Cris Moreno

Cris Moreno did not come up through water. He spent roughly twenty years building some of the largest oil-and-gas plants on the planet, the kind of liquefied-natural-gas megaprojects that run into the tens of billions of dollars, with Santos, Woodside and Shell across Australia, Korea and France. Then he switched sides of the energy transition, first running cathode and lithium-refinery programs at the Swedish battery maker Northvolt, and in late 2022 he joined Vulcan Energy Resources, the Australian-listed company building a lithium project in Germany. He came on (don’t) Waste Water in June 2023 as Vulcan's Deputy CEO, and the month after the episode aired he was made Managing Director and CEO.

Cris Moreno runs a company whose whole pitch is that it does two things at once from the same hot water. Vulcan drills into the geothermal brine deep under the Upper Rhine Valley, on the border between Germany and France, and uses the heat in that brine twice: once to make renewable power and district heating for local towns, and once to extract the lithium that is dissolved in the very same water. The lithium comes out through what the water-tech world calls Direct Lithium Extraction, or DLE, which in Vulcan's case means sticky little beads that grab the lithium and then release it again into fresh water, with no harsh acids, no evaporation ponds and no open-pit mine. The end product is lithium hydroxide, the chemical that goes into electric-car batteries.

Cris Moreno's standout move, and the reason he came on the show, is commercial rather than chemical. Building a first-of-a-kind plant is the part investors are scared of, so before a single commercial tonne existed Vulcan had already pre-sold the first five to ten years of its output, locking binding agreements with some of the biggest names in the battery chain, including Volkswagen, Stellantis, Renault, Umicore and LG. Selling a product years before you can make it is how you turn a risky-looking mining story into something a bank will finance, and Cris frames the engineering side with the same comfort: he insists the whole thing is less a complex mine than "a glorified water processing facility," the boring oil-and-gas logic he knows cold.

Cris Moreno's case for Vulcan rests on a real shortage: Europe wants to electrify its cars but barely makes its own lithium, and the conventional ways of getting it, hard-rock mining or South American evaporation, carry a heavy carbon and water footprint. By his own framing on the show, electrifying the world's passenger fleet the traditional way would release over a billion tonnes of carbon, which is exactly the bill Vulcan is built to avoid. The plan has since cleared its hardest gate, and I checked the milestone against the public record the same way I source everything in my Leviathan database: in December 2025 Vulcan took a final investment decision on Phase One, the Lionheart project, backed by a roughly 2.2 billion euro (about 2.6 billion dollar) financing package from a 13-bank consortium plus the European Investment Bank, HOCHTIEF, Siemens and Germany's KfW, with first lithium targeted for 2028.

“Some people see it as a complex mining project. I see it as a very easy oil and gas project, because I come from complex oil and gas projects where we spend $20, $30 billion, not $1 billion. For us, the lithium extraction is just a glorified water processing facility.”

Cris Moreno is, at heart, a megaproject engineer who learned to sell, and that combination is most of why a deep-tech lithium project in the Rhine valley got funded at all.