Saad Dara

Saad Dara did not set out to refine lithium. He grew up in Karachi, then went to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he stacked up a bachelor's, a master's and a PhD in chemical and biological engineering, and his doctorate was about cleaning water electrochemically, which just means using electricity to do the chemistry instead of pouring in reagent chemicals. He had decided early that he did not want to be an academic, so he deliberately structured the PhD to spin out a company at the end of it, which he did in 2017 as Mangrove Water Technologies, a desalination outfit that made useful chemicals out of waste saltwater.

Saad Dara then ran into the thing every university founder eventually meets, which is that, in his words, "university technologies are often solutions looking for problems". So he went hunting for the right problem, looked at steel and semiconductors, and kept landing on lithium, because the same electrochemistry that pulled sodium hydroxide out of wastewater could pull lithium hydroxide out of a lithium brine, and lithium hydroxide is worth far, far more for the same amount of work. A customer asked whether the box could do lithium instead, he said yes, and that snowballed. He is careful not to call it a pivot. He calls it a different use case, and to mark it he created the operating name Mangrove Lithium and dropped the water branding, because in the crowded lithium scene people kept assuming he was extracting the metal, which he is not.

Saad Dara's whole company hangs on one word that needs a quick decode, which is refining. Refining is the step that sits between digging lithium out of the ground and putting it in a battery, the bit that turns raw lithium salts into the ultra-pure lithium hydroxide or lithium carbonate a cell actually needs. The conventional way to do it adds basic chemicals, and the catch Saad Dara points out is that those chemicals have to be spotless or they smuggle their own impurities into a product that is supposed to be 99-point-something percent pure. Mangrove does the conversion with electrons across a membrane instead, generating the exact chemistry it needs on the spot without the impurity problem, and the system is feedstock-flexible (his PR firm, he joked on the show, has banned him from saying "agnostic"), so it can take brine or hard rock and switch between making hydroxide and carbonate inside a week.

Saad Dara's bigger bet is geopolitical, and it is the reason a lithium company ended up on a water podcast. Today essentially all of the world's lithium refining happens in China, while North America and Europe have almost none, so every Western battery still depends on a processing step nobody on this side of the world controls. That is the gap Mangrove is built to close, and in April 2026 it stopped being a slide and became concrete: the company opened North America's first commercial electrochemical lithium refinery in Delta, British Columbia, sized to make about 1,000 tonnes of battery-grade lithium a year, enough for roughly 25,000 electric vehicles. That came on the back of a US$85 million financing led by the Canada Growth Fund, alongside Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy Ventures and BMW i Ventures, which is the "Bill Gates jewel" the episode title was pointing at.

Saad Dara is, underneath the chemistry, a collaborator, and that is the through-line I kept hearing in his episode. He talks about designing each refinery jointly with the customer rather than dictating to them, and his one summary of how the company sells is the line below. The water beginning is not a footnote in that story, it is the whole foundation: the same electrochemical box that was going to clean water is now the thing standing between a North American battery and a Chinese refinery, which is about as neat a demonstration as you will find of why I keep tracking water technology as it leaks into everything from chemicals to critical minerals.

“We don't sit across the table from them. We sit at the table with them and say, this is how we should design. That's how I feel we have the best chance of success.”

Saad Dara came on (don't) Waste Water in 2023 as the founder of a desalination company that had found a better use for its chemistry, and you can hear the whole water-to-lithium arc in his own words in the episode linked below.