operations, they have six decades of operational history in processing brines from the smackover formation for bromide to bromine conversion.

So there’s a lot of institutional knowledge there from the people who work on those facilities that’s been, we’ve been able to benefit from as well. So we know what pumps work, we know what sensors work, et cetera, et cetera. We’ve been very fortunate to benefit from a bit of a brain trust in the existing brine processing industry in southern Arkansas.

Antoine Walter: funny cuz I can’t tell you from the lithium end, I can tell you from the water and maybe dirty water end, everybody always thinks it is possible to standardize and to have stuff which works like everywhere and to have industry standards. And then you figure out the hard way that it simply doesn’t work that way.

And that every single water metrics is specific and you need to adapt to that. So I guess if that’s true for generally speaking slightly dirty waters, it might be even more true with quite complex metrics is like, like the ones which you are leveraging there. You mentioned you threw everything against the wall and you saw what sticked, and you also said that actually a lot of it sticked.

So you could have taken all the processes, I guess you’re really chosen, best suited one, which at the hurt of it is an absorption. And you’re using if I’m right acemic absorbent. How do you end up with that? what decided you for that is strictly performance. So is there also an element of how reliable it is?

How proven it is? And I was discussing, I don’t know if they are your competitors because it’s really the other end of the world with Vulcan, which is developing this asset in Germany. And they are leveraging a different type of absorbent, more the live and style absorbent,

Andy Robinson: Yeah,

Antoine Walter: but they also patented their own version of the absorbent and they made it their atory process.

Do you do something similar? And because that was only seven questions, let me a eight. Why?

Andy Robinson: yeah. I mean, we’ve trialed and we’ve continued to evaluate other technologies in the demonstration plant, particularly, the D l E core. And when we’re selecting materials for use in the lithium extraction part, we are concerned with fouling.

We are concerned with how the lithium cell activity over time is also extremely important because One of the real benchmarks, if you like, of whether the process works is not necessarily the total capacity of the lithium absorption on your material, but how selective it is versus all of the other materials that you do not wish to carry through your flow sheet.

in our case, we’re in a very calic Brian, the Brian is hosted in the limestone, right? So we have a very calic brine. So it is, how does the material select for lithium against calcium, against sodium not just for 10 cycles, but for hundreds or thousands of cycles. And so because the material has to have longevity.

every material that you select and most of the materials that you looked at, whether they’re proton, activated, deactivated, whether they’re IOL materials , like the Livent material they all have fantastic performance out the box. They all look amazing in the first few cycles.

And then eventually you see capacity performance always asy totes. This is some sort of baseline performance over after 10, a hundred thousand, 2000 cycles. And so you need to use a material which behaves the same in a predictable manner, cuz you have to run a chemical plant.

at the commercial level. You need to have a process which basically does the same thing every minute of the day. Because you need a team of operators , to operate that. You can’t have a team of, 200 scientists constantly tweaking the process to make it work for the brine feedstock, you have to have a consistent brine coming into your plant.

And you need a process that a team of operators can actually work. They can run the plant and the process will not take care of itself, but it has to keep on doing the same thing day in, day out. You can’t have something that works one day and then doesn’t work the next. So the choice of material that’s certainly guided a lot by, does it work over the long term?

Antoine Walter: And so that’s ceramic absorbent. You’re leveraging. Is it yours or is it something you’re taking from the market?

Andy Robinson: It’s been leveraged off academic knowledge. We have made our own materials and we’ve also been using materials which are available out of the market as well. So there’s a kind of a combination which is which is in play at the plant. Yeah,

Antoine Walter: When it discussed with Ben Sparrow he theorized that as generation one and generation two, generation one being the one which you can backwash with water and generation two being the ones which you can backwash with assets. So you are generation two. When I proposed that theory , to Robert he was a bit more nuanced.

Andy Robinson: yeah.

Antoine Walter: where would you sit?

Andy Robinson: Yeah I’m not sure I’d fully buy into that because I think the Generation One materials, and I’ll, be clear, we, have been trying and successfully also using some generation one type materials in the plant as well. Again the difference between like you were saying with regards to Vulcan, like using as you describe it, a Livent-like material, which is a layer, aluminum, sort of hydroxide type material that has been modified and adapted many times successfully over the last few decades.

So I think there are now some very clever adaptations that have been made as to how that material is The form factor, how it’s packaged, like what resins it’s kind of placed into. All of that sort of way in which it can be applied has certainly evolved and changed. And then again with sort of the ceramic materials, like whether our, we’ve been using a Titan eight based material and there are manganese based materials, et cetera.

They all have their strengths and weaknesses. I wouldn’t say one is necessarily better than the other. the layered methylate structures like the Titan Eights and the Mangan eights certainly have higher capacity. But they have pluses and minuses as well. They’re certainly, they’re susceptible to pH degradation and long-term stability they haven’t been used commercially, so I certainly wouldn’t say there’s a gen one and gen two.

I think there’s a series of materials that are available to the practitioner. Which fit in an integrated flow sheet for the brine chemistry that you are working with. I really don’t think one is necessarily better than the other. and again, I kind of, I’ll take you right back, to the start of the conversation, Antoine, it’s like you need a large, consistent feedstock of brine, which guess kind of has to look the same every day of the year.

And you develop the right technology for that brine supply. And that’s the approach that we’ve taken.

Antoine Walter: you’ve developed this right suited technology and this integrated flow chart flow, suit flow process, and that’s your demo plan today, which is running since 2020, if I’m not mistaken.

Andy Robinson: Correct. Yeah.

Antoine Walter: You are setting yourself up for the full scale. What will change between your process today and the one you’ll have in the full scale?

Andy Robinson: the only real change will be that in the full scale plant there will be a recycle stream from the carbonation plant back into the front of the facility. That will probably be about the only major sort of, if you like, integrated flow sheet change relative to what’s running in the plant right now.

Cuz what we’ve got running in the plant basically is, a small commercial facility effectively. It’s just, we don’t sell any of the products that we make, we just run it. On a continuous basis to, to understand the process. But the change from the commercial plant yeah, for the most part it’s just going to be more of the same.

So it’s gonna mostly, we’ve tried to use vendor supplied equipment in the plant. Right now we have tried to invent as little as possible, to be honest, so that we can buy the same equipment just more of it for the commercial facility in the most part. And like I say, one or two recycled loops.

We’ll be integrated

Antoine Walter: What will you be recycling?

Andy Robinson: When you think about any sort of d l e process, you’re spending a lot of equipment. When you’re building the commercial facility, it’s an expensive business. So you are spending equipment to process. All of that flow of water, which comes into the front end of your plant.

And obviously the scale of that flow is dependent upon lithium concentration, but you have to build, you’re in the water business. If you think about the front end of one of these d l e plants, looks a lot like a municipal, water treatment facility. This is large, expensive infrastructure.

These are big pipes, big pumps, big filters, big initial processing equipment which is not cheap. And so therefore there’s a very large incentive to extract as much lithium as possible from your incoming flow. So therefore, when you sort of run through the flow sheet, there are always points where potentially you could lose lithium from the system, which would reduce your overall lithium extraction efficiency.

And you want to keep that as high as possible. One of, if not one of the major in any way, you’re taking a final solution in our case, a mixed lithium sodium chloride solution, and you wish to carbonate it. In any carbonation, crystallization system there is always, what’s called blowdown or there’s always a bleed stream from that crystallizer system, which contains a relatively high proportion of lithium.

So some of that, you can put two other parts in the flow sheet, but there’s typically always needs to be a recycled loop, which we can do really effectively in a DLE project, it’s very difficult to do. For example, if you’re doing your lithium concentration in the Atacama desert and then you’re doing your carbonation crystallization at the coast in Antofagasta for example, Doing that recycle is not terribly efficient because there are hundreds of miles in the way, whereas we can actually recycle on a continuous basis at the most optimal points in our flow sheet.

So we can improve our overall lithium extraction efficiency from start to finish, which is a key metric for us.

Antoine Walter: And how much do you reach?

Andy Robinson: At the d l e stage, we see well over 90% extraction efficiency just in the d l e step. We actually see substantially more in that a lot of the time. And again, that’s not just occasionally, that’s over hundreds, thousands of cycles.

Front to start, we are in the middle of the design phase for the commercial plant right now. So we have a contractor running, what’s called feed front end engineering design study. I think the basis of design, we’re working on a little over. 88 ish, 89% total start to finish extraction efficiency for lithium, which is, huge.

It’s an incredible result, but is supported completely by what we see in the plant. So we’re very comfortable with those sorts of overall efficiencies.

Antoine Walter: I just picked up a muggle question on the way, so excuse me. For really, I assume it’s a MLE question. I’ve been following Elon Musk’s Twitter and I’ve read that lithium producing companies are printing money and you have a demo plant running since 2020 and you’re not selling what you’re producing.

Why? So,

Andy Robinson: Uh,

Because uh, Frank, we are not allowed to at the moment. in Arkansas, and this really does vary from state to state. Within the US and obviously from country to country, but from state to state. The way that the business works that area is that the minerals actually in the ground are owned by the mineral rights owners, which are individuals, families, companies in some cases who own those rights under the ground.

And obviously they are due some money for when someone like us comes along, pumps that resource to the surface and creates value from it. Some portion must go to the people who actually own the minerals, the mineral rights owners. There’s a very well established framework for that, for bromine.

In the state of Arkansas, there is a, an established royalty type structure for other minerals. One for lithium has not been established yet, and it’s in the process of being established. Until that is finalized, we can’t. Sell the product because right now there’s no way that we can then effectively provide the financial feedback to the mineral rights owners.

Antoine Walter: So right now we discussed your extraction process. You have a Brian at the entry, which you run 1, 2, 3 times depending on how it drops out. You get this 88% extraction over the entire process might be even north of 90%, which is really impressive.

Andy Robinson: Yep.

Antoine Walter: That is all set up. You have this feed study done by Koch Engineering.

If I’m right, which is ongoing, which is going for this full scale. And you could be stopping there and you could be producing lithium, and that would be already a significant step forward for that industry worldwide and in North America. But you’re not stopping there. You have pilots ongoing.

You are looking at conversion from lithium chloride to hydroxide. You’re looking at carbon capture. I mean, conversion. I would expect it to be maybe a more conventional pilot, like something which I mean would be rocket science to me, not rocket science to you. Carbon capture sounds like really next step in terms of what you try to achieve there.

So why do you make your life so difficult?

Andy Robinson: Yeah, I mean, great question. And the team might ask me the same question many days of the week as well. So I mean, a couple of different things there. So one, again, sort of take you back to the start of the conversation. One of the reasons why we really like the smackover is its scale.

When I talk about the fee stock coming into the demonstration plant right now, the amazing thing is that when I move 30 miles to the west, to our southwest Arkansas project, or when I move. Another sort of distance over the state line , into Texas to look at those. the feed stop looks basically the same.

The brine composition and quality is effectively the same in all of those locations. The lithium grade improves significantly. So the quality of the resource improves as I move westward. But that means that we have effectively, the development plan that we’re working on and aim to execute over.

Really the next decade is to get the first project built scale and then replicate a across the same resource for the, effectively the same feed stock, and the same technology to process the brain. But the conversion part on the end, that really does differ. Differ because there is definitely a market for both materials whether it’s lithium carbonate or whether it’s lithium hydroxide and certainly.

When we think about the North American automotive market, I’d say, there’s a slightly different psychology maybe than is present for some of the Asian sort of car manufacturers or for the European car manufacturers, where the concept of range and power density is maybe slightly more important in North America than elsewhere.

So you’re seeing certainly amongst the larger automotive OEMs in North America, as there’s a little bit more emphasis maybe on those high nickel cathode materials to produce more energy dense batteries better power generation, et cetera. And those all require a hydroxide product to create those high nickel cathode materials.

So when we think about, the development plans for the company, and we will need to. Have a range of offerings, so carbonate and hydroxide. For sure. The carbon capture one is, that was just one of those sort of slightly serendipitous instances where we were introduced to the technology, which is developed out of Norway.

And it’s a membrane based technology. We use a lot of membranes in our plant. There’s a very high degree of comfort with membrane technology amongst our technical teams. And one thing, whenever you are running a crystallization business, which we will have to use, we’re gonna have to crystallize products, you will always end up burning natural gas somewhere in your flow sheet.

So you will always be generating CO2 emissions from what we are gonna. Build over the next few years. And so the concept of being able to use a novel technology, which offered really kind of interesting and compelling economics, both in terms of capital pricing and operational pricing to capture carbon dioxide out of natural gas burning, flu gas emissions using a membrane technology.

It seemed like a good fit. And yeah, we’ve been fascinated to try it. And we’re also, fascinated with the role of carbon dioxide in everything that we do. So we haven’t actually talked about this, but we’ve been doing some really interesting work using carbon dioxide as a reagent to help with some of the flow sheet work.

So kind of looking to consume CO2 as a reagent in our existing flow sheet. So sort of, beneficial reuse of captured CO2 in the flow sheet. But then also as we kind of scale out across the smackover formation there’s an enormous geological permanent sequestration facility basically.

And, we will be moving more fluid in and out of that formation once we’re at full production than anyone else in the entire region. So the ability to capture co2 use it in our flow sheet and then permanently sequester it where it could be into that geological formation seems like a very compelling story to me and to Robert as well.

that’s the future. that’s the future just embodied in everything that we want to do there. We wanna make responsible lithium chemicals to go into the energy transition story. And if at the same time we can capture CO2 from anything that we do, and then ultimately, Put any additional captured co2, maybe using that aquilo membrane technology back into a permanent geological sequestration reservoir.

Seems like a fantastic story. So it really all fits together from my point of view.

Antoine Walter: I think it absolutely fits together. it’s with this over-delivering, you could be just producing lithium and , that would be fine, but in terms of ESG impact, in terms of. Positive impact all the way through the chain. Especially if you can leverage the CO2 in your process.

It’s like a win, win. Pretty fascinating. And that’s in understatement. You mentioned at the very beginning of this conversation how you want to build a very large company and with the MOV formation, you probably have everything it needs to build that very large company because you have s you have Texas, you have lots of resources, yet let’s assume a crazy French guy comes to you water samples

Andy Robinson: Right.

Antoine Walter: and those happen to be lithium rich.

I have two water samples with me, one at 310 PPM of lithium, the other at 430 PPM of lithium. Of course it’s not just lithium and water. There’s a lot of other stuff inside. Is that something you would. Straightaway wipe off the table cuz crazy people, which come with crazy ideas. You must have that twice a week, if not twice a day.

Or are we speaking here of something which might eventually be interesting to you?

Andy Robinson: Yeah, I mean, I would say that, it would depend clearly if you kinda go back to the start of the conversation, some of those sort of the five things that, that we sort of think about when we think about scale is key. So the size of the formation of the brain resource that’s there is really important.

Those concentrations are absolutely economic. Those are certainly would justify additional investigation. Yeah, for sure. whenever I look at those, if it’s less than 150 PPM lithium, I would always say, that’s gonna be a struggle to ever make the economics truly work Now, future lithium pricing, who knows, right?

So there’s certainly many things there which are to be determined and which could make a lot of marginal projects very attractive potentially in the future. But certainly the, those numbers that you’re talking about there, yeah, that’s a resource which should be looked at some more for sure.

Antoine Walter: Let me try to follow your five step framework. Actually, there’s one of the steps where I don’t have the answer, but for the others I have it. Grades is what I just mentioned. We are above the threshold of 150 you just gave. So, I guess doesn’t speak too bad size. I don’t know. That’s the one I don’t have.

I just know it’s part of a big aquifer and I’m working with geologists to, I mean, I’m still running a podcast and still not a serious project, but I want to do the thought exercise up to the end and geologists have been looking into it, so maybe they can give me the answer on the size at least to have an estimate.

In terms of porous media formation that the underground is very well known and is a porous material, which is documented for decades Centuries. It has been like the region which was transitioning from France to Germany several times over history, and every country has been really mapping the underground.

So that’s known. The permitting is known as well because it used to be potash mining and we would still be producing potash if the Australians would not be able to do it three times cheaper. So, And there is no existing brine processing, but there are water treatments ongoing because there’s also an underground landfill, which burned and which means that they are recycling the water to protect the rest of the aquifer So there is an ongoing water recirculation, not to the scale we are discussing at length as I mean, really far away. So yeah the thing I don’t know is the size from your experience. Aside from answering the question of the size, where shall I start?

Andy Robinson: I mean, uh, the place to start would be to Trial. Some initial, d l e technologies, again at the bench scale and start using some available technologies where you can, there are, a handful of vendors out there right now who have technology and packaged solutions that you could start to try and you could understand initially lithium extraction potential from that brain.

The scale. item is very important. So understanding the extent of the formation, thickness porosity, permeability all of those items are very key. One of the things that I think we’ve been very fortunate from is that the smackover formation, because it’s been exploited for oil and gas for a century and for Brian for six decades, there’s a great deal of numerical modeling experience and reservoir engineering experience within that formation.

And yeah I would strongly recommend that you speak to a reservoir engineer or a hydrogeological modeler who could start to think about Brian Distribution Brian extent. Flow boundaries reservoir boundaries, et cetera, and how that might play into a resource understanding.

one of the things that we have certainly come across is yes, lots of oil and gas companies have come to us over the years and said, Hey, I’ve got this field located just here. And, we’ve got these lithium grades in the field and we’re making all of this produced water, which is a complete pain.

It costs us money can we capture lithium out of it? And there is still an order of magnitude difference between a commercial brine operation for lithium extraction and the volume of produced water, which is co-produced with oil and gas operations. A commercial brine processing business for a mineral extraction where the mineral is only present.

On a few still, in your case three to 400 parts per million, you still have to process a lot of Brian to make a commercial project. So the resource the poor volume has to be large is very difficult to make anything work off a small sort of resource base.

Antoine Walter: Again, I had read that tweet from Ellen Musk. So I was rethinking I was gonna print money in the next month, so I was really happy you just

Andy Robinson: Well, I wish I wish you the very best of luck in printing money from it anjo. I certainly wouldn’t begrudge you that.

Antoine Walter: Just to close , that deep dive. By the way, thanks a lot for everything you’ve shared and the openness in diving into your process and what you’ve been developing, which is truly amazing. If you have a threshold at 150 ppm where you say, starting there, it starts to be interesting.

Does that mean that assuming you get Es and your other our project up to commercial scale. Would you be going into this additional fields or do you really say, we have this competitive edge of understanding this micro of reformation, let’s triple down on it.

Andy Robinson: Yeah, I mean, I think, certainly I would never say never but the immediate focus of what we’re doing. Is the nature of the opportunity and the smack over is huge. So it is a truly world-class resource of a scale, which I don’t think is really matched anywhere else.

Not that I’ve found anyway I could absolutely be proven wrong, but not from the basis of my research over the years I’ve not found anything similar scale, grade, quality anywhere else on, on the planet for lithium. there’s so much ahead of us that as a company and it’s, we grow and we add people and we continue to build out our capabilities in terms of designing, scaling, building, project one, then project 2, 3, 4, 5.

There’s so much ahead of us in the smack over it’s difficult for me to say with a straight face. We should absolutely be chasing other formations right now. But. We will see, like the lithium demand curve is much discussed and structural deficit of lithium chemicals by the end of this decade is certainly seem to be a potential reality.

And who knows what incentives that may generate for a company such as ours to scale more quickly and in other jurisdictions, in other resources. Certainly whilst it’s not in our immediate game plan in a year, two, three years time, who knows Enfor one, this entire industry is just getting going.

