Jay Keener

Jay Keener did not set out to build a lithium company, and that is sort of the point of how he works. Jay Keener started in water as a kid doing mission work, then took a chemistry degree at the College of Wooster, and his very first job was as roughly the third or fourth employee of a water-treatment startup that one of his own chemistry professors had spun up. From there he spent the better part of fifteen years inside the messy end of the energy business, cleaning up the salty, oily water that comes back out of the ground when you drill for oil and gas, which the industry calls produced water. So when he describes how his companies get started, it is never a whiteboard and a grand plan, it is listening to where the industry actually hurts and building something to fix that specific pain.

Jay Keener's path to Altillion ran through a string of operating roles, and that operator's instinct is what makes him worth listening to. Jay Keener co-founded and ran the filtration business Xedia Process Solutions, then kept moving through the oilfield-water world, and for a lot of those years he was not just the executive but the person in the field doing the installs, collecting the data, and learning what a Permian winter does to a piece of equipment. That field time matters, because it is one thing to design a clever process on paper and another to know what actually breaks when you run it for real. Altillion itself was not a garage startup either, it was incubated inside a Houston process-technology company that already knew how to commercialise separation technology.

Jay Keener's core idea at Altillion is that the chemistry of pulling lithium out of brine is not the hard part, the engineering around it is. Most lithium projects lean on what the field calls DLE, or direct lithium extraction, the step that grabs lithium out of very dilute, very variable salty water. Altillion sits at the polishing end of that chain, taking a moderately concentrated lithium stream and turning it into something close to battery-grade, and its whole pitch is the implementation, not a new magic molecule. Their process injects and mixes the organic solvent in a proprietary way and then separates it without relying on slow gravity settling, which means they recover virtually all of the organic and reuse it instead of burning through an expensive consumable. That is the difference between a lab result and something a customer can afford to run.

Jay Keener is refreshingly literal about where Altillion is today, which is rare for a founder. Altillion is at pilot stage, with two small pilot plants in Houston (one runs about three gallons a minute, the other about three gallons an hour), and customers ship their own brines in for Altillion to process and analyse on site. The next milestone Jay Keener names is putting the technology in the field to run continuously at a customer location, which he frames as reaching TRL 7, the technology readiness level scale that NASA invented to grade how proven a technology is from 1 to 9, where 7 means a real system running in real operating conditions rather than a lab demo. To get there he is candid that it will take capital and more hands on the engineering and hydrometallurgy side.

Jay Keener also has a clear philosophy about how a young industry should behave, and it is one I do not hear often enough from founders. Jay Keener genuinely believes almost every company can find a way to collaborate with almost every other company, and in a field this early, with somewhere between 60 and 80 lithium-extraction companies and nobody yet sure which will win, his first instinct is to look for the collaboration before the competition. That is not just talk: Altillion worked with the Vancouver firm Telescope Innovations to take the concentrated lithium chloride coming off its pilot plant and convert it into battery-grade lithium carbonate above 99.9% purity, with neither company having to swallow the other's piece of the puzzle.

“A lot of my businesses that I've started or been involved in have started not from me sitting at my desk with a whiteboard saying, I want to be an entrepreneur. They usually start with interacting with the industry, with my network, and just paying attention to where are their pain points.”

Jay Keener is, in the end, the kind of founder the lithium rush probably needs more of: not a chemist chasing a breakthrough molecule, but an operator who has cleaned enough dirty water in enough cold fields to know that the cost and the mess are where these technologies usually die, and who built Altillion specifically to fix that part.