Benjamin Sparrow

Benjamin Sparrow did not set out to be a water entrepreneur, and he certainly did not set out to be in lithium. He trained as a mechanical engineer at the University of Alberta, added an MBA at Simon Fraser, and spent eight years at BC Hydro as a turbine engineer, rehabilitating aged hydroelectric assets, which is about as far from a Silicon Valley garage as a career gets. And yet a garage is exactly where Saltworks started: in 2008, in Vancouver, with what he calls a bunch of motivated young engineers rather than a university spin-out, chasing a counterintuitive idea about desalinating seawater with low-grade waste heat.

Benjamin Sparrow likes to say the company's plan was to develop the technology that industry would need after 2020, and to start a decade early, which sounds like hindsight until you remember Saltworks was founded in 2008. The seawater idea was the bait; the catch was industry. When the team came out of stealth, he says, industry came knocking, with lots of salty water and lots of waste heat, asking whether the two could be put together to make fresh water. That pulled Saltworks onto industrial water recycling, and the very first purchase order, in a detail he clearly enjoys, came from NASA. Once an industrial customer could tell their boss the technology was good enough for the space station, the commercial sales followed.

Benjamin Sparrow's most quotable argument is about a mismatch in where capital is going. He puts it simply: roughly ten times more money is flowing into building battery factories than into extracting the lithium those factories need. Now think about what that imbalance actually means on the ground, because it is not symmetric. A lithium battery plant takes about two years and a couple of billion dollars to build, and a mine to feed it takes a great deal longer, so you can finance all the gigafactories you like and still end up short of the raw material. That gap is the opening Saltworks walks into: its membranes refine lithium out of brines, including unconventional North American and European brines where the usual evaporation ponds simply do not fit, and it is one of the clearest water-technology stories of the battery era.

Benjamin Sparrow is careful about what Saltworks is and is not. He splits the market into two buckets, and for most of it, his blue-chip industrial water-recycling clients and his mine-site customers, Saltworks is extracting water and minimizing waste, not extracting lithium. It would be lovely to own a lithium resource, he admits, but then you are a miner exposed to one commodity, and he would rather be the technology provider selling into all of them. Underneath sits a quietly radical view of the feedstock: Sparrow treats brine and industrial wastewater not as a disposal problem but as a resource, and the thing that actually drives adoption, he is honest enough to say, is money: make recycling cheaper than dumping, and customers recycle. (This is the part of the water story I keep coming back to in my own Leviathan database, where the deals that close are almost always the ones that pencil out.)

Benjamin Sparrow's patience comes, by his own account, from the water itself. He is a sailor, and he calls water the most undervalued and overlooked element on the planet, refusing even to use the word commodity for it. He has the contrarian's eye for who really moves a sector, too: in his telling, the Church of England, acting as an activist shareholder marshalling others over water risk, did more for industrial wastewater reuse than any regulator ever has. And for all that Saltworks has grown, he insists the whole field of industrial wastewater recycling, zero liquid discharge and lithium is still, in his baseball phrase, at inning one.

“The Church of England has done more for the industrial wastewater reuse sector, in my view, than any regulator ever has.”

Benjamin Sparrow is, in the end, an engineer who reframed the dirtiest water in industry as the next place to find value, and who got into lithium almost by accident because the chemistry he had built for brine turned out to be exactly what the battery age was short of.