It’s been a sleepy little niche business for 40 years, right? And it’s just going through a revolution. And so how this business looks in five, 10 years time, I think it’ll be very different.

Antoine Walter: I just have one more, which I would sneak into it. So really in, in two words, sorry. Is there a race going on to be the first one to be commercially producing lithium with a DD process? Because everybody I met said you are supposed to be the number one, but Vulcan brought some doubt in my mind when I saw that their calendar because it seems like you would be producing at the same time.

Andy Robinson: we certainly hope to be the first new production in North America for lithium from Bryant for sure. We felt comfortable with our timeless cause. again, this is like project development.

Permitting is always on the critical path. For most projects. It’s the bit that doesn’t get talked about. Like on a water podcast. There’s, an emphasis on the water and the technology and the processing. But as a project developer permitting, stakeholder approval, stakeholder buy-in state and local government approval, and the permitting that fits in and around all of that story is at least as important.

One of the amazing things about what we’re doing in South Arkansas is that it’s such a high level of support for what we do. Because we’re effectively building inside the fence of an existing processing facility. Our permitting requirements are minimal because we are using the same infrastructure that’s already in place.

And so there’s just some small permits that you’re relating to our process only, but we’re. There are no impacts. We don’t have to drill any wells. We don’t have to put any pipelines in or any of that. I would say I have a a very good degree of certainty around some of my timelines because I know I don’t need permitting or agencies, or authorities to approve certain things before I can do, then do certain other things.

So I’m comfortable with our timelines, but I mean, I, we need all lithium that we can get, frankly. So  I mean, whilst I’d love to win the race as long as we’re soon that’s good enough.

Antoine Walter: Well, Andy I open saying that I had high expectations because you’ve been warmly recommended twice and you over delivered on those expectations. So thanks a lot for that. To round off, I just have very rapid, fair questions, short questions, I mean for short answers. I’ll try not to sidetrack still French, I can’t promise, but I’ll try.

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Rapid fire questions:

Antoine Walter: My first profit for a question is, what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and why?

Andy Robinson: honestly, everything that we do in Sandal, lithium, I mean like building, the plant that we’ve got, we’re even running right now is just still completely exciting. Whenever I go around there and see what we’re doing, it’s amazing. Thinking about building the first one and like. Selling, a ton of lithium carbonate to an end user and it going into a battery and going into an ev that would be amazing.

That would be a fantastic achievement. Be so proud of when we do that. But, I’m very lucky. I have a very interesting job and everything that we do is pretty cool. Even my kids think it’s okay, right? Yeah.

Antoine Walter: Can you name one thing that you’ve learned the hard way?

Andy Robinson: working continuously with natural brain, that’s been like, that’s been a headache. Yeah. That, I, we predicted how lots of things would work, and I would say none of those predictions played out. Everything worked differently than we thought it would do. And so that’s been a really hard lesson.

This stuff is difficult. It seems really simple. Again, goes back to continuous chemical processing. Is. Whilst a lot of it is very simple, the chemistry should be very straightforward. The practical reality is difficult to get right. And so that we’ve learned the hard way. But me personally, I think some members of the team who are who know better than I do and are not quite as optimistic as I am probably new.

But I’ve certainly learned that hard way.

Antoine Walter: Is there something you’re doing today in your job, which you will not be doing in 10 years?

Andy Robinson: I mean, other than using AI to write news releases which I still have to do right now. To keep it, maybe to give it a message for your podcast. I think we spend a lot of time taking discreet samples and sending them internally to a lab for analysis. In the future, I think we’ll see a lot more inline, real time analysis.

Of fluid streams and the control, the process from that inline, realtime analytical tools. So I think that process analytic control through, through real realtime chemical analysis, that will be something that we’ll do in the future that we can’t quite do yet.

Antoine Walter: So here I have to prevent myself very strongly to open a sidetrack cuz I can start another hour if I do. It’s a fascinating field, really fascinating field. So maybe you have to come back at some point.

Andy Robinson: Sure. I’ll bring somebody else on when, who knows a lot more about it, frankly. Yeah.

Antoine Walter: what is the trend to watch out for in the D l E sector?

Andy Robinson: Oh I don’t know if there’s a specific trend to be honest, Antoine, I think it’s the, for people who are truly interested, I think that, again I’ll hark back. It’s people actually telling the full story about their entire flow sheet from start to finish. I think that’s gonna be the interesting, that’s the real interesting thing that investors in the space people who are just have a, a, an intellectual interest in, in, in what we’re doing.

That is the trend to to figure out and understand like what does the whole flow sheet look like and what seems to be working across multiple different formations. From resource to resource. Cuz I think that tells you a lot.

Antoine Walter: Last question, would you have someone to recommend me that? That should definitely invite as soon as possible on that microphone.

Andy Robinson: I mean, if you wish to know about lithium. You should absolutely speak to, to, to Mr. Lithium. To Joe Larry. He would be an excellent podcast guest cuz he knows he’s forgotten more about lithium than most of us know. So that’s just a fantastic person to talk to about how the industry has evolved and where it’s going.

And if you want to know about process analytic control and modern approaches to processing, you should speak to to a friend of mine and a colleague of mine, professor Jason Hein, who is at university of British Columbia, and also Telescope Innovations. He’s a, an individual who we use a lot to lean on as a technical resource.

Probably, actually no, without doubt, the cleverest person I’ve ever met. An incredible individual. So either of those people would be fantastic. Podcast, yes.

Antoine Walter: Thanks a lot for the recommendation I have been exchanging with Joe. I have not been able to pin him down to having on the microphone, but I will keep on trying cuz Yeah, I got the recommendation from others and Robert advised me also to speak to Jaen Hein. So

Andy Robinson: No.

Well, there you go. I didn’t,

Antoine Walter: two recommendations, which is the magical number, which brought you on that microphone.

So it was a good pattern to reproduce. Thanks a lot for the time you spent with me. Sorry I was French and I took more time than expected. If people want to follow up with you, what’s the best place for them to contact you?

Andy Robinson: I mean, really through the standard Lithium website or I can always be emailed at a robinson standard lithium.com. But yeah, and always happy to interact with people who are interested and thank you. I’m fascinating interview and it’s a pleasure to speak with you, Antoine. Truly.

Antoine Walter: again, my pleasure. So thanks a lot and I stand my point. If you want to be back at some point for instance, when your plan starts operating I’d be happy to have you to discuss what you’ve learned in the

Andy Robinson: At that point, We should have a live podcast from the facility. And then we can actually run you through in real time a lithium ion entering the plant, and finishing up in a in a hundred micron particle of lithium carbonate!

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The post The 5 Rules To a Successful Direct Lithium Extraction Adventure appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

(Also check my entire Lithium deep dive!)

with Christopher Brown – CEO at Helios Corporation

Helios acknowledges that the World’s current trajectory is unsustainable and focuses its expertise in Energy, Power, Biomass, Capital Markets, and the latest environmental technology to achieve more, using less.

What we covered:

How geothermal energy can revolutionize lithium extraction and how it may actually do it

Why the future of lithium production is tied to reducing carbon intensity and the secrets behind low-carbon lithium extraction

What the key to sustainable lithium mining is and how HeliosX is bridging the gap with eco-friendly practices

How to invest wisely in the thriving critical minerals industry while still not being investment advice (hey, this is a podcast!)

How DLE technologies are reshaping the lithium extraction landscape and how groundbreaking lab experiments can give us a glimpse of the future

How long it takes from lab to commercial production, and the timeline to make lithium extraction profitable

How lithium extraction can and shall be both profitable and environmentally friendly

Green goals vs. economic reality: the real cost of an accelerated EV program and its challenges for the electrical grid.

Scaling up lithium extraction: How can companies transition from lab success to field operations? Let’s break down the logical steps

Collaboration in the critical minerals industry: the ideal partners for driving positive change and their shared philosophies.

Impact metrics that matter: how to contribute to economic development and low carbon intensity while integrating the human dimension

Investing in critical minerals and the associated risk, the winning formula to sustainable mining, how revolutionizing battery production is a race, the next big thing, first nations, zooming out before we zoom in… and much more!

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Teaser: Sustainable Lithium Extraction

Resources:

Come say hi to Christopher on LinkedIn

Check Helios Corporation’s website

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Editorial: The Human Dimension of Sustainable Lithium Extraction

Over the past episodes, we’ve discussed why we need more lithium, where to find new sources, and how to unlock them from a technical standpoint. We’ve discussed fascinating projects and drawn a line toward a more sustainable future for the decade to come.

But sustainability isn’t only environmental and financial impact; it’s also the human dimension. And even when lithium is literally found in deserts, those places still belong to someone and to a culture, and they historically had a role and use that wasn’t lithium extraction for several centuries.

That is true wherever you are on earth, from South America’s first nations to Canada ones, through local communities in all the places where unconventional sources of lithium are to be mined in the future.

Everything in life can be done against someone else or instead in concertation. And to that extent, what we discuss with Christopher today offers a framework for comprehension, best practices, and way forwards.

As I mentioned in my intro, when Helios acknowledges that the World’s trajectory is unsustainable, it’s also important to ensure that the remedy is better than the plague. So sustainability is a keyword, for sure, and an ambitious one. From Argentina to Canada through the US, today’s exploration is one of the deepest we’ve had in this mini-series, and I’m really thankful to Christopher for the incredible openness he demonstrated and the great pedagogy you’ll get to experience in just a second.

Right before that, let me remind you that if you like what you hear, you can help others benefit from it by sharing this episode with a friend, a colleague, your boss, or your team, thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I’ll meet you on the other side!

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi Christopher. Welcome to the show.

Christopher Brown: Hello. Thank you for having me.

Antoine Walter: I’m very excited to have you today because we will be touching a topic, which is, let’s say, slightly aside from the usual water topics and yet quite hot right now in the water world, but before going to the depth of that, their traditions on that microphone, and it starts with asking you to send me a postcard from the place you’re at.

And actually you are in Calgary. So what can you tell me about Calgary, which I would ignore by now?

Christopher Brown: Well, thank you first for having me on. I appreciate the time and uh, calgary’s a fantastic dynamic young city still focused on, oil opportunities here. But we’re definitely working on transitioning to the new lithium bride space and this is sort of a, an interest area of ours.

And we’re actually quite the emerging technology hub as well. So I know Calgary has been quite the dynamic young city that’s slowly growing onto its own. And it’s just been a fantastic place to live and work.

Antoine Walter: So Oil tech hub and in the transition phase, does that have a link with what you’re doing today at Helios?

Christopher Brown: Oh, a hundred percent. so The work we do is right now a lot of ex oil and gas guys, they’re taking their fundamental technology experience and transitioning that to how to better extract critical minerals from Alberta. And there’s an exact correlation for skill sets that go across the board, that focus on how to best and optimally extract subsurface lithium brine to make a commercial today.

And we’re, close proximity, university of Calgary where we have a lot of access to amazing technical talent that’s looking at the next generation type of lithium recovery to make these commercial opportunities come to fruition.

Antoine Walter: And what’s brought you to that position? I mean, I’ve seen that you’ve been in engineering, you’ve been in finance. How do you come across lithium?

Christopher Brown: so Lithium came on our radar screen as we were focused on renewable technologies. And then to take a step back Helios Corporation I founded in 2016 with a focus to merge engineering and finance to assist actually, initially indigenous nations and empower them with environmentally positive technologies for commercial opportunities.

And along those lines we reviewed a number of investments that evolved, the application of renewables, but also the application of extraction technologies. And through that course of action we had discovered that there’s an amazing large depth of resources available in lithium brines in Alberta that haven’t been touched or properly reviewed.

And we thought we could bring a technical expertise to fruition that would commercialize those opportunities.

Antoine Walter: if I’m right today, Helios is around 70 people.

Christopher Brown: there’s a mix of companies that make up under the Helios Corporation and partnership groups. For example I founded a company up in the oil sands which became the largest environmental protection group of all the tailing ponds. And so that gave us direct hands-on experience with being around large bodies of water and the nature of protecting those for environmental purposes.

And so that has grown from when I founded that with two people, it grown to actually over a hundred employees today within the Helios X group. We have a staff down in Argentina who’s currently reviewing resources down there for opportunities for potentially evaporation pond or DLE processes.

And then we have four or five employees up in Calgary that with additional consultants are looking at how to commercialize reservoirs up in Canada for lithium brine extraction. So each of the groups has its own focus. We do have a greenhouse focused area as well and as well as a fiber optic company that we’re working with First Nations to deploy to.

So we’re a diverse, trying to empower both technologies to indigenous nations while moving along with renewables and extraction technologies for critical minerals. So a very diverse group of companies.

Antoine Walter: So you mentioned these critical materials. You also mentioned DLE, so you are active in two of the three fields of this lithium world.

You have the rock mining, so that’s the one you’re not in. Then you have these evaporation ponds and the direct lithium attraction. And those are the two, if I’m right, where you are active. So are you active on an equal basis or what’s your view into these various fields?

Christopher Brown: For our focus we’re subsurface experts. We come from oil and gas industries, so we’re good with fluid dynamics and analysis of subsurface fluids. So that’s why we stay within the brine universe for lithium extraction opportunities. The other two types of lithium opportunities are pure hard rock, which involves stripping away the surface of the earth and digging down deep in the traditional mining techniques.

actually the third type of lithium is a lithium that’s embedded in clays. And this is an evolution that’s continued to grow in the us. For extraction of clay-based lithium where you do like a slurry and you extract the lithium via different type of processes. But our focus is particularly in brines.

And to give you an idea of what that is essentially subsurface. You have these reservoirs filled with salt water, and within that salt water exists lithium. And the goal here is to extract the salt water from the subsurface using wells, pumping them to surface, and then deciding on two courses of action for technology.

The one proven course is evaporation ponds, and that’s proven commercial and currently used. 70% of the lithium currently produced today is. Produced via that method versus 30% is hard rock extraction. And then the other emerging technology, which is what we’re tracking very closely, is direct lithium extraction.

And what that technology proposes is essentially to reduce the amount of fresh water utilization and order to extract the lithium ions directly from the salt water and then re-inject the salt water back subsurface.

Antoine Walter: You mentioned Argentina, you mentioned Alberta and Calgary. If I’m right, you have a third region where you’re active, which is ne Nevada. So is it these clay subsurface sources, which you were mentioning, or is it something different?

Christopher Brown: Well, each one’s a little bit different, so to speak. So no reservoir is the same. And so to break each of the three basins up for visual is that, in Argentina, the reservoir type, we have there is like a bowl and the bowl’s filled with sediments and the salt in the water is based in those sediments.

In the bowl in Canada, we flip the bowl upside down and that’s the container type of style we have in Canada on in reefs. And these reefs are filled from below with a geothermal system , that essentially hot water from below brought up calcium and lithium and magnesium and filled the bowl.

That’s upside down. Now in Nevada, it’s a slightly different one where the bowl is like the Argentine bowl, but it is actually being fed from below. And so the segments and the geothermal work is drawing up the lithium to the bowl in

Nevada’s play types are smaller, but there’s a proven play called Silver Peak the only producing lithium asset that’s been on production for many decades in Nevada using lithium brine.

They do evaporation ponds and people are looking to expand and hopefully create new commercial opportunities in the vicinity of that Silver Peak asset. And two of our assets are in very close proximity to the Silver Peak. So we’re cautiously optimistic. The geology is somewhat similar, but we need to drill some exploration well to really prove it.

Antoine Walter: And so your expertise isn’t understanding what’s below the surface before starting to drill.

Christopher Brown: That’s right. We do a combination of things, applying our reservoir engineering skills to both define the resource subsurface, but then we do a lot of advanced probabilistic statistical analysis. It’s a bit different because in the mining sector, they don’t take a statistical probabilistic mathematical approach to their type of resource assessments.

It’s more of a bulk volume. I have this much resource, I drill this hole has this much pay. I’m extrapolating this in the region, and that’s their number. From a more detailed technical engineering side that we bring from the oil and gas side. We take a far more complex approach to these to do the analysis, a much more sophisticated approach.

So we try and do more detailed distributions of the potential resource outcomes to give us a better sense of where we should focus our monies today. And so from a ranking perspective, Argentina is like heaven. It is beautiful reservoirs, amazingly high content lithium rich brines. The only issue there is indigenous type of groups that need to be consulted with are a little bit apprehensive and understanding the work that’s being done.

Industry’s done a very poor job in keeping the indigenous informed in South America. So we’re hoping to bring our indigenous consultation expertise down there to work with the nations more effectively. And key thing is they’re just education. The industry’s never really educated the indigenous and what the work’s being done.

And so , my. Path to success with our, all of our partnerships we’ve been successfully had in Canada has merely just been keeping the lines of communication open and working cooperatively with the indigenous nations.

Antoine Walter: Please don’t get shocked by the low level of details in what I will be asking, because I’m really starting to discover the fields. You mentioned Argentina, and you mentioned the respect of the indigenous people living on that land. During my research, I came across the case of the Atma Desert in Chile, where there is 40 to 60% of the water resources, which is used by that lithium and brine extraction to the detriment of the people who used to cultivate that lens.

So if I get your rights, what you’re bringing to the table here is that you’re bringing that consideration of the people living on that lens so that it is made in synergy and in a sustainable way. Right.

Christopher Brown: Yeah, exactly. Like part of the issue that is the misunderstanding that the water that we’re bringing to the surface is fresh. Because when you look at it and it comes to surface, it actually looks clear, looks like drinkable bottle water. It’s not, and there’s a definite misunderstanding that if you’re not informing and keeping the indigenous nations participating alongside you, technically understanding what you’re doing there’s a misconception that you are draining fresh water.

And because of this lack of communication in South America with those nations, it’s grown out of proportion. And unfortunately, misconception politics, things that people can grab on easily, tend to make headlines and a lot of that is just a lot of misinformation about the type of nature of the water we bring to surface.

A great example of work we did was in the oil sands. My reason I decided to partner with the indigenous nation is because the oil sand producers had very little transparency on what was going on. Birds were landing on these contaminated tailings ponds with oil and dying, and then First Nations were concerned that the oil sands were essentially taking their natural hunting ability away from them.

They were killing birds on these tailing ponds. And what we did is I came up with a concept of partnering with the First Nation and bringing them to the tailings ponds. And now the First Nation is present at the tailing ponds. They see the environmental work that’s being done to protect the tailing ponds and the understanding has grown exponentially.

Now. There’s very few, if any, complaints about bird landings and environmental issues around that, because the First Nations present, they see the challenges. You’re never gonna not have a landing, for example, in these contaminated ponds, but it the technology does its best to prevent it, but it was only bridging the understanding with the First Nations to see what was being done positively.

Were we able to come to a nice compromise and everyone is actually quite content on moving forward together. We lack that in Argentina. The companies that are previously there never brought the First Nations to the table or the indigenous peoples , to see the work, to participate with the work. And this is what the skillset set that Helios X wants to bring to the table.

Antoine Walter: Let me be uh, muggle here very intentionally. You mentioned technology, but an evaporation pond. It’s bringing something to the surface and waiting for it to evaporate. So what’s technology in that?

Christopher Brown: Well, there is a component of fresh water utilization. When you do bring this heavy high salt water if you want ironically enough to accelerate the evaporation, you have to reduce the salinity. And that helps by injecting some fresh water into the system. So from a perception standpoint, , that sounds negative especially in desert-like conditions in Argentina but from a carbon intensity perspective.

So when we look at all of our concerns about a CO2 equivalence that all of us from an environmental climate change perspective are concerned with, it’s actually a very low carbon intensity process when we go to direct lithium extraction, you have the counterbalance where Yes, we use far less water.

