Christopher Brown

Christopher Brown did not arrive at lithium from a battery lab. Christopher Brown is a professional engineer (a P.Eng, the Canadian licence) who spent his early career deep in oil and gas and capital markets, at Burlington Resources, ConocoPhillips, BMO Capital Markets and Canaccord Genuity, and along the way he helped found the largest environmental operating group for the tailings ponds of the Alberta oil sands, a company he says grew from two people to over a hundred and that was eventually sold to a First Nation. So when he founded the Helios Group of Companies in 2016, the pitch was not a single gadget but a way of working, to merge engineering and finance and put it to work for Indigenous nations on projects that were environmentally positive and still made commercial sense.

Christopher Brown stays inside what he calls the brine universe, and that choice is the whole story. There are three ways to get lithium out of the ground, and Brown is blunt that his team only does one of them: not the hard rock you strip-mine, not the lithium locked in clays, but the lithium dissolved in deep underground brines, the salty water you pump up from far below the surface. The reason is that he and his people are subsurface experts who came from oil and gas, fluent in fluid dynamics and the behaviour of underground fluids, so they apply reservoir engineering and probabilistic statistical analysis to a resource the traditional mining world usually sizes up with a much blunter bulk-volume estimate. It is the oil-and-gas brain pointed at a mining problem, which is most of why he keeps insisting the energy industry's geologists and engineers are the ready-made workforce for the whole lithium transition.

Christopher Brown's headline idea, and the reason the episode is titled around an overlooked third component, is heat. Most people picture lithium as either the resource (the brine) or the technology (the extraction process), and Brown's point is that there is a third lever almost nobody costs in: where the energy to concentrate the lithium comes from. About 70% of the world's lithium today is still produced by letting brine sit in giant evaporation ponds and waiting for the sun, a method with a fifty-year track record, and Brown's twist is to put those ponds where the earth is naturally hot. In Alberta he wants to use natural geothermal heat to keep the ponds warm and speed up evaporation, so that he does not need to burn electricity to do it, which drops the carbon intensity of the whole operation. Geothermal, he points out, is not exotic either, Iceland, Sweden and Norway have run on it for decades.

Christopher Brown treats carbon intensity as the line he will not cross, and it doubles as his social-licence argument. As he puts it, it is useless to bring on new critical minerals if producing them costs the environment more than the lithium battery saves, because that defeats the entire point of the electric vehicle. That same honesty shows up in how he talks about water, where he is quick to correct a common misconception, that the brine pumped to the surface looks clear and drinkable but is nothing of the sort, and that the real damage in places like South America has come less from the water itself than from failing to keep the local Indigenous nations informed and participating. The other extraction route, direct lithium extraction (DLE), which pulls the lithium straight out of the brine using sorbent media (he describes it as a spiked bowling ball drilled with a million holes to grab more lithium as water passes), uses far less water but more energy, and the work he is proudest of is a DLE project with the University of Calgary aimed at very low-concentration brines.

Christopher Brown is worth listening to as a builder because of how cautious he is about scaling, which is rare in a field full of hype. He is an engineer first, and he will tell you that jumping from a laboratory straight to a half-million-barrel-a-day facility is, in his words, a naive step and a guaranteed failure, so the logical path is lab, then a single well, then commercial. He also reads the geopolitics plainly, that China is roughly ten years ahead of North America in locking up the critical minerals (the lithium, cobalt and nickel) a battery needs, which is the real reason the West is suddenly in a hurry. Since the episode aired, Christopher Brown has kept building across the same critical-minerals and clean-energy world, as a founding director of Libra Lithium (now Libra Energy Materials), an advisor on direct lithium extraction in the United States with Blue Ridge Lithium, and a director of a next-generation geothermal greenhouse venture, eGrowth, which is the geothermal idea pointed at food instead of lithium.

“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.”

Christopher Brown is, in short, the oil-and-gas engineer who looked at the lithium rush and asked the unglamorous question nobody else was costing in: where does the heat come from? You can hear his full case for geothermal-powered, low-carbon lithium on the (don't) Waste Water episode below, which sits inside a whole series on why water technology decides who wins the lithium race.