This Lithium Plant Would Double US Production | The New Industrialists

November 9, 2026

The United States produces almost no lithium of its own.

Not for lack of the stuff. There’s lithium in groundwater almost everywhere. But most of the industry’s growth over the past decade has come from hard rock mines, and most of that concentrate goes to China to be refined into something a battery can use.

Raef Sully is CEO of Lilac Solutions, which has spent ten years turning ion exchange into a way to pull lithium out of brine too dilute for conventional methods, and to make battery grade material on site rather than shipping it anywhere.

Their first commercial plant is on the Great Salt Lake in Utah, where the brine is some thirty times more dilute than the Chilean salt flats that supply much of the world’s lithium. It already has a buyer signed up for ten years and $100 million from the Department of Energy. What it doesn’t have yet is the final go-ahead to start building, which Sully hopes comes by the end of the year.

In this episode:

  • A couple of wells instead of billions of gallons pumped into evaporation ponds
  • Why the capital cost runs about half the incumbent method
  • The ten years it took, and when they realized they’d have to build a plant themselves
  • 150,000 tons of global demand in 2015, nearly 2 million now, and where analysts put 2035
  • What the US Trade and Development Agency is paying for at a geothermal plant in Indonesia
  • “Hard tech is hard because you’re building something real”

Links:

Energy Empire: https://energyempire.fm

The NEIS Center: https://neiscenter.org

Lilac Solutions: https://lilacsolutions.com

Lilac and Traxys ten-year agreement: https://lilacsolutions.com/news/lilac-and-traxys-announce-binding-10-year-offtake-agreement-for-great-salt-lake-lithium-production

DOE’s $100 million award for the Great Salt Lake project: https://lilacsolutions.com/news/us-department-of-energy-selects-lilac-solutions-for-100m-award-for-great-salt-lake-lithium-project

USTDA funding for the Indonesia pilot: https://lilacsolutions.com/news/ustda-funds-pilot-of-u-s-critical-mineral-recovery-technology-in-indonesia