But we use a lot more electricity. And that electricity, especially in Alberta, tends to be methane based. And because it’s a carbon intense electricity, it’s carbon footprint, even though physically, visually it looks smaller, it’s a much larger car carbon footprint. And so it’s a balance that we have to strike.

Do, we have a surface evaporation pond, which is naturally evaporating just water into the atmosphere, which is not too bad but does utilize more fresh water, but low carbon intensity. Or do we use DLE systems, which can be highly carbon intensive, but have a smaller footprint. So it’s gonna be an interesting debate as DLE systems evolve.

Antoine Walter: I’d like to jump into the DLE in just a minute, but there’s one last thing which I need to understand before that, which is you have these three different regions where you’re active, so Argentina, neda and Alberta. What does that mean to be active? Does that mean that you own a piece of land?

Does that mean that you own a right to extract or a permit to extract or a concession? What does it mean?

Christopher Brown: that’s a very great question. , so in Argentina we’re in the exploration phase and until we’ve done enough exploration work to convince the government to commercialize, it remains in that type of label, meaning that we don’t have the right to. Essentially commercially sell lithium until we convert the exploration permit into the license , to develop it.

In Nevada, our permits allow us to continue the exploration in a similar application process. As you move forward to construction of a facility, we have to obtain appropriate permits with the Nevada state which some companies are going through right now. So we’re observing the process, seeing what the objections the state may have to their developments and making sure we incorporate that into our own program when we move forward.

And then Alberta, it’s the same thing. So you have an expiration permit, which you then convert over to a license once you’ve deemed it commercial and put forward your necessary permits and paperwork to justify that conversion. So all three of our assets are still exploration based. We have to do a decent amount of work to move them to commercial.

But at least we’re, we’re really understanding and learning about the reservoirs today.

Antoine Walter: What’s your time horizon to convert them?

Christopher Brown: It’s about anywhere from a two to five year process to collect the necessary data. It’s a government approval process, so you can only convert it upon obtaining enough commercial information to give them a line of sight that you can commercialize the asset. And then from there, the actual construction process can vary quite a bit.

It could be another two to five years in addition to that, to actually construct the necessary and do the detailed engineering accurately and drill the necessary wells to do the commerciality. So it can be a process that ranges from four years to over 10 years depending on the approvals, the environmental permits, and most importantly, working well with the indigenous nations in the region.

Antoine Walter: so I guess the fact that you need these. Several years to understand what exactly under the surface, prove what you have to dig into, and then get the time to drill and to finally, and extract explains why, if I do the math right, 70% comes from evaporation ponds. 30% comes from rock mining. That means that today, DLE is at 0%, but is in development a bit everywhere around the world, and will become one more way to extract lithium.

It won’t disrupt the existing or will it.

Christopher Brown: No it won’t. For example like the Silver Peak Group’s been on production and using evaporation ponds for decades. There is the method of which they’ve designed, their systems will not lend itself to an efficient DLE conversion process. And so DLE right now there’s probably close to 20 different types of DLE processes out there.

And with I love about it is it continuously evolves. And so there’s always the next group, like we work with the University Calgary group out of there, that is amazingly intelligent, has taken sort of the next evolutionary step for DLE processes. They’ve proven in a laboratory, but they we have to work to transition to that, to field demonstrations.

That’s where the next step comes because we can do a lot of things in laboratory. All 20 of these technologies , work amazingly well on laboratory basis. None of them have really proven themselves commercially out in the field with massive volumes of water yet. But you know, I love the enthusiasm behind it.

I love the intelligence behind it. And like I said, the DLE technology that was here three years ago has already been trumped by the DLE technology being released today. So there’s, continuously an evolution of DLE technology that becomes more and more efficient, which then lends itself to hopefully we can reduce our electricity consumption in order to reduce the carbon footprint of these DLE processes as well.

Antoine Walter: So you mentioned 20 different ways of doing DLE or 20 different processes. I tried to understand what’s the difference between those. what is it like, like 50 shades of gray or what differentiates those 20 different ones?

Christopher Brown: No it’s always the subtleties. It devils in the details as they say. So for example the methodol that you, which you do, the ion exchanged work can vary quite a bit. For example. And then there’s the aspect of the precipitation, one that you had talked is completely different process. And then there’s the absorbent technologies.

So those are the ones to keep it very simple for listeners, it’s like having a bowling ball, a spikes with a bunch of spikes on it, and as water passes, it grabs the lithium. Well, what’s happened for the next guy that figured out the bowling ball with the spikes is someone decided to drill 1 million holes through the bowling ball to increase the surface area substantially.

Well, that’s a nice step of evolution. So now you have a bowling ball with spikes with 1 million holes, and then the next guys come up with a better way , to put spikes within those million holes to capture even more lithium. And so those are the types of evolutions we see is people taking. The existing thought process, the chemistry is always the same.

It’s been known for 30 years of how to extract lithium from a chemistry equation. It’s just been the innovation and the excitement around the technologies people are bringing together on a nano level even to, to more excitingly capture this lithium in an environmentally friendly way. And those are the differences.

It’s just that little step change difference. And everyone’s adding their little contribution from a known point. And it’s we’ll see where everything ends and there’s gonna be winners and there’s gonna be losers. But we hope that we can bring some new technology to Alberta to extract our lithium here for sure.

Antoine Walter: your three assets, you have Argentina, which is about evaporation ponds. Why for Neda and Alberta did you go for D LE

Christopher Brown: Well, I wouldn’t say that we definitively decided , on DLE simply because evaporation ponds are the only proven technology. Now, from my oil sands experience, there’s actually new technologies on evaporation ponds that can accelerate evaporation rates in Alberta. So people, again, have the misconception that we’re cold.

You can’t use evaporation ponds when, ironically enough, just to give you some numbers that are meaningful in order to be a successful evaporation pond in Argentina. You have to evaporate upon about 1.8 meters to about 2.2 meters a year of evaporation rate. You do that, you’re starting down the path to get to a concentration which you can throw into your system and extract your lithium efficiently in Alberta, our evaporation rate on average today, even with our cold winters and our hot summers, runs about 0.8 to point to one meter of evaporation rate naturally.

Well, there’s new technologies that we use in the oil and gas industry today that can enhance that evaporation rate to get it up to the two meters. It’s just that no one’s taking those next step cuz everyone’s hesitant about evaporation ponds in general in Alberta just from the misconception of how, like the tailing ponds and how negative those have been for industry.

I wouldn’t discount evaporation but d l e and evaporation that maybe there’s a hybrid solution too. Like there’s that concept as well that if you preplanned DLE with evaporation ponds, maybe there’s a more effective lower carbon intensive methodology as well.

Antoine Walter: So like using d e as a CRC step, so concentration step, and then go into an preparation pond or something totally different.

Christopher Brown: Yeah, no, exactly. Like something to that effect. Whether one comes before the other we’d have to see keep in mind where our, the one reason I like d l e in Alberta is because we have exceptionally low concentrations of lithium, our lithium concentrations range from like 30 parts per million up to 120 parts per million.

To put that in perspective, Argentina is like 300 parts per million to 600 parts per million. So that’s well within what we call the economic range. And then Nevada is essentially between 150 to 300 parts per million type of range that you can have outcomes in Nevada. And so Alberta’s really on the low end of the scale, so we have to be particularly innovative how we’re gonna unlock the Alberta opportunity.

And so our goal here is to get it up to. At least 25 to 35,000 parts per million through these types of processes. Because then your friends at Saltworks can come to the table, pull their design off the shelf, and anything from that point on is just literally off the shelf. Technology, whether it’s saltworks or any other group once you get it up to that level is always the goal.

It’s just trying to get that low concentration to a point where we can feed it to the Saltworks of the world to take it to the refined lithium processes.

Antoine Walter: You mentioned how you are teaming up with the University of Calgary. What’s the shape of that partnership? Does it mean that you have some PhD students which are working in your offices, or is it a more formal partnership or what’s the way to work with that scene?

Christopher Brown: Oh it’s just a friendly partnership PhD professor that is expert originally at hydrocarbon extractions is where they work towards how to apply that technology to lithium. And this is again, the evolution of bridging the gaps between oil and gas and lithium extraction.

And the nature right now is just support. So what we do is we try and to source lithium samples for them, that we want to do the analysis on their lab, so we get them real world samples to try and determine what hiccups could be and their type of technology extraction, as well as we bridge the gaps within industry.

We’re fairly well known in the oil and gas industry, and so our goal is to try and translate this technology into the energy industry as best as possible, and we help facilitate that for them as well. And so that jointly we can empower them with access to real life brines, and they do the analysis and hopefully they empower us with new technologies that the industry can benefit from, not just us.

The goal at this stage is we’re so early in this industry, we all have to work together as partners. Being competitive works to no one’s advantage right now.

Antoine Walter: you mentioned partners, if I’m right, you’re working with Lius Lilac and Core Separation. So what is the role of each of the parties in that collaboration?

Christopher Brown: Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s the idea of just keeping the concepts open and having information flow. Lilac Solutions out of California. Really well-funded entity. Private backed by Bill Gates. MIT’s involved with that technology evolution. They’re active around the world looking for lithium plays to apply their technology to.

They work in the above, 200 to 400 milligram per liter range. That’s their window of success for their application of their technologies. Koch has developed various types of lithium and evolved their lithium separation technologies. But again, they fall in, that 200 to 400 but have real on the ground experience in the US trying to commercialize or attempting to commercialize their technologies in the us.

Lilac has actually successfully partnered. In Argentina with a field operation that has proven very positive to date. So Lilac sort of has proven itself in Argentina so far. Koch has proven itself in US so far, and Litus up in Canada is in the process of a lower concentration. their window is sub 100 milligrams, which falls into those reservoirs there.

So each one has its specialty for the reservoir types, and that’s what we’re looking for is not necessarily one solution to fit all. What’s the best solution for the reservoirs we’re pursuing?

Antoine Walter: For me to get that construct of who does what. Let me just take you 10 years in the future, like your expiration is done, you’ve drilled, you’ve started operating, you’re producing in that construct. So 10 years in the future. Are you like the mother company with everything in house or is it like a joint venture on each of these sites where these technology companies have their own word?

Or how is it gonna be built?

Christopher Brown: Yeah. Well, yeah, 10 years out, I’d love to be vertically integrated. So if we have a solution that works best in a basin, I’d like that to be in-house as best as possible, allows us to control our destiny, allows us to control the design aspects and more importantly, operations in the field need to be dynamic.

We need to have hands-on and just having lots of field experience things go wrong and having that in-house technology expertise allows us to efficiently restore or get production back in an efficient period of time. So I’m a big fan of vertically integrating, but at the same side I would never house or keep that to ourselves.

Our goal would be to partner with other lithium opportunity exploration guys and development people that if we had that technology in house, I want to make sure it’s available to them economically as well, because it benefits everybody to have a healthy lithium extraction and critical minerals entity to essentially isolate and not share the technology with others.

Doesn’t work well for in the industry in general. And plus then it’d be harder to find a qualified employees. You wanna encourage more people to transition and the key thing is to make sure there’s employees and enough employees in industry that we can properly add to the benefit and transition people from oil and gas into the critical minerals as efficiently as possible.

Antoine Walter: in terms of hr, that’s the play at work. It’s converging the oil and gas specialists into those more sustainable fields.

Christopher Brown: Exactly. Exactly. They already have the skillset. It’s one of those things that. They just don’t know what they don’t know type of situation that they have the skillset that is perfectly applicable. They just don’t know that they’re very valuable for lithium extraction. And it’s just teaching them the applications.

And once a lot of people realize that actually my geology background directly applies, my engineering background directly applies my geophysical background directly applies. It checks so many boxes for transitioning to critical elements extraction. It’s just getting the word out there and really expanding and opening up people’s minds in terms of the new emerging industry.

Antoine Walter: So I’ve taken you 10 years in the future. What’s your vision today of these 10 years in the future? I hear that you’d like to be vertically integrated, but do you have a certain level of certainty today about how you’re going to build that, or are you in a phase where actually everything’s possible?

Christopher Brown: Well, as you’ve heard from the various entities , that we house under our Helios corporation, we’re a big believer of everything’s possible. So we’re, so, like I said, un under us, we have emerging geo, geothermal technologies. We’re working on for sustained greenhouse development for remote communities.

We have a fiber optics network company. We’re working on developing. We have our lithium extraction technologies. We’re evolving. I’m a big believer of investing widely. And to try and just capture as much as possible because you don’t know which one is gonna be sort of the winner at the end of the day, and you just want to keep a diversified portfolio of opportunities.

And when it comes to the lithium extraction, that’s exactly our perspective. We’re open-minded, whether it’s absorption technologies, ion exchange technology, precipitation technologies with some type of cal enhanced catalyst to do that, whatever one makes sense, but is also. As low carbon intensity as possible is also very important because you could have the best direct lithium extraction technology.

But unfortunately, when you go to sell your lithium, one of the criteria that a lot of these guys haven’t factored into their analysis yet is the purchasers of that lithium want to know what was the carbon intensity? How many tons of CO2 did it take per ton of lithium for you to make this? And they’re gonna go down their list and they’re gonna rank their purchases and they’ll pay a premium for those that are low intensity.

And you may be punished for being too carbon intensive. So DLE , what we have to really watch if you’re looking 10 years in the future, is who’s the most carbon intense entity? And who has taken the extra time to reduce that will be the ones you wanna partner with.

Antoine Walter: We mentioned quite generally lithium since the beginning of this conversation, but what is it exactly that you aim to produce in term of type of lithium or grade of lithium?

Christopher Brown: Well this could be a conversation onto itself cause this is a very big topic. So the two primary products that are off the shelf today, commercial for yielding. Or is either lithium carbonate or lithium chloride via various mechanisms. Now, what is the most efficient for transportation is actually lithium carbonate.

Lithium chloride carries a certain amount of issues if you’re gonna be transporting and packaging that you have to be more environmentally sensitive and watch out for employee safety is a big concern with lithium chloride. Now, one thing I’d love to propose and I wish more would give consideration to, with these aspirations of the US to create these battery facilities.

So right now all this product is essentially heading over to China for further refinement to produce into your battery. What we need to do is do like a lithium concentrate facility. And what that means is rather than refining it to a certain point in the fields, which almost no junior company can affordably do today, cuz you’re talking about 800 million plus a capital requirement to get to these levels, why don’t we take a step back and create refineries that can accept lower concentration lithiums and then we can make all these junior opportunities more economic because they only have to refine it, evaporate it a bit, get it up to 25,000 parts per million and ship off the fluid in tankers.

And then you build multiple concentrate facilities, which will take that concentration, use the whatever saltworks technology just because you mentioned them earlier and take it to a refining level themselves. So I think the investment in refining locally that can take lower concentrations would be a brilliant way to bridge the gap to make all the junior guys.

Remain interested in exploration and allow them a path to commercialization.

Antoine Walter: You mentioned all these junior guys and all that striving ecosystem in North America, actually on both sides of the border between the US and Canada. From my research, which probably didn’t find everybody, I identified about 40, 45 companies in North America alone. Which are acting on various parts of that extraction, but all linked to that extraction.

So one way to look at it is to think it’s like this era pre Blu-ray where you had all the alternatives and one day the Blu-ray came up and killed all the others because it just happened to be better. The other is exactly what you explained to say, there’s probably an economy of scale if you can find a way to ize the resources and then have a full vertical in North America, which can deal with all the stages.

So how do you team up with the other members of that ecosystem?

Christopher Brown: I’ve personally reached out to a number of the junior guys just to stay in contact keep an understanding of their evolution of what they’re doing, what contacts they’re making. But it is a bit of a process. The government does need to provide essentially an incentive to construct refineries.

And this has been an issue, ironically enough, in Canada, many decades ago could have had the chance to be a large refiner of, in our energy system for oil and gas, for example. At the time they, they chose not to, and now to our detriment, Canada is now at the will of the US refinery.

 Like 50% of our crude has no functional use until it gets to refinery. So it has to be piped through the us big risk on piping, long distances, pipeline breaks and things like that. Provide environmental risk. Versus we could have built many refineries, much closer to home, saved ourselves both the transportation cost, the environmental risk, cost, and also been , an active contributor to the world economy.

Lithium’s the same way. We have a decision point coming up where we have all these junior producers who are looking for exploration opportunities for lithium extraction. The government needs to provide that window to say, we’ll support it by allowing or providing some type of tax incentives for US companies to come to Canada.

Construct intermediate refinery processes so that the junior producers can flourish. It’ll encourage more investment in exploration. Cause right now, if you’re a junior producer, you have to actually do your budgets as if you’re gonna take it to full commercialization. Well, a 15 million market cap company in no way can get line of sight on 800 million of capital today.

 I can put it down in a preliminary economic assessment report. But it’s almost worthless because you don’t have that means to export. You don’t have the means of the market. And like I said, a big unknown is whether or not your DLE technology, let’s say, would even meet the classification of carbon intensity that will allow you to export your lithium.

So there’s lots of risks involved at this stage if we don’t find that intermediate bridge to be successful.

Antoine Walter: That entire market is obviously driven today by the battery revolution, or the ev revolution, depending on how we want to look at it, which is driving the costs up. But to which extent can those costs be driven up? I mean, again, according to my very short research the price was multiplied by five last year, but there’s probably a cap.

And at some point the new capacities of production will at least stop the increase. it something you have to take in consideration when you’re dimensioning your assets and looking at what is gonna be breakeven and sustainable and then profitable?

Christopher Brown: Yeah, that, that’s something that we actively monitor. To give you some research background for example, China in general is a ballpark is about 10 years ahead of North America on all this thought process of critical minerals. To put it in perspective, like China realizes that if it wants to move to electric vehicle, which it’ll be the largest electric vehicle hub in the world it needed to secure critical minerals early on.

So a good example is like cobalt’s, a key part of the battery. Components. So you have lithium, cobalt, nickel as some of your key elements you need as part of the critical elements for your battery. Well, China, just to give you a perspective, one of the key cobalt places in the world is the Congo. China’s imports from Congo in 1990s was about 1.9 million with an M.

Today it is now 9 billion with a B. They recognized early on to source the critical elements they need for an electric future, that they need to securitize the key source of critical elements. Now the situation is no one else can get access to that market. They’re the largest imported exporter of goods from Congo.

They control that economy, have it well in hand, and now indefinitely will have that ability for themselves to meet their ev demand. Now what’s happened is the US and Canada are now gonna fight the good fight and they’re gonna have to pay more for the product, which is gonna lend itself to challenges with, like you said, on costs just across the board and may cost out a number of potential consumers.

So the potential forecast for EVs in California and the US may not come to fruition honestly. There’s the components of the car itself, which will be likely more expensive. But the second component is the electrical grid systems aren’t designed for that. There’s no way, for example, , in Alberta that we can put in, for example, like a new wind farm if we want to be green on the eastern side of Alberta, because our electrical system in no way can handle any type of uncertainty, variable electricity input anymore.

So we’re hamstrung by not just the EV side, but the distribution system is so archaic that it can no way support an accelerated ev program that is currently being proposed for 2035 from both Canada, us. It always sounds good from politicians, but when you actually do the math, it doesn’t actually work out at all.

Antoine Walter: But would that influence the price of lithium?

Christopher Brown: That will increase the price of lithium. It’s good for obviously the base exporter like ourselves hopefully , over the next 10 years. It just concerning from an environmental standpoint that we’re not necessarily gonna achieve our green goals , as efficiently as we could.

