Jim Rieke

Jim Rieke runs the part of Veolia that almost nobody expects a water company to have. His group, which trades under the HPD brand, does evaporation and crystallization, which is the unglamorous craft of boiling a liquid down and growing solid crystals out of what is left. In Rieke's own words, his team is "a little bit strange in the Veolia world," because while the rest of the company cleans water, his group spends its time on the production side of things, the chemical and inorganic processes that most people never see. That odd specialism is exactly why the world's largest water company ended up being very good at making lithium.

Jim Rieke connects those two worlds through a concept the water industry already knows well, Zero Liquid Discharge. ZLD is what you do when a factory is not allowed to release any wastewater at all, so you evaporate the leftover brine and crystallize it until there is nothing liquid to discharge. A lithium refinery, it turns out, is that same water technology pointed the other way. Instead of boiling a brine down to make a waste disappear, you boil it down to harvest the valuable thing inside it, the lithium, and grow it into a battery-grade crystal. Run Zero Liquid Discharge in reverse and a water-treatment plant becomes a refinery, which is the whole reason Rieke's evaporation-and-crystallization toolkit transfers so cleanly.

Jim Rieke's proudest proof of that idea sits in Japan. The Naraha plant, in Fukushima, is the country's first lithium-hydroxide refinery, a joint venture between Toyota Tsusho and the Australian lithium producer Orocobre (now Allkem). Veolia supplied the HPD process that converts roughly 9,500 tonnes a year of technical-grade lithium carbonate into about 10,000 tonnes a year of battery-grade lithium hydroxide, the form the cathode makers actually need. Rieke and his team de-risked the whole flow scheme first at Veolia's testing facility in Plainfield, Illinois, before anyone poured concrete, which is how a process this finicky gets a performance guarantee wrapped around it.

Jim Rieke is candid about how slowly this kind of work really moves, and that is the detail a newcomer should hold onto. He explains that these refineries can take six or seven years from the first client conversation to commissioning, because most of that time goes into testing and validating a flow sheet until you can reach what he calls a "design freeze." Only once the design is frozen does the project move into detailed engineering, procurement and construction. It is the opposite of move-fast-and-break-things, and for the EV battery supply chain, where a single bottleneck can strand billions in committed capital, that patience is the point.

Jim Rieke is also unusually honest about where Veolia's lane ends, which is the kind of grounded detail I like to anchor against my Leviathan database and his own words rather than a press release (you can read how I source these facts on the methodology page). On Direct Lithium Extraction, the newer family of technologies that pulls lithium straight out of a brine without giant evaporation ponds, he is clear that his group does not have its own DLE process. Instead Veolia engineers and supplies everything downstream of someone else's DLE, taking the upgraded lithium and concentrating, purifying and crystallizing it into the final product, as on the EnergySource geothermal-brine project in California. After more than thirty years at one company, the thing he keeps coming back to is hard-won and almost humble:

“Through my career, the big learnings are the hard learnings, the ones that are a little bit painful. One key learning is that it's usually not the things that you're worried about that trip you up in these complex flow schemes. Sometimes they're rather simple things that cause the most delay or heartache.”

Jim Rieke is, in short, the deep specialist the energy transition quietly runs on: the lifelong process engineer who can hold the chemistry, the timeline and the cost of a first-of-a-kind refinery in the same conversation, and who got there by being thorough about the boring parts.