Teague Egan

Teague Egan did not come to lithium from a lab, he came to it from a holiday. On a trip to Bolivia he visited the Uyuni salt flat, the largest in the world, and learned that the same blinding-white desert is also the planet's single biggest lithium reserve. That stuck with him, and in 2018 he turned it into EnergyX, a company built on one stubborn question: if the lithium is already dissolved in the brine, why are we still evaporating that brine in giant ponds for a year and a half to get it out?

Teague Egan's whole pitch starts with how badly the old way works. The standard method floods salt-flat brine into evaporation ponds that can run 15 square miles, take roughly 18 months to yield lithium, and recover only about 30 to 40% of what entered the system. EnergyX's answer is direct lithium extraction, or DLE, which is the family of water-tech approaches that grab the lithium straight from the brine without the wait. Its platform is called LiTAS, short for Lithium Ion Transport And Separation, and it mixes adsorbents, solvent extraction and membranes, tuned per site because, as Egan likes to point out, no two brines are the same. The target he set is a far smaller footprint, a far shorter time, and recovery closer to 90 or even 100%.

Teague Egan's sharpest commercial idea is not the headline "no more ponds" future, it is the near-term money sitting in the ponds that already exist. Producers have spent billions building evaporation infrastructure that leaves 60 to 70% of the lithium on the table, and in Bolivia's case, by his telling, essentially all of it. So EnergyX patented a way to slot its separation tech into those existing ponds, just before the big losses, and claw some of that value back. It is the kind of unglamorous retrofit that turns a science project into a business.

Teague Egan's most surprising recruit was a Nobel laureate's blessing. EnergyX had licensed patents out of the University of Texas at Austin, which is how Egan ended up in the office of John Goodenough, the co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery, who was 96 at the time. Goodenough thought some of his ideas were worth testing and put him in touch with one of his last PhD students, Nick Grundish, now EnergyX's VP of Battery Technology and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree. EnergyX went on to hire several scientists from that same lineage. Goodenough, who won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and was the oldest person ever to receive one, died in June 2023, just after this episode aired, at the age of 100.

Teague Egan is, by his own cheerful admission, a salesman as much as a scientist, and the cap table shows it. By my Leviathan database's count, EnergyX has raised about $134 million across nine disclosed rounds, the standout being the $50 million round General Motors led in 2023 to lock in future North American lithium, with strategic money since from POSCO and Eni and a string of retail crowdfunding raises. The first dollars, fittingly, were easier for Egan to find than for most founders: he is the son of Michael Egan, who founded Alamo Rent A Car and sold it for around $625 million, and before EnergyX he ran a seed-stage venture fund and, at 21, a record label that put a debut album at number one on the iTunes hip-hop charts. These days he is also building a second moonshot, a nuclear-energy startup called Final Frontier working on a small thorium reactor, which tells you most of what you need to know about how Teague Egan picks his problems.

“We're the first ones to think about how we can complement existing pond infrastructure and insert some of our separation technologies at a point in the pond process just before they start to see those huge losses. We filed patents around all of that because nobody else is doing that or had thought of that.”

Whether EnergyX hits its own targets is still being decided in demonstration plants and project-finance term sheets, but the bet underneath it is simple enough to explain over coffee, which is exactly how Teague Egan likes it.