And this is where, like I said, if the government starts to realize that vertically integrating within your own region of the resource can lend itself to that advantage, and that’s what China has demonstrated. We need to actually take a not outta their book from securitizing our own resources to be able to actually refine our own resources.

We can’t be dependent on China for the next 10, 20 years of refining our batteries any further. That’s a big political risk.

Antoine Walter: Talking of this energy question, resources and also a field you’re involved in. If I’m right, you’re also active in geothermal extraction. It sounds , like the good counterpart to any kind of lithium extraction, because if already you’re taking that water, which is more or less rich a lithium, if it has some geothermal value, then you can double up with an energy play.

that your idea , to find this synergistic move between the two, or is it just a coincidence?

Christopher Brown: No, it was by design. So we’re very geothermally focused as well, and this lends itself to the tailing or essentially the evaporation pod design in Alberta. We can use natural geothermal heat to keep the temperature of the evaporation ponds higher to accelerate evaporation rates in Alberta on an exceptionally low carbon basis, because then I don’t need the electricity.

I have my natural heat from the earth providing natural heat to a pond, providing fresh water to our atmosphere while we extract the lithium. It’s actually a very nice story once people get their minds around that the evaporation ponds are not like contaminated tailings ponds. And that unfortunately, people tend to relate those to is the one and the same.

So our evaporation ponds we could use with the geothermal technology would also keep the carbon footprint amazingly low. The carbon intensity would be very low on that type of process. So I’m a very pro moving along our geothermal technology in parallel with the lithium extraction. I think , they go hand in hand for sure.

Antoine Walter: So it’s not about being exothermic or producing energy, it’s about reducing the carbon intensity and optimizing the lithium extraction process.

Christopher Brown: Yes.

Antoine Walter: It sounds like a great synergy and a cool opportunity. If I’m playing the dead advocates here, it’s like adding uncertainty on the uncertainty, so it’s like doubling up the technological risk. How can you reassure me that’s a good idea.

Christopher Brown: Well, the good news is geothermal technology has made decades of proven success. And so, you can go to a number of countries, Iceland, Sweden, in Norway and go into , their systems and there’s a lot of geothermally positive, construction projects, residential, commercial projects.

So what’s nice is geothermal gradients and understanding of geothermal technologies, and I’ll convert that to surface heat. Very much proven technology. And then evaporation ponds, obviously very much proven technology with the work that’s been done with 70% of your lithium currently being extracted via that means we’ve had 50 years of evaporation ponds that have proven themselves as well.

 Where that next step is actually the risk for us is DLE, how they integrate this DLE system without using so much electricity. This is the largest issue we have. It goes to the point of, for example, I can produce as much hydrogen as you want. If you give me infinite amount of electricity and a bottle of water off to the races, I go, is that the most efficient way when my electricity is produced by methane?

 Am I creating hydrogen, but creating a larger carbon intensity issue by just utilizing high intensity electricity that’s based on methane, that’s the balance balancer we were trying to strike with the direct lithium extraction technologies.

Antoine Walter: You’ve spoken in very positive terms about these general companies and this striving ecosystem, which is aiming , to develop the third path of the I’ve also heard a different rap sometimes when discussing with some of these actors in this field who told me that they are the alleged companies and they are the ones which sound bits more like a really venture investment.

It might be a big thing or it might be a major failure. So is it a risky field? I’m not, investment podcast at all. I’m just trying to understand if there are various shades of risk in that field.

Christopher Brown: Oh yes. Huge. So there is, from a risk perspective it’s funny because we’ve gone through some of the data of the DLE processes the ones we’ve mentioned, plus the number ones we haven’t mentioned ironically enough a blanket statement, they all work. So there’s no one out there , that’s claiming to have DLE that definitively doesn’t work.

They all work on a laboratory basis to a certain extent. They all do various degrees of success with recovery. So it’s not a matter of are they the misleading, they’re not misleading. They all do work to certain levels. The challenge that we have is that transition to field operations.

It’s one thing when I’m running a cup full of or a bucket full of water in my lab and I extract lithium and I’m all celebratory that it took 95% of lithium out. Great. The challenge is when I’m running 100,000 barrels of fluid a day past the same processes, that’s much, much more complex.

And so this is where the big technology gap we have today is that we have not proven any capability to essentially scale up all these lab opportunities. So all the lab ones work no problem. It’s just scale scaling is where your investment risk is.

Antoine Walter: It’s actually an analogy that Wim Audenaert made on that microphone a while ago where he explains that adult clothing is not baby clothing made larger. It’s there’s a difference when you’re scaling up that those processes in terms of. Scaling up. Will you explain in the beginning how you are looking at what’s exactly the potential of the assets you’re in?

At some point you will be drilling, you’re looking at those DLE technologies. Will they go in steps or do you directly go for the full scale?

Christopher Brown: If they’ll be in steps. I’m an engineer by background and I would never knowingly take a silly risk that I’m gonna go from a lab to like a 500,000 barrel a day water production facility. That’s a very naive step to take just in life. That’s guaranteed failure for anyone claims they’re going to do that for sure.

So the logical steps are you have your laboratory set up and then your next scale should just be one Well, One well is easy to do. One well is just a field application. You may not get the economics because you don’t have the volume throughput, but you’ll get the understanding of the operation and extraction.

So you literally just move up to a one. Well, whether your one well produces 2000 barrels a day of water, or 10,000 barrels a day of water, that should technically be your next scale. And then from the one, well we go to a battery system to see what was wrong with the one? Well, what prevented me from being commercial with the one well is what you ask yourself and then is it a volume issue or is it a technology issue?

And then you determine, then you scale up from that point. So then I go to what’s called a battery level, where I’ll now look at, take my two to 10,000 umbrella day concept, and then I move it up to 50. And then if I can achieve successful commercial success at 50, then I have a much higher degree of certainty that I can either.

Copy my 50, for example, with that facility four times and have a 200,000 barrels a day. Or do I gross up to a 200,000 barrel a day facility that allows my optionality for commerciality. So there are many steps you have to take, and I would never invest in the company that ever makes a claim that we were successful in the lab at, 50 barrels a day or 10 barrels a day.

Now I’m gonna build like a, a 500,000 barrel a day facility. I’d wait for the promote on the stock and then sell all of my stock because there’s a high probability of failure on that. That outcome.

Antoine Walter: Nice bump and dump

Christopher Brown: Exactly. That those are design, pump, and dumps, as we call it. The old Vancouver promotes what those used to be nicknamed as.

Antoine Walter: In terms of investment, right now, that sector is getting quite a lot of investment. You mentioned these steps towards profitability. What’s the horizon at which those companies including yours, in that application of these extraction of lithium, when do you expect to be profitable?

Christopher Brown: Yeah that’s a very big question again though that cuz as many avenues you can go down for that analysis, but just as a good rule of thumb you start the timeline for exploration can be like a couple of years to four years, for example. So if we factor in four years just to determine the resource size and then from that point I start engaging engineering for more detailed engineering for pilot facility.

That’s another two years, you’re up to six years. And then after my pilot facility to construct into a detailed engineering for the next facility is another at least two years. And so you’re up to eight years just to get up to my decision point. Do I have something I can scale or not scale? So you’re eight years out to reach a commercial decision.

And then from there, it’s a determination of whether I’m not g whether I make multiple copies of that level or if I make one large facility. So a large facility could take up to three to four years, depending on the components. If you’re dealing with hundreds of thousands of barrels a day, some of those components could have a year plus lead time to deliver.

And especially the drilling program, some of, if you do the math on some of the theoretical drilling programs that need to occur, these companies on lithium brine and their PAs have to drill like hundreds of wells to achieve their production levels. Well, I’d be surprised if you can find rigs, the oil and gas industry still exists and now you’re gonna compete with a couple hundred wells in the field.

So you’re gonna be delayed for years for that. So eight years to just be commercial decision point if you’re gonna be big, or if you’re gonna be multiples of a small unit. And then it could be another, two to five years post that. So you’re a decade out from definitive commercial production.

If we’re starting today,

Antoine Walter: And to place you on that timeline. If I’m right, you intend to start drilling this year, is that right?

Christopher Brown: Yeah, if we can our, again, hurdle to success is obtain the capital for the programs. So we just were listed last year. We self financed ourselves with a couple million dollars seed. We haven’t done an offering publicly yet but we need to look towards obtaining the capital for a program to start drilling.

So that’s our goal for 2023 is to start putting some wells. I think we have a very good idea of what we wanna do. We just need to now raise the necessary capital , to achieve our goals.

Antoine Walter: So if people listening to that who like to invest in your company, how can they do that?

Christopher Brown: Well, they’re always welcome to drop us a line at info@heliosx.ca. So that’s i n ffo, H e l iOS X ca and we’d happy to have further discussions with them if they’re interested.

Antoine Walter: So I’ll put the link in the show notes and which type of investors, which type of profiles would be the right partners for you?

Christopher Brown: Well, I’m very much in favor of those that are like the aspect of critical mineral investments with a positive environmental attitude. The goal here is just not to be singular on a one well outcome, but to work collaboratively with industry, evolve all together the technologies for all of us to be successful and to continue the collaboration with like the universities, other corporations and those , that appreciate the work we do with First Nations and to work in trying to empower First Nations with opportunities for both employment as well as empower them with new technology understandings that can help enhance their economic outcomes as well.

So that’s the nature of the ideal profile, because that shares the same philosophies we do.

Antoine Walter: think that answer gives a strong hint for the last question I have for you in that deep dive, which is what’s your metric for impact? What will tell you in, let’s say, 10 years that you had a positive impact?

Christopher Brown: Well, yeah, a couple of metrics, obviously success with the regional nations that’s easy to see when you see positive economic development, and we work with First Nations on that basis, and you visually see the benefits to the nation by reinvestments to the nation for enhancing their wellbeing.

Low carbon intensities obviously a key parameter for us, so if we’re successful, we’ll be able to bring to the market lithium production at the lowest carbon intensity possible. And that’s definitely one of our goals , it’s useless to , bring on new critical minerals if we’re costing the environment more than the benefit of the lithium battery.

For EVs, it’s our contrary to the whole goal of what we’re all trying to achieve.

Antoine Walter: Well, Christopher, it’s been an incredible exploration with you of that quite fascinating field. I could keep that going for a while, but have to be conscious of your time at some point. So if that’s right with you, I propose you to switch to the rapid, fair questions.

Christopher Brown: Oh, sure.

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Rapid Fire Questions

Christopher Brown: So these are quick question and answers, right?

Antoine Walter: Exactly. I’m trying to keep the question short. You can try to keep the answers short. I’m never cutting the microphone and usually I’m the one doing segues, so, so don’t worry.

My first question is, what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and why?

Christopher Brown: The most exciting project is the work with the University of Calgary to try and bring to fruition the direct lithium extraction technologies at a very low concentration.

Antoine Walter: Can you name one thing that you’ve learned the hard way?

Christopher Brown: Well, not all First Nations are the same we know this, but working with the Argentine nations is just a learning process and everyone has their particular cultural nuances and it’s, I just appreciate learning the new cultural approach and trying to reapply it in the future to, to be more sensitive to other nations needs and cultural outcomes.

Antoine Walter: Is there something you’re doing today in your job that you will not be doing in 10 years?

Christopher Brown: Well, I hope to pass on a lot more of the math to the next generation, so, recruit some younger engineers to sit down and crunch the numbers more effectively and efficiently. I’d love to be able to pass on the technology, know-how to the next generation so that they can carry the torch, so to speak.

Antoine Walter: today a lot of the maths is still with you.

Christopher Brown: It is, unfortunately, I have to sit down and spend a lot of time doing all the technology analysis.

Antoine Walter: What is the trend to watch out for in the water sector?

Christopher Brown: I think the ability to open up the understanding of the nature of the types of waters and passing on that understanding to the particular indigenous groups that are in close proximity to those waters. I think there is definitely a lack of understanding of the different types and what’s good water and what’s bad water.

All of it is usually deemed good and that tends to carry on issues when we are dealing with environmental approvals and that, and so I think it’s just, we really need to work on education on that front.

Antoine Walter: And last question, would you have someone to recommend me that I should definitely invite as soon as possible on that microphone?

Christopher Brown: Well, it would be a dream, but I always like Christine Lagar, she’s an amazing, talented woman that carries a lot of strength globally. She has an amazing perspective on balancing the environment and economics. I know that would be the ideal dream. And if she were to be on there, I’d love to be on there with her for questions and answers, because I think she’s a brilliant woman with amazing insight, balancing both the economic needs of the globe, but also incorporating realistic climate achievements.

And so she’s just a wonderful leader around the world. So that would be the dream. Ask for the program.

Antoine Walter: Well, I’ll give it a shot, but beyond playing the argument of let’s have a French guy with a French woman, I’m not sure I have much more to offer, but I’ll try it. Christopher, it’s been awesome to have you on the show. If people want to follow up with you beyond the email you already shared, is there another place where they can reach out to you?

Christopher Brown: Our email is the best. I am on LinkedIn as well, and so more than happy to add links and have conversations on LinkedIn. So if they want to take , that social media platform, more than happy to continue the conversations.

Antoine Walter: Well, I’ll put the links as well in the show notes. Thanks a lot for having been my guide in that inspiration and I wish , to see if in 10 years that vertically integrated Helio X is exactly what you described and we dreamed a bit together today. I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be an amazing journey and I’ll be very happy to follow that. Thanks a lot.

Christopher Brown: Excellent. Well, thank you very much for your time and really enjoyed the questions.

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The post Sustainable Lithium Production Has an Overlooked 3rd Component: Here’s How to Unlock It! appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

(Also check my entire Lithium deep dive!)

with Devesh Sharma – CEO at Aquatech

Aquatech helps the world’s most recognized companies solve important water challenges such as lithium refining, desalination or food and beverage.

Full Video – Devesh Sharma sits down with me at the BlueTech Forum 2023

Teaser 1 – How Lithium Extraction is Reverse ZLD and how Aquatech is Geared for This

What we covered:

How Aquatech is a Private Powerhouse in Industrial Water Treatment You Need to Know About

How Aquatech delivers complex projects and how they tackle challenges in remote locations

Why Being the Best Matters More Than Being the Biggest: Aquatech’s Winning Philosophy

How Aquatech and Ecolab Join Forces in a Strategic Partnership and how the company maintains a balance as a middle-sized global player

Impact Metrics Unveiled: Aquatech’s CEO Shares the Key to Their Success

Energy Transition and Green Revolution: How Aquatech is Shaping the Future, and how that involves lithium endeavors

How Aquatech won North America’s most-awaited lithium refining contract at Thacker Pass and how they won Lithium America’s confidence on the way

Planning for Success the Company’s Short to Medium-Term Goals

Game-Changing Projects: From Trash to Jet Fuel – Aquatech’s Mind-Blowing Endeavors

Water Technology-as-a-Service: The Future is Here, and Aquatech Leads the Way

How Reuse and Digital Revolution might be The Next Big Trends in Water

Aquatech’s Secrets to Effective Communication and Recruitment, and how you could Join the Aquatech Family – exciting endeavors ahead?

The importance of in-person connections, multitasking overload, ensuring modularity, creating memorable moments for employees – that feel like family, identifying the right growth opportunities, measuring impact… and much more!

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Teaser 2 – Could Brine Mining become the Next Frontier in Lithium Extraction?

Resources:

Come say hi to Devesh on LinkedIn

Check Aquatech’s website

This podcast was produced in partnership with BlueTech Research, recorded from the BlueTech Forum 2023 in Edinburgh

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Teaser 3 – How Water as a Service already represents 30% of Aquatech’s turnover and soon more

Teaser 4 – Aquatech’s motto: Being an entrepreneur is like a bicyclist you gotta keep peddling or you’re falling down

Editorial: The Fine Line that Aquatech Mastered

There’s a fine line between risk-taking and putting all you have at stake, between perseverance and obstinacy, and between grit and recklessness. And it’s only when the dust settles that you’ll know on which side of the line the ball decided to fall.

When I started my career in the water industry, veterans were telling me: keep your fingers off the industrial market. It’s a “who’s the cheapest” game, and they’re so short-term-minded that it’s depressing.

Yet, at the same time, these veterans opted out of the industrial game; Aquatech was created as an almost pure-play dedicated to that very specific end of the market. Risk-taking or putting all you have at stake?

A couple of decades later, and long before it was hype, that same Aquatech ventured into Water as a Service to speed up the adoption of its technologies. Perseverance or obstinacy?

And while the world of Water consolidates in a fashion we’ve probably never experienced before, Aquatech trusts it can keep growing and build its path as a private, family company. Grit or recklessness?

The Water Industry is rapidly changing

Well, I don’t have all the answers, but what I can tell is that as the dust settles, the industrial end of the Water Market is the one thriving right now, as it’s faced with the hottest challenges ever, which in turn generate new opportunities.

And as Devesh will explain in a minute, 30% of Aquatech’s revenue today comes from its Water as a Service; said differently, they have a 30% – probably high-margin – annual recurring revenue with a plan to expand it to 50%. That’s a ratio that kind of turns a hardware company into a software/tech type of play. And with that mix, Water suddenly becomes a much more scalable business – as we’ve seen with Gradiant recently turning into the water sector’s first unicorn.

Well, Gradiant and Aquatech are certainly not the same, but they have similarities in the technologies they develop and the markets they serve. And Gradiant claimed its unicorn status, thanks to a 225 million dollar series D raised at that billion-dollar valuation.

Is Aquatech a Water Unicorn flying under the radar?

I’m throwing Gradiant in the discussion here because we’re debating the possible next steps for Aquatech with Devesh today.

And my napkin calculations and estimates indicate to me that Aquatech is probably already a unicorn, given its revenue mix, proprietary technology, and turnover somewhat double of Gradiant’s. Take it with a pinch of salt; none of these companies are public, so it’s pure guestimates.

Now, I mention dust settling, and I’m using that metaphor on purpose. Because Aquatech was chosen by Lithium Americas to build the lithium refinery at its upcoming Thacker Pass lithium mine, which is extracting this “While Oil” from clay, so settled dust. And Aquatech has the perfect portfolio to take on this 2020s challenge because it tripled down on industrial water and zero liquid discharge since the 1980s – something we’ll dive into much deeper with Devesh in today’s conversation.

Finally, I think Aquatech’s story is inspirational on many more levels. It’s also the tale of a family business, taken to its today’s shape and successes by two brothers that were respectively 24 and 14 when they took over. So let me avoid spoiling everything, and leave the floor to Devesh, just after reminding you that if you like what you hear, please take this episode and share it with a friend, a colleague, your boss, or your team, and also don’t forget to subscribe. Come on, do it, and I’ll meet you on the other side!

Teaser 5 – Could M&A or IPO be the next steps in Aquatech’s path?

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi Devesh. Welcome to the show.

Devesh Sharma: Thank you, Antoine.

Antoine Walter: I’m excited for many reasons to have that conversation with you. I’ll save it for the second part of the interview because you might have big news to commence.

There’s much more about Aquatech, but before we jump into that, I have a traditional on the microphone, which is to open with a postcard. So what can you tell me about the place you’re usually at when you’re not in a deep bar sitting down with me, which I would ignore by

Devesh Sharma: now. Aquatex headquarters is, and my birthplace is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

So the postcard is from Pittsburgh. We love to have you over our headquarters one day. Pittsburgh’s a beautiful city. It’s a city of three rivers and the home of my Pittsburgh Steelers. You are

Antoine Walter: leading a quite special company in this quarter space for different reasons, but my first question is it a family

Devesh Sharma: business?

That’s a good question. I think it is a family business, but in more ways than you think. The company was started by my father. In 1981 in Pittsburgh, he was always a water engineer. Late fifties, graduated from college in India. Moved to the US and Canada in the late sixties, and was always working in the water industry and settled down in Pittsburgh and decided to start his own company.

10 years into it, he had an untimely passing. In 1991, he passed away. And Vanke, my brother, took over at the age of 24. I was 14 at the time. So from that point of view, we’re a private company and very much a family business. But I think in the second way, it’s more interesting in that we’ve grown over 40 years with a amazing management team.

I talk to people every day that have been with the company over 20, 25, 30 years, and we wouldn’t get to this level. Without them. That feels like a family. I’ve worked with people closely longer than I knew. My dad, from that point of view, we’re very much a family company. What would be your

Antoine Walter: elevator pitch to Aquatech, to someone who would ignore what Aquatech does?

I’m not sure if there are still people who ignore what Aquatech does, but in

Devesh Sharma: case elevator pitch, let’s see. We solve water scarcity challenges. We help some of the most recognized companies treat their water. Water and process technology is at the heart of what we do. We’re at our best when we can solve complex water challenges, and that’s what really what we’re all about.

Some statistics 2000 installations and 60 countries. As I said, 42 year old company. We’re really proud of the stability. In this fast moving market, we’ve always had the same ownership for 42 years, and very proud of that.

Antoine Walter: Actually, yesterday I was sitting down with ra, we are here at the BlueTech Forum in Edinboro.

When I looked at the website of ra, there’s five products. I did the same exercise with your website and it’s the total opposite. It’s every single technology I could think of. It seems like you’re doing it. How do you manage to have such a broad portfolio? It’s

Devesh Sharma: exhausting sometimes, but the best recognition you get is what others say about you.

Maybe over 10 years ago, there was some article, it was something that Gwi published about us. It basically said that while others promote what they know, Aquatechs clients can be assured they’re gonna get the best solution for their need. I looked at that and I said, geez, I. Couldn’t have said it better.

That’s what I think, but the words came out from somebody external, and that’s our brand promise. Every corporate presentation I give, I end with that quote. I really want to live through that quote. And for that, water is hard. It’s never just one thing. It’s always a combination of processes to meet a process guarantee, to meet an objective.

I think we’ve done a great job developing deep knowledge and experience in many different processes to put them together to reach that goal for our clients, and that’s really that kind of superpower, secret sauce. That’s what makes us different. When speaking

Antoine Walter: with sea level people in the water industry, it’s always an amazing conversation, but sometimes they just came from a different industry and started directly.

At that stratosphere, it’s not your case. You’ve been built through the various roles and positions within Aquatex. So what did you learn on that path? A ton. I

Devesh Sharma: love the way you asked the question because I’m gonna come back to the outsiders that have come into our industry, but I’ve had the.

Fortunate opportunity to really work in every part of the business. I’ve bid projects, I’ve managed projects. I have to start at the beginning. The most memorable, fun, biggest learning was when nothing’s better than when you’re at a job site commissioning. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Commi commissioning and I feel for our.

Own young engineers. It’s so important to get them out to the site because everything is theoretical. You can get a P N I D and you can look at valves and pumps all day long and do calculations, but until you visualize it in the field and you understand how everything comes together, I thought that was invaluable.

It’s also working under pressure. I have this little frame, picture on my desk. It was from the summer of 96. I was at a job site in India. I was in college at the time. It was a summer. We had to meet a commissioning schedule and. I’m standing there with the team and we have a little notepad. It says, two gas turbine.

We did this we commissioned the water. They got to do their boiler blowdown, their startup of their boiler. The feeling you get when you’re on site is unmatched, and the experience you get is unmatched. How about the outsiders? It’s a blessing and a curse. Sometimes you’re too in it. I always admire the perspective of somebody who comes into the industry with no sacred cows.

And just ask fundamental questions. There’s a lot to be said about that too, and we’ve seen some success stories there as well. So I always try to give a balance thing. There’s some advantages with that as well. I think you’re

Antoine Walter: absolutely right. The best situation is the combination between the two words.

I’m often told that the two. Positions where you learn the most about the, what industry is commissioning as a said and project manager, because the project manager’s be the CEO of his project. So it’s a way to learn how the company looks like, and then you right, as well, when you come from the outside, you don’t know what’s impossible.

So basically everything could be possible and everything is questionable. So interesting perspective talking Aquatech, if I’m right, you’re more focused on the industrial side of the business. Very much is that true?

Devesh Sharma: Very much we’ve always been very focused on industry. We love working with industrial clients.

It’s what we’re good at. It’s where complex water technology is needed the most. We have ventured into municipal and infrastructure because of desalination and water reuse. So really that is a vertical for us is desalination and water reuse where we do get into outside of industrial. But at our core, we’re really 90 plus percent in industrial water treatment

Antoine Walter: company.

But that’s a daring. Move to start a company with this industrial target at first, because you mentioned it’s a 40 years company. 40 years ago, water wastewater, the treatment for industrials was much seen as a cost of being business. You really took it from the north face. If I want to take a, an LP is metaphor.

Devesh Sharma: Yeah. And you know it’s a, hindsight’s always 2020 when you look. Back. There’s four decades of evolution of aquatech. When we started, we talked about Pittsburgh. We were doing filtration and demineralization for steel companies. The highest level, if you distill our company, we started by taking pretty clean water and making it very pure or ultrapure for industrial use.

And that’s what we’ve done for most of our journey for 40 years, is just the water’s gotten worse and worse and worse. So in the eighties, we really embraced the concept of an integrated solution where a lot of companies were just specialized on demineralization. That’s a personality of Aquatech is getting into these technologies.

So we got into ro, we got into pre-treatment. We said companies used to bring out packages and say, we want a demineralization plant. We want a. Pre-treatment plant. We want a polishing plant. And we said why don’t we do all of these? So the eighties was really around integrated solutions and that came early in our journey.

The nineties was international expansion. We were at that time very focused on greenfield. So somebody’s building new. Plans weren’t building many of those in the United States, so we followed suit. And for a company of our size at that time, I thought we punched way above our weight class, where we started subsidiaries in the nineties, in India, in China, in the late nineties, in the Middle East, and developed a great, a global capability to source to be present.

To support our clients around the world. I think late nineties to 2000 to 2010 was about technology. It was about doubling down, re initiated r and d efforts in the late nineties. And what came out of that was our division called Quad, where we do membrane products, uf fractional electrode ionization, mbr.

Ceramic membranes and our own applied testing and development laboratories, which is critical today and has brought us a lot of success in partnering with our clients. And really that fourth decade has been about expanding our capabilities, heavy focus on service because of our focus on total cost of ownership and.

Operating planes well when required. Doing an EPC wrap and doing more for our clients and really evolving to taking all of that technology and service capability and really ideally trying to sell water to the client. Water technology as a service.

Antoine Walter: There’s a lot to unpack. Let’s start with that last section, which is you could be an EPC if needed, but you’re rather transforming into a service company with water as a service if you have to really put you in a box.

What

Devesh Sharma: are you today? Technology and service. And they go together because you have to design a plant as it would be operated maybe 40 years ago when we started, we were a manufacturer. But we’re really technology and service. Technology and service. Technology and service. What

Antoine Walter: is a service is extremely trendy as a concept and as a buzzword, how much of your turnover is it

Devesh Sharma: today?

Last year in 2020 was about 30%. Wow. And we’d like to take it beyond 50.

Antoine Walter: What was your first. What is a service project?

Devesh Sharma: I love that question because I wanna stress that maybe we’re doing more external marketing of that concept, but we’ve been doing this for many years. I remember it was a very famous company refinery in South Asia.

Should I try to guess or I didn’t come prepared to know whether I should make names. No, don’t worry. I think you could guess. We were promoting industrial reuse, and this was in early two thousands, so it was not. The commonplace thing that it is today. So we had a unique technology. We piloted this technology and other refineries in the country.

We had great pilot reports and this company came to us and they said, we want do this. We’ve seen your pilot studies. We don’t need to do a pilot. We want to implement this, but it’s new technology. We want you to own an operated. We said, oh my God, we can’t do that. We rebuild plants. We just supply plants.

After a couple weeks. It was evident to us that we’re not gonna implement this project unless we. Take the gulp and do it. I think it’s one of the top three to five most successful things we’ve ever done as a company. We ended up doing it. We ended up owning and operating it. We ended up expanding it twice to four times this, the size.

When we were negotiating it, the client said, we’re gonna have a buyout sketcher. Once you operate this, once you show this, we’ll buy it up. Then about two years later, after we. Did the expansion. We were having dinner and we were talking the client asked me, he says, Daves, why do you think we now expanded this again on a build don’t operate?

And I said I think you find it easy. You don’t have to go, it’s all opex. You don’t have to go through a CapEx cycle. I said no. Our cast of capital is very low. We have a lot of CapEx, but. Our refinery is very unique. It’s one of the most adapting in the world. And every time a new ship comes with a new source of crude, two weeks later through, as it goes through the process, the wastewater fluctuates.

And it’s very challenging. And we know that. And we see the pain you take and your people take to keep this plant running. And we don’t think we can do

Antoine Walter: that. So if I try to check, if I understand you right on that one, that means it was about technology adoption at first. Yes. And they wanted to de-risk.

The fact that they were working with you. So that was the icebreaker. And then the reason why you’re still operating as a service is because you have an operation excellence, which they don’t have in-house. So it’s a win-win. Yes. That’s an interesting setup. We are at the BlueTech Forum. I mentioned that yesterday.

There was a discussion around how to adopt innovation faster and how to speed up. That was 12 to 16 years it takes for technology to be in the middle of the market. Would you say that what is a service as the perfect tool to do

Devesh Sharma: that? You couldn’t have said it better it absolutely is, because the value proposition is go to a reputed partner and don’t get into what is the technology.

Know that you have a company that has. Decades of experience and is gonna give you process guarantees. We’re getting back to the secret sauce or what differentiates us. I’d like to print a sweatshirt that says Meeting process guarantees since 1981 that really summarizes Aquatech and that moment was the aha moment is that finance in water as a service is secondary.

It’s really about taking the client’s pain away. I love this question about the 16 years or the 13 years cycle and my dream. Is, how are we going to shorten that in this industry? And I think this way, the water technology, that’s why we don’t say water as a service. We say water technology as a service.

And I think that’s one of the objectives.

Antoine Walter: I have a question on the process Es, it might be a tricky question, you’ll tell me. I was taught about waste for the treatments by a early in school, but what you learned in school goes a certain way. Then I learned it in the field and I learned with two of my very first guests on that podcast.

So the number one podcast, the first one, and number four. So Lauren de. And ka, and what I learned with them is that one of the big skills you need to have in water and waste for the treatments is learning how to write process quarantine. Because if you write them right, then they will never apply.

Devesh Sharma: It is a balance of risk management, but we don’t say process guarantees.

We don’t take that very lightly, that’s very serious. That’s at the end of the day what the client needs. That’s also why we work with industrial clients, because you talk together, you partner together, you know you have a design basis. It’s very tough and you can’t build a credibility and reputation in the industry.

If you’re gonna be a company that goes out there and says, aha, this isn’t here, this isn’t there. At the end of the day, you gotta perform whether. You can get out contractually or not. 50% of our business is repeat business.

Antoine Walter: That’s was gonna be my question because Yeah you’re absolutely right.

You can trick someone only once and once you’ve done that, and in this industrial world, as you said, if you’re building with a company in the US your business plan and your go-to market is to follow them when they’re expanding in the next country. Exactly. And if you cheated them on the first project, then there’s no second project.

So that would be. Stupid and you don’t seem to be like a stupid person at all, so thank you. Just curious, you mentioned how you are also working AT getting innovation faster in the market. What is your coolest innovation of the past five

Devesh Sharma: years? Two come to mind. We’ve always been in zero liquid discharge.

20 years ago it was a niche. Today, 80 plus percent of our business comes from Mld Z L D or Brine Management In the process side. Okay. Before we got into the industry, zero discharge was. A big evaporator, highly metallurgical, high opex, high CapEx. We’re very proud of an innovation we brought to the industry, which is hybrid zero liquid discharge.

I think we were amongst the first, I’d like to say we’re the first, but I’ll say amongst the first to prove that you can operate RO highly efficiently on. Difficult to treat Wastewaters reliably, thus increasing the recovery through a membrane system and then shrinking your thermal system. It was so successful we ended up buying a thermal business called Aqua Chem at the time, and really being a single source provider for zero discharge, but zero discharge has always been relatively, More costly and the mission is how do you reduce the cost of zero liquid discharge?

How do you democratize zero liquid discharge? So for smaller flows to avoid trucking off of site, what can you do? Our r and d team developed membrane distillation process. We call it A V M D, advanced vacuum membrane distillation. There wasn’t a V there for a while because tinkering and working in r and d.

So what? Membrane distillation is, it’s a hydrophobic membrane, so you’re drawing the water in a vapor form across the membrane, and the membrane kept on following. Our process takes the best of our knowledge from how evaporators work and heat management, and we have a vacuum that, that draws.

Basically the membrane surface is not wedded. Last night we got a lighthouse award for that. We’ve applied this in a pharmaceutical plant. Smaller flows, but very impactful industries. And this is reducing the cost of zero liquid discharge. I think another one that really comes to mind is our approach on digital and operations.

We have a product called Biofilm Pro, which is aimed at integrating sensors, little bit of chemicals and some proprietary. Devices and AI and machine learning to predict biofouling on heat transfer surfaces and real time apply the right solution to curtail it before it fests. Do you do that

Antoine Walter: alone or do you team up with smaller players, universities,

startups?

Devesh Sharma: That is a really good question, Antoine. Our journey, when I told you we started our technology efforts in the late nineties, we licensed a lot of technologies. We acquired a company, it was heavily, you could say, external. And once we saw how successful tech technology and applying unique.

Differentiated technology can be. We invested a lot and got a lot out of our r and d. We created a membrane company out of it. We have 25 patent families. The ship went into the other direction where it was a heavily intern. I think today we’re more balanced where we have a lot of applied testing.

We have our continuous r and d, and we pick and choose projects of what we can do, but. We also are very cognizant that there are just a lot of innovators out there moving much faster than we can ourselves. And back to that ethos is we’re not the company that says we’ll only do it if it’s homegrown. We have to find the right solution for our clients internally or externally, and there’s a real balance of that.

So we do, I think our ability to integrate and wrap and provide process guarantees and be confident of that makes us a great partner for some of these young company innovators out there. That have a very good. Solutions that, that fit that process. Floki,

Antoine Walter: you mentioned your Lighthouse award, which you got yesterday.

Congratulations. Thank you on that, what does innovation for impact mean for

Devesh Sharma: you? Oh, loaded question. Wow. Okay. I think innovation for impact we are all in. I heard somebody say that, I can’t take credit for this, but I was at a panel last week at gws on energy transition and the closing statement was, let’s face it guys.

There’s no green without. Blue taking all of our skills. Now we’re very focused on supporting the energy transition, so that’s a bigger goal. A broader impact is we’re really going all in our industry verticals on decarbonization, energy transition, carbon capture we’re working in right now, biofuels, lithium, and critical minerals and hydrogen.

I think innovation for impact means making a commitment. To the company to support the energy transition the world needs and being at the forefront of that. So that’s the first thing that comes to mind.

Antoine Walter: I would be incredibly curious to explore every of those verticals, but I have to pick some because I need to be cautious every time as well.

So I’m very curious about the lithium one because I just, So that you got awarded the contract for the lithium refining at THCA Pass. So to give a bit of context for the ones that would not have followed all the lithium stories in the US today, the US produce a little bit of lithium in Neda and that’s about it.

And they are plans. To produce much more. I had standard Lithium on that microphone to discuss that project in El Dorado. But that’s the cool key on the block, direct lithium extraction. There’s the traditional ones which is going more into mining and emblematic project of mining in the US is FCO Pass.

And everybody was looking at that thinking if FCO Pass doesn’t make it, then nobody will make it. So there was. Awaiting on that project. I think it’s develop by Lithium Americas. Yes. Usually the usual suspects in the lithium refining for these kind of plants are Veolia, H P D Koch engineers, and that’s about it.

Cause AKA Pass. And who’s got the contract? Aquatech. How does that happen? What will you be doing there and what’s

Devesh Sharma: the story? It’s been an actual long journey before I. Talk a little bit about Thacker Pass. I just wanna mention that being in managing Brian, a company that manages Brian, we’ve been doing things in this area a long time.

It just hasn’t been that visible of a market. That’s what I suspected. So a lot of brine mining, which if we have some time we can talk about as well, is very interesting. But, our entry into this market, when the focus is you take a brine and your focus is separating the water and reusing it, and then taking the impurities.

This is. The flip, we don’t want the water. Let’s take the water out. We want the lithium, we want the nickel we, whatever it may be. The skills are very similar. It’s not necessarily new technology. It may be the application of existing technology to meet new outcomes and Lithium America’s, it’s been a two year partnership with them that started in the lab.

It’s samples. It’s how can we prove to a demonstration in our. Applied testing and development facility in Milwaukee, and at the same time at their applied testing and development facility in Reno, where we’ve got a demonstration plant that Brian in one side and. Triple nine purity, lithium carbonate on the other side.

It’s a great industry. This is a particularly a wonderful client that we work as a partnership to validate and create a robust design, and it’s very important for investors and owners to see that and that have that validation of the lithium

Antoine Walter: purity. You mentioned the proximity to Brian Mining and to what you’ve been doing in Zazi for decade, if not decades.

Is it really the same thing or did you have to adapt to processes as well? Yes

Devesh Sharma: and no. It is the same thing in, it’s an integrated lot of times bespoke process, but it’s applying mostly existing technology that’s very proven to meet that unique outcomes. So Brian Mining the story is still yet to be written.

Just think about the benefit if the economics can be evolved. Look at solar. 20 years ago, if somebody told you that solar was going to be. 10 cents a kilowatt hour, everybody would’ve laughed. Today it’s 2.75 cents, let alone 10 cents. But it took time. It took help from governments incentives, tax incentives.

You need some supernatural inertia to make an industry grow, and then technological solutions are developed. Scale happens, and you find a way to make it economical. I think brine mining is. In that early phase right now, Hey, if somebody can invent something very cool to do with sodium chloride, we got a very interesting industry.

Very

Antoine Walter: true. Again, brain mining could be another hardware I need to focus to, to stay on that lithium topic. Yes. This AKA pass project is a lighthouse project, but it comes with its challenges. It’s the first time that lithium gets extracted from clay. Yes. And not hard rock. I guess it’s gonna be like a good visit card to then visit different places and say it’s what you expect, but it’s not the traditional way.

Does that mean you will become a major lithium

Devesh Sharma: refining player? It’s a market that is dealing with complex brines and creating pure products with complex processes. So circling back to what we’re really good at, it’s a great fit for us. So you’re saying

Antoine Walter: it’s not that you will become, you already are.

Devesh Sharma: I wouldn’t wanna be, so I think we have work to do, but yeah, it’s a big focus area for us.

It’s a big focus area for us. And we like this holistic approach and we’re very well suited. I saw a slide the other day and it’s like we have a vertically integrated approach to the process scheme. And I say, no, we have a horizontal, we have a horizontally integrated approach. We have the ability to partner with the best technology.

If we can provide it, we’ll provide it. But we can deliver a process, train reliably, integrate it and take the pain of our clients away and partner with our clients. And it’s almost we’ve developed this capability over 40 years and here we have this very unique industry to really apply everything we know to, and that’s super exciting.

Given your position

Antoine Walter: in the company, I’m 200% sure you have access to the numbers You’ll tell me if I’m totally off. I have been told by water professionals that the reason why they go into these new applications, battery lithium, hydrogen soon is because they’re sick and tired of the two to three person profit margin, which you get in the traditional water, and they also want to take a piece of the cake at 20 30% profit margin.

Am I remotely true with that? I’m

Devesh Sharma: not gonna comment on your numbers. But I think relatively Look we can’t forget about water. Water’s a super exciting industry. We gotta balance lithium’s. Very exciting. The thing is when you have a chance to work with a client and help them solve a problem that’s core to their product, that’s a different place than sometimes water is.

We have to work to support our clients, but we’re the utility. So the nature of the two is different, but you have to balance, were you gonna grow? In lithium and critical minerals, we’re gonna grow in resource recovery and we’re gonna grow in water and we have to, one of my challenges is to maintain the discrete focus on all of them

Antoine Walter: On that microphone, I had a conversation with Ben Sparrow from Saltworks, and he shared how they have roughly one year of backlog.

So leap times are increasing because they are pushing things out of the door as fast as they can, but the market is growing even faster than they are growing themselves. And he said that. So you’re saying that basically you might be the bottleneck. Correct.

Devesh Sharma: Us and our competitors, and that has implications on the water treatment industry as well, because with the lithium industry heating up and these clients move fast and they have a willingness to pay, that’s going to draw capacity out of the water treatment industry.

This will all unravel in the coming years. I hope I’m wrong. But I think in fact, we already know that lead times are increasing across the board. Some of our competitors are quoting up to three years. Do

Antoine Walter: you share that concern and what are your current lead times?

Devesh Sharma: I certainly can’t argue with the concern, and that’s why we are engaged.

Early companies have to make early decisions because it’s a process of concept pilot, demo implementation, and we are. Focusing with several clients early and reserving our capacity. It’s like we were built for this over our journey. We have engineering all around the world. We have sourcing all around the world.

We’re doing projects in South America right now, and we’re sourcing globally. We’re doing projects in the us. We’re. Sourcing in the us So there’s a lot of variety to our global sourcing capability. But lead times could be from project implementation 12 to 24 months, but that’s the tip of the iceberg.

Yeah. What about all of the development that happened before that? So I’m trying to answer the question the best I can, we’re not providing one unit that. I can say, oh this is the delivery time of this unit. It’s get back to it. Complex projects. Yeah. Each project has a different dynamic.

A lot of these are remote locations, so there’s a high level of modularity. If you go to our plant right now, you’ll see stacks of things that don’t fit inside that are built to be put together very simply at site. But we’re doing the fed up outside in the parking lot. It was a nice picture opportunity.

We would take our sons and daughters to workday and we had a, a Kona ice truck and everybody was out there and behind. We had this dramatic. Thing with a bunch of modules being built. Very interesting. So it’s a tough question to answer. There’s not a, there’s not a single soundbite I could give you for that, but I hope I was able to answer it.

Absolutely.

Antoine Walter: And if you have that picture, I’d be very happy to add it. You mentioned in the very beginning of this conversation how you were a private company, you have a major stakeholder, if I’m right, yes. You also a specific size of company. Which is getting very rare, like this middle-sized global player.

You have the very big ones, which even bigger and bigger. Exactly. So when you have island buying, Evoqua Lia, acquiring Suez, and then you have these. New entrants, which want to gobble as much as possible the fastest they can. I met with Ski on Water last week and this week, and they said they already did four acquisitions since the beginning of the year At some point, given your perfect a equation between the challenges of the time and your technology portfolio, given the fact that you are a private company, given the fact that you already have a big company on your shareholders, aren’t you the perfect

Devesh Sharma: targets?

I think, I can’t argue with you. I think so. We are. Extremely passionate about our business. Myself, and I speak for my brother Benke. And I think I speak for our management team who’s been on this journey with us, most of them for the last 25 years. We just wanna do good work. I remember I’ve just seen this throughout my whole career.

One of my projects when I was in college in the mid nineties was I took a mergers and acquisitions class and I did my project report on the US filter roll up. And so I was fascinated about this and I’ve seen the whole US filter. Then Vivendi buying US filter, becoming Veolia and selling into s Siemens, becoming a qua.

Then ge, Greg Ionic xenon early in the in, in my career, I was really Maybe in the young Turk mode, it’s oh, what are we gonna do? And if before long, it’s like our real ethos is we just wanna focus. Growth is important. You walk into Aquatech there’s a picture of our founder, there’s a quote underneath it is, being an entrepreneur is like a bicyclist.

You gotta keep pedaling or you fall down. So the goal isn’t to be the biggest. It’s to be the best. There’s no shortcuts. You gotta do good work. Just doing it inorganically is very difficult to get you there. You mentioned Ecolab. It’s a great partner. We’re very complimentary companies, one-third of the company can’t disclose numbers, okay?

So we’re a private company. We don’t do that, but significant stakeholder in Aquatech. We work independently, but we have the connection to provide our respective solutions to each other, and most importantly, to the clients, whether it’s, a steel plant in Europe or a bio-refinery in Louisiana, or our auto manufacturer in Alabama.

We work together. Between the two of us, there’s nothing that we can’t do and that’s been very valuable and that’s helped us with our mission.

Antoine Walter: But that’s the full point. It’s that if you look at what they do and what you do there is very limited overlap. So it’s like the perfect fit. Which makes me think it could fit even better.

Yeah.

Devesh Sharma: It’s been several years and I think we’re both in a very good place right now, so I can’t feed into your hints because that’s very honestly, we’re just, no, we’re just friends. Our approach is to continue to keep doing work our ideally, Continue to be a private company, but also we want to grow.

We wanna leave our mark on this industry and when we see right synergies like we did at the time when we did the deal with Ecolab, we’ll continue to do that to,

Antoine Walter: to be better. And I p o is totally out of the picture. Tough

Devesh Sharma: question if and when. It has to be the right fundamentals. We have to be able to deliver the right value.

Water is a challenge to scale. What we do very well is we scale technologies and scale plants. Scaling the business water as a service is very important. That’s what

Antoine Walter: I was gonna say. If you have 30 persons of your revenue, which is a r, it always makes you a tech company. Maybe it’s difficult to scale, but you are.

It’s a terrible way to say it. We are CashCo. I would see that working and if you want to grow, Further your watch as a service. It means you need cash to invest in your plans upfront. Which you could get with an I P U. I didn’t take m and a courses. I’m a total muggle, so I’m really doing like no risk to, I’m like

Devesh Sharma: you, I’m a engineer and learning as we go along.

But that is not the goal. The goal is to do good work, to continue to growing, to satisfy clients, to have employees that are. Really excited and happy and nothing’s out of the question in that case, there’s other ways to solve these things. We did a wonderful deal, great partner of ours is Upwell Water, and we’ve created a JV called Aquis Aquatech, upwell Industrial Outsourcing, and we partnered to do this water technology as a service.

So it doesn’t have to necessarily flow through your own balance sheet. There’s different ways to, to

Antoine Walter: skin the cat. You imagine how. I, P O M and A, whatever is just a tool and that what matters is your goal and how you achieve that goal. Which leads me to the last section for me in that deep dive, which is, as the CEO of the company, what is your metric for impact?

What are you following as a north star, which tells you that you have a positive impact? Very good

Devesh Sharma: question. I think definitely employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, repeat business, very important financially, constant growth. It’s not about how fast or how much it’s about what’s the right growth for you to keep doing the good work and to not lose.

Your credibility or your quality. I think the energy transition piece is can we make an impact in this world by supporting and accelerating the green with the blue? We want to be the number one industrial water treatment company in the market. That’s both, that’s love what we’re passionate. That’s the aspirational goal is when you talk to an end user and you say, who are the companies?

Aquatech is first in mind. That’s really sums up those goals. The way I think about that,

Antoine Walter: you. Obviously are long-term oriented because of the setup of the company, because of your history with the company, because of the fact you’re working with some members of Emity, some members of your management, which you’re working for 25 years, what is your horizon?

Is it five years plan, 10 years plan, 20 years. More in this

Devesh Sharma: industry, it’s very difficult to have a one year plan, so let’s throw that out the table because project cycles everything we’ve talked about. I think on a short term basis, it’s a minimum of a three years, like what do we wanna achieve on a rolling basis?

Of course, you have your one year plan, your financial goals and all of that. Always, but. So we look at it that short to medium term on a three to five year basis. I think that’s where a lot of the time goes in. But certainly the horizon is that’s just rolling. It’s infinite in a way. We, I don’t have a number but it’s yeah, in 10 years we’re gonna keep doing this and 20 years we’re gonna keep, I can’t think of anything else.

I don’t know Anything

Antoine Walter: else ve told you? I have to be cautious of your time. It’s a pity because I would have. So many more topics, the ones you mentioned, the ones you didn’t even mention. I bumped into some of your colleagues last week, which gave me some very interesting roads. I’d like to explore with you with Equate at some point I heard you that you have a great facility in Pittsburgh and that if I’m one day in Pittsburgh, you might have some time. So absolutely, anytime I use that Jo card, I remind you of that. But for today, I have two. Go to the last section of this conversation, which is the rapid fire question.

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Teaser 6 – It’s all Theoretical until you send your engineers to the Field

Rapid Fire Questions

Antoine Walter: So in that last section, I have short questions, which I’m for short answers, but I’m not cutting the microphone at any point. The first one is, what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on? And why?

Devesh Sharma: One that comes to mind is Crumb bio energy. It’s a, what it represents is great.

It’s municipal solid waste to jet fuel, garbage to jet fuel. Is it Nevada? What can’t we achieve as a species if we can turn gar garbage to jet fuel? But the wastewater is very challenging. And this is that culmination of that water technology as a service. This thing’s got anaerobic treatment, aerobic treatment, water in pure water, our electro ionization.

It’s a, high recovery RO Z L D. And a 25 year operating contract, that’s very exciting. But also on the services side, we’ve worked together with Upwell and we’ve just last end of last year kicked off our rental fleet. Also what’s fun to drive into the office every morning, and I say trailers, say aquatech mobile services and we have the conventional R O E D I UF Pure Water Treatment, but.

We have DAFs and wastewater treatment and MBRs and before our first units were even off the assembly line, we already sold the wastewater treatment rentals. So that’s gonna be a going part of their business, that mission to raise that 30%. So stuff like that’s also very exciting. So again, balance, you have the really complex Uber technical project, things like rentals or biofilm Pro are equally as exciting.

Katie, one

Antoine Walter: thing that’s ruined the hard way, how about two?

Devesh Sharma: One, first and foremost, guiding light. You can’t fight economics. Okay? You have to look at the business case. So many years I focused on how cool a technology is or how cool a solution is. You gotta figure out if it makes economic sense. And the second one is there’s no shortcuts.

Especially in this industry. You had to do good work. You have to execute projects. They’re complex. It’s not as easy as saying, oh, this water analysis has changed you. Stuff to deliver for the client. No shortcuts. Is there something

Antoine Walter: you’re doing today in your job that you will not be doing in 10 years?

Devesh Sharma: I hope I’m not multitasking as much as I am today. That’s one thing that comes to mind. I hope I’m traveling less, but If you ask my wife, she would look behind me and she says, he doesn’t mean that he loves to travel. So I don’t know. But that’s certainly what comes to mind.

It’s

Antoine Walter: very interesting because everybody mentions this travel element, and on the other hand, everybody I bump into at this forum or whenever there’s a conference tells me that nothing we replace in. In-person interaction. So what’s your opinion on that?

Devesh Sharma: I couldn’t agree more. I think I think there’s a place, and it’s funny, all this technology existed before the pandemic, but it really got extenuated teams and it all existed.

We never used it. There’s a place for both. There’s certainly an acceleration if I need to go meet a client in Saudi Arabia and take a four technical team, And it takes six months to, to get everybody’s schedule aligned. And it’s a week out of everybody’s lives to do that, where now it’s like, Hey, can we do this next Wednesday?

So that is invaluable. I was at the Global Water Summit last week and I felt like I. I pitched a tent in the lobby and just slept there. It felt like that. Three days of just meeting everyone, talking sometimes over a drink, sometimes over coffee. You can’t replicate personal face-to-face relationship interaction.

It’ll never you. But there’s a balance to both.

Antoine Walter: What is the trend to watch out for in the water

Devesh Sharma: sector? I think the technologies related to, to reuse, look at the membrane technologies, just three, four years ago, you’re limited in membranes to osmotic pressure and, 70, 75,000.

Tds Today we’re talking two 50 2 25, 2 50. So membrane brine concentration. Some of the things we saw yesterday about desalination, making it more cost effective. That’s a trend of course, digital. I think digital is sometimes a buzzword. Sometimes it’s not very clear But I think there’s a lot of tools, and it’s really interesting is nobody’s talking about it yet, maybe next year, but can you imagine the impact of chat G p T to our industry and AI that, that in that way.

And of course there’s control and plant control, but what about training? What about opportunities are endless? How can we, I like that. How can we, Shrink the commercialization time. If that would be a trend, that would be a, this is gonna be a great industry for us all. If we can change the cycle from 13 years to commercialize technology to even less than five

Antoine Walter: Imagine.

Yeah. And 13 years is if you pick the winner. So you could also take something which ends up in Badala for forever, but that. Again, fascinating topic, but if I open

that

Devesh Sharma: one, we could talk about that for an hour.

Antoine Walter: Yeah. You mentioned multitasking as something you would like to do a bit less in the future.

If I became instant, your assistance, what’s the first task you would delegate to me?

Devesh Sharma: I’d use your great networking skill to help. Help increase my five leadership on LinkedIn. That’s a good one.

Antoine Walter: Maybe we can discuss that.

Devesh Sharma: But yeah. There’s so much to do just kind of flavor of the week is if I had a maybe a chief of staff or an assistant to, she’ll take mine and some of our other decks and cut ’em in half.

It’s like, how do you say? Less, somebody came on the stage yesterday and she said, I promise this is the only slide where I have more than 20 words. Yeah. Or 20 words. Yeah. I’m like, I love that. So help in permeating a more effective communication strategy because.

It’s industry. We’re a lot of engineers, and we love 35 slide deck. And it’s like, how do we do this in five, getting an assistant to help me do that would be great. Recruitment’s a big one. Recruitment is not the job of the HR team. It’s the job of the manager to work in partnership.

A lot of critical recruitment and it’s not a task. It’s a huge opportunity to shape your company. And it’s something that just when you asked about that, geez, if somebody was sitting there, I’d say, Help me with this. Help me with this. So those are the two things that come to mind. Are you actually recruiting right now?

Absolutely. So people can

Antoine Walter: reach out to you or to your company. Absolutely. So if you’re listening to that, watching this, you heard it Devesh. So that’s maybe your next opportunity to grow into a position at Aquatech. Last question. Would you have someone to recommend me? I should definitely invite as soon as possible on the

Devesh Sharma: microphone.

I’ll give you three. Tamin pip at Upwell, he’s the CEO of Upwell Water brings a a. Very interesting per perspective from the finance side and in an opposite way, highly technical potential podcast is Keith Lampe of fts, H 20, who’s a pioneer in these brain concentration membrane technology and a great guy to talk to.

You’ll love to do that. I also have a Job where I’m the, on the board of the International Desalination Association. And Shannon McCarthy, the Secretary of General, she’s here and she’s doing a lot of good work in promoting desal around the world and reuse. I think those three come to mind.

They’d be very interesting podcasts.

Antoine Walter: Thanks that for the recommendations, if people want to follow up with you after that interview, where should I redirect them? The best? I think,

Devesh Sharma: Email. We can put up the email on, on, on the pot and

Antoine Walter: I think that’ll work. Perfect. Devs, it’s been a pleasure as a set.

I can. Keep on that for hours, but we don’t have it today, but we might have it in the future. So I’m looking forward to having a sequel conversation with you as well.

Devesh Sharma: Yeah, you’re welcome. Anytime and maybe not me, maybe you can get a different perspective from Vanke next time. Thanks a lot.

Other Episodes:

FREDsense: Revolutionizing Water Quality Monitoring with Biosensor Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 7 May 2025

Swirltex: Revolutionizing Wastewater Treatment with Bubbly Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 30 April 2025

Blue Foot Membranes: The Next Evolution in Water Filtration

By Antoine Walter | 16 April 2025

Echo River Capital: Pioneering the Future of Water Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 3 April 2025

1001 Fontaines: Engineering Sustainable Water Access Through Social Entrepreneurship

By Antoine Walter | 22 March 2025

Amazon’s Water Footprint: Tech Giant’s Quest for Water Sustainability

By Antoine Walter | 19 March 2025

Turing: The AI Revolution Quenching the Water Industry’s Thirst for Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 26 February 2025

Altillion: Pioneering Digital Intelligence for Water Asset Management

By Antoine Walter | 6 February 2025

Flocean: Pioneering Ocean-Based Water Solutions

By Antoine Walter | 15 January 2025

Botanical Water Technologies: Harvesting Liquid Gold from Plants

By Antoine Walter | 4 December 2024

The post How Lithium Refining & Water as a Service spark Growth for a Family Business appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

(Also check my entire Lithium deep dive!)

with Chris Wyres – CEO at Evove

Evove aims to take membranes to the next level, overcoming the inherent flaws in conventional architectures, hence transforming membranes, transforming separation, and filtration.

Precision engineered Membranes – Slider

What we covered:

How G2O Water Technologies was founded around the use of graphene to coat membranes, how that was game-changing by itself and how Evove still took it to the next level

What the problem with incumbent membrane technologies is, and how Evove’s technology aims to correct it

How Evove’s technologies multiply a membrane’s specific surface by three, reduce energy consumptions up to 80%, improve desalination’s yield by 30% and double the membrane’s selectivity

How 3D-printed membranes at scale may disrupt the world of membrane filtration as we know it, and how they may unlock localized manufacturing

0⃣ How producing lithium and green hydrogen is a great thing to do, but if it comes at the expense of heavy carbon and environmental impacts, it doesn’t make sense

How Evove went down a different path than other companies developing graphene membranes and why

How the company picks applications where existing tech struggle to leverage their specific edge

How in the case of direct lithium extraction in particular, Evove’s superior selectivity is an asset to sort out white oil from calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium and all other salts

How Evove didn’t “just” design a lithium-catered membrane, but an entire end-to-end solution for effective production of lithium carbonate

How the company tailors its solution to every specific case, within 30 days, and supporting its customers end to end

How Evove intends to become the water sector’s first unicorn (well, second to Gradiant, but still, that’s a bright and bold ambition!)

Precision engineering membrane pore size, preventing fouling and scaling, revamping the direct lithium extraction process train, Evove’s business strategy, sub-sea desalination as a way to power green hydrogen, speeding up the pace of innovation adoption, advocating for increased capital focus on the water sector… and much more!

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Resources:

Come say hi to Chris on LinkedIn

Check Evove’s website

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Teaser

Editorial: Precision Engineered Membrane

In the middle of the 19th century, a Belgian inventor, Adolphe Sax, conceived what’s known today as the saxophone, which is today the fourth most popular instrument, just behind the piano, the guitar, and the bass. Yet, it wasn’t Sax’s only invention, as he also conceived Saxtrombas, Saxtubas, considerably improved the bass clarinet and invented the Saxhorns that also still somewhat live today.

Yet, have you ever heard of the Ophicleide? Or of the serpent? I could keep naming many more less successful instruments, and if you want to get an anthology of all of them, look up an original score from Mendelssohn or Berlioz: Romantic era composers really leveraged that wave of new ways to produce all kinds of sounds.

Each of these inventions addressed specific needs, but not all overcame their flaws or found a clear use case, like the saxophones with the military orchestras. And so, only a few stood the test of time.

2020s Membrane Scene and the Mid-19th Century Orchestras look alike

To me, the membrane world today resembles a lot of the mid-19th century orchestras. It’s tingling with incredible ideas, new takes, new materials, radical approaches, and blooming innovation.

We’ve addressed several of them on that microphone, from Membrion’s ceramic ion exchanging membranes to Zwitterco’s zwitterionic material, through Cembrane, LiqTech, a membrane anthology with Graeme Pearce, or the history of MBRs with Andrew Benedek.

But with the boom in membrane applications, there are also new needs, new challenges, and new markets to address, which keeps incentivizing and rewarding innovation and differentiated approaches.

Evove actually ticks all these boxes. They’re actively developing new application fields, such as lithium extraction or green hydrogen production while building the rocket on the go with their Enhance and Separonics product lines. They’re also bringing new perks to membrane applications in desalination or food and beverage. And they’re inventing a new type of company: decentralized, finely adapted to each vertical, and frankly ambitious:

“We want to be the Water Sector’s first unicorn!”

I won’t spoil you too much of what Chris very openly shares in today’s interview, don’t worry; I’ll leave him the floor just after reminding you that if you like what you hear, if this is of any value to you, please take that episode and share it with a friend, a colleague, your boss or your team. Thanks a lot to all the ones I see doing it every week, that’s heartwarming to me. Is Evove a saxophone or an Ophicleide? Time will tell, but you can build an Idea for yourself right after this.

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi Chris. Welcome to the show.

Chris Wyres: Thank you. I’m pleased to be here.

Antoine Walter: I’m excited about today’s conversation for many reasons. I mean, your company itself, what you’re doing, which sounds like really special in this water sphere, and also from another perspective and for another kind of adjust topic, which is not directly water, but has to do with water, which is lithium.

So that’s what I have on my agenda for today. I’ll elaborate a bit in a second, but after editions on that microphone, which starts with a postcard, and you’re sending me a postcard today from Daresbury. So what can you tell me about Daresbury, which I would ignore by now?

Chris Wyres: Dabury the site that we are on it’s part of the UK Science and Technology Foundation Council’s facility. And we are very fortunate to have a lot of expertise on site and facilities uh, we’re able to access and leverage, including the UK’s highest performance supercomputing facility, which is an IBM UK government stronghold.

And that’s what we typically used to do rapid modeling, computational modeling of many of the membranes we’re developing as well as various other simulations we use for additive manufacturing, as well as some design work utilizing some latest generation ai.

Antoine Walter: You mentioned membranes and also said straight from the introduction that it has to do with the water industry. Yet I’m curious to understand how you got personally into this water world. What led you to. That challenging environment.

Chris Wyres: Yeah. G two O was founded by some friends of mine two of which I’d worked with in a previous business which I led through , to exit. knew my background in material science and tech development and asked me to provide some advice on their strategy.

So I joined the board. I was providing advice and then just got more and more , involved in the project. This was part of a portfolio I’d started building of tech businesses, which I thought could make real impact. Across many different sectors whether that’s urban air mobility or water.

But this has really fascinated me both from the challenge that presented but as well as the potential impact we can create. if we are looking at climate change I think there’s a phrase used a lot, there, there is no green without blue. And you start to understand the critical role that water plays in climate change.

 I became more and more passionate about delivering a solution that could really help. And membranes lie at the heart of all water processing applications.

Antoine Walter: mentioned how you got more passionated about it, which I would translate into. You joined the company on the board, and then you took over the company and run as the c e O of G2 Water Technologies and then transformed it into its current name of Evolv. So what’s the

Chris Wyres: Yeah there were really two angles , to this. GTO was founded around using graphine oxide coatings applied to membranes. I joined business full-time we took a long, hard look at the strategy and the impact we could deliver using graphing oxide coating.

And then it’s tremendous. Don’t get me wrong we’ve made a lot of progress. changed the game with graphing coatings alone. But to go one step further we needed to, address the underlying problem in membranes. And that they’re not precision engineered devices. They’re essentially pieces of polymer or ceramic with randomly sized, randomly distributed holes in many of which don’t go anywhere.

They’re dead ended. They don’t offer you precise control over the structure and the properties you can deliver. So we decided to develop a new, way of making membranes. And that was based around 3D printing. So the products the business , was going to offer its strategy had changed fundamentally.

wanted to reflect that in a new branding. Also the application areas which we were addressing had broadened from typical water based applications into things that are gonna underpin the energy transition, so specifically lithium and green hydrogen production. it’s that whole change of emphasis that we wanted to reflect , in a new brand.

And, e evolve was what we created, which I think is very distinct from many other brands in the space. Both in color palette, but also its name.

Antoine Walter: So you’re saying you’re, you’re not blue,

Chris Wyres: Yes.

Antoine Walter: which which is

big difference.

Chris Wyres: Absolutely. Yeah. And Andrew Walker our, C M O was instrumental , in many of the decisions there.

And, he’s a seasoned water professional and he said, let’s do something that’s not water. And he had my full support for that.

Antoine Walter: terms of standing out. Absolutely. , that works. And kudos , to Andrew for that one and also for us together in that call. Cause he, was instrumentally in preparing that discussion. You, mentioned membranes. so that’s the obvious lead for me , to dive into our deep dive for today because I’d like to understand, you’ve mentioned some of the elements. I’d like to start from the problem you’re aiming to solve, which is this element of. Membranes have random poor sizes, some of them being dead end as you just mentioned.

So I guess that is the problem you’re aiming to solve. How did you identify that problem and, what’s the real challenge inside that problem?

Chris Wyres: So in terms of identifying the, problem we got a, very talented bunch of scientists and engineers and the first, thing they did was analyze existing membranes, took cross-sections, did high power microscopy, built digital twins computational models looked at how fluids flow through , these structures.

, and identified all of the issues , we needed to overcome to build a perfect membrane. It’s very clear once you start doing the computational modeling that the structures are suboptimal and they’re limited by the current manufacturing techniques, you just don’t have the level of control you’d like over pore size distribution, the three dimensional architecture, which sits below each pore.

So you can’t really optimize the flow properties of, these devices. Whereas, using 3D printing, you’re able to control every aspect I’ve mentioned there. So you can precisely define the pore size, you can precisely define what you’re filtering whether that’s a given molecular weight or a physical size in terms of size of particle.

Antoine Walter: Does that mean that the key driver here is the graphine material or the 3D printing?

Chris Wyres: It’s two very distinct approaches. We use graphene oxide coatings. We apply coatings to the surface of existing membranes to refine the pore size and structure. But , there’s only so far we can go. If you have , pores, which are, a hundred times bigger than other pores , in that particular membrane.

There’s only so far a coating can bridge that gap. So you then have to address the fundamental issue. Let’s just get the poor size under control. Let’s precision engineer the poor sizes. And then you build down from there through the sub-structure. How do we minimize the engine requirements to push water through this membrane?

How do we build structures in which prevent fouling and scaling both on the surface and sub-structure. really addressing all of the issues which people typically see right across the water space.

Antoine Walter: Let me just, ensure I pin the challenge right here, which is you’ve done this, cross-cuts and this in-depth computational study of the existing membranes. What I noted down in my preparation work is that you found out that 17% of the actual surface is used today.

Chris Wyres: Yeah, I

may,

Antoine Walter: Can you go to 100% or what’s the leapfrog here?

Chris Wyres: well,

17% is a typical number you see in most membranes. It can be higher, it can be lower, but it’s normally in that range. In terms of what we can do, we can go much higher 50% if we want to. And that’s because we’re able to engineer specific structures which provide the mechanical integrity required to exceed 35, 40%.

Cause you imagine you can’t go a hundred percent cause then you’d have no surface. It would just be a one big hole. 50% is a very high number.

Antoine Walter: it’s free x the average or the the market standard

Chris Wyres: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s not just about that though, Anton it’s about what you do with a fluid once it passes through the initial surface, how you manage the fluid dynamics, what energy requirements there are to address the big problems.

if we’re looking at climate change, it’s all about reducing the amount of energy required to, process a fluid get to a product provide a vital service.

Antoine Walter: And so that entire package you’re describing here, is that what makes your, and I quote your website, perfect membrane.

Chris Wyres: Yeah. That’s the goal. We’re precision engineering membranes for specific applications. And, we are, we’re able to drive down the engine requirements quite significantly, up to 80%.

Antoine Walter: can you give me the special sauce and the trick to, bring that energy requirement down.

Chris Wyres: it’s not just one single ingredient. It is a source as you say. So it’s about having way of precision engineering, the membrane building a. Three dimensional architecture, which minimizes the energy required to, process that fluid , through the structure, but also having a structure which filters or separates what you want to remove from that fluid.

So that could be defined by pore size. it can be defined by other specific elements in the structure. So it’s really just taking all of those variables in, the input feed, water or fluid and precision engineering nearing a, three-dimensional architecture to process that fluid and give the desired product, whether that’s salt removal, food processing, et cetera, et cetera.

Antoine Walter: I have a question for the stupid, which in that room is clearly me. If, I read right you, you’re 3D printing the membrane, the spacer, and the liner.

Can you just explain like really for the layman, what do the Aust terms mean and what does

that mean?

Chris Wyres: yeah. So sorry Anton I didn’t do a good job in explaining really our, product portfolio. So there are two, ranges. We have our enhanced range, which are products we apply to membranes to enhance the performance. And they include the graphing oxide coatings spaces, which go into spiral wound membranes, but we 3D print those spaces.

We don’t use conventional manufacturing and inserts, which go into tubular or hollow fiber membranes. Again, 3D printed shapes, which optimize flow.

Our fully 3D printed membranes are what we call Separonics. And they’re distinctly different. But we’ll come back to those. So, Graph oxide coatings really straightforward.

You apply them to the existing membranes. We’ve made them retrofittable to finished membrane modules. So integration is very simple. Our spacer technology. And the big application for us here is is ro desalination. if you look in that industry what issues do they have in terms of membranes?

Well, phon and scaling, it’s a big issue that’s caused by many different components in, the membrane. But principally the spaces play a big role there. They create dead zones in the flow which allows things to accumulate or biofouling to occur. The spaces also Don’t manage what’s called pressure drop across the a membrane.

As you’re pumping fluid through a membrane, the pressure drops. The bigger the pressure drop, the more energy you consume. So we designed our spaces to eliminate dead zones, create turbulent flow, and to minimize the pressure drop. make the membrane work in an optimal fashion and minimize the energy required to process a given volume of fluid.

Antoine Walter: For that enhance line and approach, do you have like some numbers or keep it from a syndicators to tell us how you can

enhance how.

Chris Wyres: Yeah. If we look at our graph oxide coatings we can double the selectivity. Whether that’s food or lithium. Or other products? With our spacer technology, if we look at desalination around a 30% reduction in the energy consumption for desalination by incorporating our spacer tech for our insert technology in food and beverage processing, we’ve reduced energy consumption by up to 80%.

We’ve also flipped it on its head as well and increased production capacity by four to five x?

Antoine Walter: Impressive.

Chris Wyres: Yes.

Antoine Walter: If I’m right, you have what you just described, so the enhanced product range is commercial today and your

other. Product Theron membrane that is in development stage and might be commercial in 2024. Is

that right?

Chris Wyres: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So we’re working through scale up this year. And that was one of the big asks in terms of the fundraise yeah. This capital intensive process.

Antoine Walter: So you mentioned the fundraise. let’s dive into that. you just announced a 5.7 million pounds, sorry. funding rounds with two new investors in your capital. So at One Ventures and AEM Ventures, I think it’s in the name, the venture elements, but what’s the story of that funding round?

What you do you have to achieve with that?

Chris Wyres: Yeah. So the objectives and the use of funds are really to. Expand our manufacturing capability for both our Enhance products and our Separonics products. And to scale the business globally. Establish a global strategic partner network increase manufacturing capacity.

Establish a global strategic partner network so we can roll this out across all of our target sectors.

Antoine Walter: And from the specific profile of your investors, what does that tell about the future of your company?

Chris Wyres: at One Ventures are a very forward thinking impact fund very focused , on addressing climate change. So it tells you there’s good alignment with the impact our technologies can have there. they only really invest , in businesses that absolutely change the game in specific industries.

Our business is right now is really focused on lithium and, leveraging the tech into green hydrogen production. And can really change the unit economics there. So the cost of manufacturing lithium end to end, and also minimize the impact on the environment. Which is often the forgotten element in you know, the energy transition.

It’s all well and good creating lithium and green hydrogen, but if actually the carbon impact on the environment and physical impact on the environment I is much higher than the as is then what’s the point?

Antoine Walter: Very true to understand your, your point on the production capability. So you will be enhancing your production capability, but do you speak of production of membranes or production of membrane printing devices.

Chris Wyres: it’s both. We’re gonna expand our, manufacturing capability. So we can produce more membranes including spiral wounding membranes with our spacer elements coating, 3D printing the inserts and 3D printing the spaces on a much bigger scale.

Antoine Walter: but in the long

run, what do you intend to do? do? you intend to be a membrane company? a membrane printing, printing company, a technology house, which license its technology to, all the players. What’s your vision?

Chris Wyres: principally a membrane manufacturer. But we keep our business model flexible cuz we understand in certain territories and certain sectors that, basic, there’s not a one size fits all model. the model in semiconductors is vastly different to the model in food and beverage which is vastly different to the model in desalination or lithium or green hydrogen.

Ultimately what I, I see the bulk of the business being is regionalized manufacturing hubs have a range of 3D printers and conventional membrane manufacturing equipment.

Antoine Walter: you were called G two O, I guess you had to produce membranes out of graphine. Now that you are named Evolve, could that mean that you might be also looking at other materials in the

future?

Chris Wyres: let’s address that first bit. We’ve never sought to make membranes purely of graphine. We took a coatings approach, so we took existing membranes and applied a very thin coating to regulate the poor size distribution and the surface properties of the membrane to create antis scaling anti-family.

That, that was a very

Antoine Walter: I took a.

Chris Wyres: Yeah it’s a very clear distinction between The strategy in graphene that we adopted compared to most of our peers who were trying to make the entire membrane from Graphine which is a noble thing to do and makes a lot of sense from a scientific perspective.

But when you, try to engineer a membrane, which is quite a complex device in that way it’s difficult and it’s also very expensive to make it purely out of graphene.

Antoine Walter: But, does that mean that in the future you might be looking at coatings, which are not of graphene? You could apply your coating to basically any type of membrane. I’ve been told by, people looking at you and saying it’s really like a great technology and very promising, but it sounds very challenging to coat in graphine so

Chris Wyres: no, that’s confusion in the marketplace. My background in is it last 15 years in the digital printing business. A lot of coatings, inks involved. A lot of our team are from those sorts of sectors as well. So we’ve developed coatings which are very easy to apply.

We apply them typically to finish modules. We can also integrate the coating process into existing membrane manufacturing, but actually the easiest ways to have a retrofittable product, simply just pump it through under controlled conditions prior to the membrane going into service.

So it’s very quick, easy, and cost effective. We apply a very thin coating. So yeah, it’s not overly affecting the physical structure of the membrane itself, but that thin coating has a significant effect on the properties of the membrane and its performance.

Antoine Walter: you mentioned your various application fields. One of them, if not the first of them you’ll, you’ll tell being lithium,

Chris Wyres: Yes.

Antoine Walter: took you to this application?

Chris Wyres: Yeah that’s a very good question. we’re looking at markets where existing membranes really struggle and cannot provide a cost effective solution with a minimal impact on the environment.

Lithium seem to be one of them. And we determined that selectivity was the key issue. It’s very difficult to selectively filter lithium from other salts. So whether that’s calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, we thought there was, fantastic alignment With our coatings technology in the first instance.  So the team set about taking existing membranes and adapting them to enable lithium to be selectively recovered.

Antoine Walter: terms of the thought process and the history of, that move, G two O Water Technologies was created in 2015, if I’m right.

Chris Wyres: Correct.

Antoine Walter: At which point of time did you realize that you had that competitive advantage with your coating technology within that lithium sector?

Chris Wyres: It’s probably as recently as 2021. yeah, we run a tech business. The guys to be honest, get a, a fair bit of freedom , in what they do. So it probably, it emanated from a Skunk Works project as all good things do. So yeah, visibility for us was really in about 2021. Just as I think, the lithium market was starting to report a big potential future supply gap.

Antoine Walter: And so what’s the first project? How does it start?

Chris Wyres: The first project starts with us supplying a pilot scale system for testing on site. And that’ll be happening most likely in the uk. That’ll be our first deployment. then we build out from there. To be clear, Antoine what we’ve designed here is not just a membrane.

We’ve designed an entire end-to-end solution for very efficient and cost effective production of lithium carbonate,

Antoine Walter: that’s exactly what I’d like to understand, which is you are on one end, a membrane company, but when it goes to d l e, so directly from extraction, straight off the bat, you decide to go from end to end. so what’s , the reasoning there?

Chris Wyres: Quite simply that, we’ve been able to design and build a process which is fully optimized and is far more efficient than existing systems. We have membranes on the front end. Then we have downstream refining processes. If we went and bought an off the shelf, if there is such a thing a piece of equipment for refining the geothermal waters or brine then it wouldn’t be optimized for the feed water which we’re producing.

After our membrane filtration stage it would be much bigger and it would cost more to manufacture the end product in all honesty. And it’d be far more complex. So we’ve taken the view that we’ll optimize each of those subsequent processes so that we have best in class technology end-to-end.

Antoine Walter: But best in class technology, which might come from third party.

Chris Wyres: Yeah. As a business at the heart of our strategy is localized manufacturing. It’s one of the key benefits of of 3D printing, additive manufacturing. that really enables it the thought of building equipment and shipping it halfway around the world horr me. I think that the carbon footprint, which would be associated with that It’s horrendous. Absolutely horrendous. our strategy in the lithium sector is to take our designs and We have local partners who can manufacture in the region and supply the equipment.

Antoine Walter: I’ve used one

acronym yet, which is DLE, so this is direct lithium extraction. I’ve heard on dot microphone for instance, when I was discussing with Ben Sparrow from Saltworks, we discussed about CRC concentrate, refine and convert. You are using.

One different acronym from, what I read, which is IPR for isolation, polishing and Refining.

So how does that describe your process?

Chris Wyres: So three steps The first we isolate the lithium. We get rid of all of the problematic elements. Typically calcium, magnesium, et cetera, in that first stage. the downstream. Polishing and refinement process is far more compact, far more cost effective, far more efficient.

Antoine Walter: to catch you. So isolation is what you do with your graphing

membranes.

Chris Wyres: it is. And we use our 3D printed spacer technology in those membranes to minimize energy requirements and prevent failing and scaling.

Antoine Walter: Very clear.

Chris Wyres: Okay. So isolation. Very clean feed. Containing monovalent, s particularly lithium. It then goes into a polishing stage just to take out any p p b levels, any tail of calcium, magnesium, that’s crept through.

Antoine Walter: You don’t want to be a pain, but you’re polishing step very clearly. It does, but how do you do

it?

Chris Wyres: we use a proprietary iron exchange technology.

Antoine Walter: Okay, so you’re not only intend to change the the face of membranes, you also intend to change the face of iron

exchange.

Chris Wyres: Yeah. But it, we can make it work with other iron exchange, but we have a preferred system, which is just more efficient and effective.

Antoine Walter: you crack me the secret a

bit?

Chris Wyres: No,

Antoine Walter: No, I tried.

Chris Wyres: No. so again, we isolate it. We then take out any final impurities and then we move into a refinement step, which is, again, it’s a proprietary iron exchange technology. Where we effectively isolate the lithium and concentrate it. And this is a very important step. Typically people we use ro membranes to concentrate, which are energy hungry and comparatively inefficient.

And we’ll occupy a large footprint on most plants. So we don’t need that. So it’s simple membrane filtration. In the first stage, we clean it up a little bit more, polish it. In second stage, and then we’ll refine it into a very high quality lithium chloride feed, which can then be processed into the battery grade materials.

Antoine Walter: So the output of your extraction is lithium chloride, and then you use, I guess, market standard roots to go from chloride to carbonate or chloride to hydroxide, depending on what’s needed.

Chris Wyres: correct. The purity and the concentration of our feed makes the subsequent steps much easier as well. So we’ve taken this whole, end-to-end solution approach. So we can minimize the footprint, minimize the cost and most importantly, minimize the impact on the environment of this refinement process.

Antoine Walter: You, mentioned how your first 2021 project was in the uk, which is. Not known to have the high content of lithium, which you can found in Argentina. So I think that kind of gives us already a part of the answer, but what is the lithium concentration you’re looking for in these geothermal brine or whatever source you’re looking at?

Chris Wyres: It doesn’t really matter. another U S P for our solution is that we can work with either very low lithium concentrations as low as 10 or 20 ppm, right up to, several hundred ppm lithium concentration. More importantly though, is the what makes up the rest of the feed the composition.

And we can tackle easy brine at, which are look like seawater, 45, 50 thousand TDS levels, or we can do the really difficult stuff which is 300,000 plus tds. Loaded with calcium, loaded with magnesium really challenging feeds that other people really struggle with.

But our, our system it’s such a broad capability. We can deal with all of it.

Antoine Walter: Magnesium is, usually seen as the one which is the most problematic by conventional approaches. I hear you. How that is less if a problem at all for your technology. Do you have like another scavenger, like one which would be then your specific nemesis?

Chris Wyres: No I would, I’d pro I’d probably say the sodium and potassium levels are probably the next biggest concern. But there’s not a lot that we’ve found, we’ve encountered in the market that we’ve not been able to deal with.

Antoine Walter: So that’s for the technological side of things from a. Business perspective. When you say end to end, I could see you bolted at any of the ends actually with, your customers. So do you work with the developer to look at a way to develop its resource? Do you work with the battery manufacturer to kind of be selling the lithium element?

How, is it coming into music , from a business perspective?

Chris Wyres: we typically work with the companies who are extracting the, the brine.

Antoine Walter: So that makes me a very smooth bridge to my own personal project. because I might be then , your customer, if I get it right.

Chris Wyres: Okay.

Antoine Walter: I mean, I mentioned it’s not a project, it’s a thought exercise. But directly in my backyard there is a lithium resource, which.

For many reasons , is a very complex project. It used to be a set of potash mines. Those potash mines exhausted , their potash contents at the beginning of this century. So beginning of the 21st century when they got converted into landfills, that didn’t last long because they took fire.

and since 20 years now there’s this open environmental topic in my region of what shall we do with that, waste, which half burns and which is 300 meters down in the pot mines. And there were concerns around the water, which is surrounding that landfill. And when they looked up the analyzers of that water, they found out that there is quite a high content of lithium.

So we are speaking here of, I have two samples. One is at 310 ppm, the other is at 430 ppm. And as a thought exercise, I’m looking into, Potentially developing that resource. And I’m discussing with market players and technology companies like you to get their very qualified and informed view on that stuff, which to me is just a sheet of paper and I’m trying understand what to do with it.

So what would you advise as a way forward starting with that resource? If I wanted to see what’s feasible and what I can do with it.

Chris Wyres: first comment is, and that’s a very high quality lithium feed. The concentrations are very good of the lithium. It then comes down to the rest of the composition, but our process is very straightforward. Yeah. We’ll get a copy of the composition. We’ll prepare synthetic brine exactly the same as that, do some quick lab tests, but we’ll also build a digital twin and start to look at how we need to optimize the process for those specific feeds.

Antoine Walter: A digital twin of the process or a digital twin of the hydro geological

Chris Wyres: No digital twin of the process that we’re going to utilize for your specific brain. So we very quickly get to a full techno economic analysis. And feasibility on, what we’re gonna need to do to process this brine to extract the lithium, and then we come back to the customer and say, how does this look?

are we in the right price bracket? Is the footprint available to put this plant down, to process it at your target scale?

Antoine Walter: You mentioned a keyword which sounds very important, which is very quickly,

Chris Wyres: Yes.

Antoine Walter: everybody I’ve talked with so far said to me it’s a race. It’s an interesting race. but it’s a race, so you have to be fast. So when, when you say very quickly, how much time are we discussing here?

Chris Wyres: one to two weeks?

Antoine Walter: So that’s beyond very quickly. That’s light fast.

Chris Wyres: Yeah. every inquiry which comes into our business Whether it’s simple or complex we answer within 30 days and keep the communication going with the customer all the way through. We have a dedicated, very experienced very professional customer success team who manage that process end to end.

Antoine Walter: again, from what I heard from other companies, a active in that space. I mean, I didn’t speak with many technology companies. I spoke with developers, with consultants, there are not so many technology plays either, which are. Deemed to be legend by all the people I, spoke with, and you’re one of these legend companies, which is also why I’m so excited to speak with you.

that disclaimer made what many told me is that they get a lot of inquiries. Like sees that there is this lithium spot price at 70,000 or 80,000 per perton right now, which makes a lot of projects potentially profitable at that hate. So how flooded are you with the demands?

Chris Wyres: we’ve got a tremendous pipeline of opportunities which will, help this business achieve its objective very quickly to become, a unicorn in the water space.

Antoine Walter: I, heard that one right, but I wanted to be absolutely clear. So you’re aiming to be a unicorn.

Chris Wyres: Absolutely. Yeah. And we’re very confident. Sharing a bit more insight one of our key objectives this year is, to have a pipeline of opportunities can generate over a billion a year in recurring revenue.

I’m not saying we’re gonna grow the business to that scale, but it’s to be involved in projects which can get us there in the next three years.

Antoine Walter: So within three years, your a r r should be of 1 billion.

Chris Wyres: That would be a nice thought. We’re not so stupid to think we’ll get there, Anton, to be honest. But it’s to have enough business in the pipeline, which could build a business of that size. Nobody will move fast enough for us. We’re not gonna be the slow link.

It’s gonna be the customer base.

Antoine Walter: I guess it’s not a matter of being stupid or not being stupid. I think it’s, it’s a matter of ambition and I’ve

really rapid-fire so many of my guests on that microphone and asked them if they were in for hypergrowth. And I think I, I have a rate of like 99% of no. And the last one person might be a, probably no, but we’ll see.

You’re, I guess, the first to so openly say that you aim to this hypergrowth route and with a sound confidence from what I hear from

your voice.

Chris Wyres: Yeah, absolutely. growth is limited by three things, really. Capital, obviously you’ve gotta be funded well enough. We have a fantastic investor base. We have a business which I think is highly attractive. getting good traction across multiple markets with some really, blue chip companies.

And. second aspect you’ve gotta consider outside of capital and the attractiveness of the business to its, its end customers is really how quickly you can scale your manufacturing. Because if you can’t supply product, then you can’t make sales. 3D printing and the other technologies, which we’re utilizing in our business are rapidly scalable.

 And also we don’t need a lot of real estate to create large volume production facilities.

Antoine Walter: just wanted to close the arc on the lithium part just to be exhaustive. And then, because I have more questions for you. coming back to my exercise, projects, do I have a tier one, tier two, tier three project here?

Chris Wyres: Look three to 400 ppm lithium. That’s a very good starting point. Depends on the size of the deposits to where we prioritize it. So that’s the missing piece of information. How much have you got?

Antoine Walter: I guess that’s the next question I need to have an answer for. I don’t have it yet, but it makes a lot

of sense.

Chris Wyres:

Do you have a puddle or do you have a, a, an intern, a sea

Antoine Walter: it’s part of a very big aquifer, but then how much of that very big aquifer has that concentration is, undetermined, I’ll do my homework. lithium is one of your vectors for growth and you just shared how your growth. Shall be in in hate where maybe one vector isn’t sufficient.

So the next one is green hydrogen. So what do you intend to do there?

Chris Wyres: Green hydrogen is essential to the energy transition more important than lithium in fact in the longer term perspective. The key issue with green hydrogen is that for green hydrogen to be realistic, you’ve gotta have the quality of water feeding into the electrolyzers that Don’t degrade them quickly.

Currently the lifetime of the ELECTROLYZERS is quite limited by the quality of the water coming in. You effectively need ultrapure water to make these electrolyzers work at their most effective. So ultrapure water likely use in the semiconductor industry, which we all know is a process, which is the conversion rates are terrible.

To get one liter of ultrapure water, 15 to 20 liters of potable water as your input feed.

Antoine Walter: a very interesting insight you’re uncovering here, because so far when I discussed green hydrogen with some of my guests, it was a matter of designating water. Like I did a full deep dive, like I’m doing like currently a deep dive on lithium. I did a full deep dive on hydrogen last year and one of the output were, yeah, if anyways you’re gonna desalinate a bit of water, you can desalinate a bit more and that bit more can feed your, green hydrogen production. But if now you’re adding these new pieces to the puzzle, which is to say, yeah, just throw desalinated water might not be sufficient. You have to go to ultra your water standards. That’s different game. why do you need to go to that quality of

water?

Chris Wyres: it. Essentially any of the impurities, even at P p B level will accumulate in the, the electrolyzers make them more inefficient. They’ll impact the efficiency and in many cases, lead to degradation. If you get scaling on the surfaces, for instance. your only answer other than continuous cleaning, which just destroys them anyway, is to keep ramping up.

The voltage, if you like, keep it very simple. So you’re driving them harder and harder, which brings a lifetime down.

Antoine Walter: And so what’s your answer

to

that?

Chris Wyres: So our answer is that using our membrane technology, we have a very efficient way of making preneur water. So conversions, efficiencies are higher. The energy requirement is much, much lower. there’s no point in making hydrogen where the carbon footprint of making the water outweighs that the gains of using hydrogen as a fuel.

Antoine Walter: Does that mean that you can fundamentally solve this imbalance of green hydrogen being three times more expensive than black hydrogen?

Chris Wyres: we can play a big role in that. Yes, very much and we see our Separonics technology in particular being able to do that. My personal opinion on the matter is this is gonna require subsea desalination in the first instance, your membranes have gotta be highly effective.

Cuz you can’t just swim to the bottom of the ocean and maintain your membrane plant. it’s gonna be down there 20, 30 years plus. It’s gotta be low maintenance, it’s gotta be ultra efficient. that’s what we think seonis can deliver.

That’s the starting point. And then obviously, Once you have the desalinated water, it’s then converting that into ultrapure in a very cost effective and efficient manner. And again, seonis plays a big role in that.

Antoine Walter: You’re opening a fascinating new door here and sorry because can push , for long new doors. So at some point you have also to stop me, but Subsid desalination, is it something you’ve already worked on?

Chris Wyres: We have some pro active projects in the space.

Antoine Walter: Would it be Maybe Norway.

Chris Wyres: No,

it’s

Antoine Walter: Okay. I’m

fishing.

Chris Wyres: yeah.

Antoine Walter: it have something to do with your partnership with uh, s wcc?

Chris Wyres: No, not that’s um, very focused on, desalination and brine harvesting. But yeah, desalination is the main focus there driving down the energy consumption in desalination in particular.

Antoine Walter: Okay, so I’ll keep my radars very active because I’m really interested in when you are ready to, talk a bit more openly about this. Subsid alienation sounds like a fascinating topic. I have one last very important chapter on my agenda, which is this partnership you have with S wcc, which is the largest assassinator in the words.

If I am right, it has something to do with magnesium.

Chris Wyres: It’s one aspect of it. Yeah, I mean , we obviously have a level of confidentiality that I have to be mindful of. But I would say the goals of our with s w CCC are aligned to their very publicly in announced goals. Yeah, brine harvesting and driving down the cost and energy requirements in desalination.

Antoine Walter: In that order, like number one, brain harvesting and.

Chris Wyres: no. That I think if you look at what they publicly state number one is driving down the energy requirements for desalination, making that process far more effective. And, have big growth ambitions a big national and regional requirement to increase their desalination capacity significantly over the next 10 years in line with their intended population growth.

So I think they have to find the best in class technologies to achieve those goals. You they’re targeting below two kilowatt hours per cubic meter. Which compared to most desalination plants today is a long way away.

Antoine Walter: If I zoom out from the various applications and technologies we’ve discussed today, I’ll try to put it in my words and you’ll tell me how much of a shortcut I’m taking and how long am I might be. have your today’s business, which is around Enhance and your d l E technology.

You have your Tomorrow business, which is around crons and everything it’ll enable in terms of applications, for instance, green, hydrogen and desalination. Sounds like something you’re covering today with Enhance, but which is a bit smaller than the lithium portion. I’m just trying to wrap my head around it.

So if you had to put like very rough numbers around it, how much do you do in, in Lithium? How much do you do , in the other applications? And how will that mix evolve in the future?

Chris Wyres: if you looked at a mix over the next five years 70% will be in the lithium space. And the rest will be spread across food and beverage desalination, green hydrogen, which is a very early stage industry. In the next five years it needs to grow quickly, of course.

But yeah, it’s still a very early stage industry. If you look 20 years out, the mix is gonna change, and green hydrogen will become an equally big part as lithium as that sector emerges.

Antoine Walter: And usually I’m asking. To close the step dive, kind of a crystal ball question and saying, look, in the future, like in 10 years, what did you achieve for you or had already intended to go only five years in the future because you sound to have like a rapid path. What I heard from you previously today is that three years might be the right horizon, but I’ll let you pick if you want to see you are in three or in five years, but what will tell you that you’ve had an impact?

Chris Wyres: I think first and foremost is a large install base across our target sectors. that is the first indicator of success. I think the second indicator of success would be a global partnership network that’s able to supply. Service and support our business across multiple sectors in multiple regions.

Antoine Walter: Which kind of partners are you looking for?

Chris Wyres: It depends on the sector where possible we try to work directly with the end users minimize the supply chain, but in certain sectors we have to work with like semiconductors. So it’s a, it’s a well established supply chain in industry, so we have to work with the usual service providers , in that sector.

Desalination similar, you have to work through the EPCs, so.

Antoine Walter: Very clear. And

do you stand your point that you, you will be that first water unicorn ever.

Chris Wyres: I hope so. We’re very confident. We have a game changing business, transformational products and very strong traction , in the market in multiple sectors, whether it’s lithium, it’s green, hydrogen, semiconductors, and beverage, desalination or localized recycling of industrial wastewaters.

Antoine Walter: Well, Chris, thanks a lot for that in-depth tour of Evolve and I’d be looking forward to make updates your path , to that unicorn target. I mean, you made it clear. it might be the result, but you have very in between.

Chris Wyres: Yes,

Antoine Walter: So I’m really looking forward that SQL conversation to round off today is one, I have a set of rapid for questions.

If you’re fine with that, I will transition to that last

section.

Chris Wyres: of course. Yeah.

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Rapid Fire Questions

Antoine Walter: So in that last section, I’m asking short questions, which aim for short answers. Usually I’m the one side tracking, so don’t worry. My first question is, what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and why?

Chris Wyres: The most exciting project we’ve been working on. We have so many. To be honest, that’s a really difficult question. For sure it’s in the lithium space. We have some fantastic opportunities. One in particular with a very forward thinking operator in Canada. It has an incredibly challenging feed and the team have been very successful in solving the challenge.

So really tough challenge. We’ve solved it and the partner is really excited about the potential and they have enormous deposits.

Antoine Walter: I, I warned you that I’m the one sidetracking. So here’s my sidetrack. I have actually two sidetracks. First I, I was in Canada some weeks ago to interview some, players within that deep dive for lithium. And they told me everything’s big in Canada. So you have like low concentrations maybe, but like huge deposits.

So, I guess that mirrors pretty well what you just explained. my question here is in that d l e word you sound to me like an outlier. Because you’re a European, I’ll not treat you anymore. Let’s say a UK British company. Most of the players are North American and Australian. Do you feel like left alone.

Chris Wyres: No, I don’t think we do we’re engaged with organizations across North America, Latin America, Europe. So I think you’re right. look a bit like an outlier. And, I think the alignment with that phrase is that we have something very different to everybody else in terms of

techno, in terms of technology.

In terms of the growth prospects and the ability to deliver on what we say we can deliver on we’re certainly not an outlier

Antoine Walter: Well, sorry for the sidetrack, but I was curious. I had to ask, so back to my rapid fur questions. Can you name one thing that you’ve learned the hard way?

Chris Wyres: one thing, I’ve learned the hard way since being involved in the water sector the pace is incredibly slow.

Antoine Walter: guess that’s what’s all my, guests, from outside the industry are the most surprised when they start with, but still, you intend to change

that

Chris Wyres: Yeah. absolutely. And I think that there’s two parts to, to that. The pace of adoption of technology is slow. And the second part is that funding of the water sector woefully low. It’s changing, thankfully was much more focus on the water sector really the specialist funds are emerging but it needs to accelerate.

Antoine Walter: Yet, and I’m not opening a sidetrack, so it’s just my remark here yet you’ve been funded by funds which are not water specialists. So it sounds like when you really have a compelling business case, you can find investors which are outside that, that specific sphere.

Chris Wyres: Absolutely.

Antoine Walter: there something you’re doing today in your job that you will not be doing in 10 years?

Chris Wyres: Good question. I won’t be doing in 10 years traveling as much.

Antoine Walter: It’s incredible how often that answer comes. So I, I take your point. what is the trend to watch out for in the water sector?

Chris Wyres: Evove.

Antoine Walter: That’s a good one. I, I take it, last question, would you have someone to recommend me that I should definitely speak with as soon as possible on that microphone?

Chris Wyres: My colleague Andrew Walker, who I know, you know, well,

Antoine Walter: I’d agree. I think we’d have an insightful and, and fun time on that microphone. So, so thanks for the suggestion.

Chris Wyres: could I just go back 1 more? I would actually say one of the managing partners at at One Ventures who have a very different approach to venture funding and addressing climate change.

Antoine Walter: Well taken. I guess once I’m done with my lithium deep dive, I’ll take a breath and then my next tip dive is probably gonna be into the venture word. some of the things you mentioned today, like the low level of, investment into the water sphere, but also how specific players like the one which you’ve teamed up with are going into that sphere.

I guess suggestion might be very, very well used there as well.

Chris Wyres: Yes,

Antoine Walter: Chris, it’s been a pleasure to explore the path of evolved so far with you today, and I, I stand my case. I’d be really delighted to have a sequel and an update at some point in the future. If people want to follow up with you, where shall you contact you the best?

Chris Wyres: The best place to contact me is via email, either direct, into my email or via our info box.

Antoine Walter: if you’re fine with that,

outputs your, your, email in the show notes thanks a lot for the thoughtful conversation and I hope to speak to you

soon.

Chris Wyres: Likewise. Thanks for your time. Really appreciate it.

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