Lithium isn’t like most minerals.
Unlike other battery metals such as nickel, cobalt, and manganese, which are mined from hard-rock ores using drills and explosives, the majority of the world’s lithium resources are found in underground reservoirs of extremely salty water, known as brine. And while hard-rock mining does play a major role in lithium extraction — the majority of the world’s actual production still comes from rocks — brine mining is usually significantly cheaper, and is thus highly attractive wherever it’s geographically feasible.
Reaching that brine and extracting that lithium — so integral to grid-scale energy storage and electric vehicles alike — is typically slow, inefficient, and environmentally taxing. This year, however, could represent a critical juncture for a novel process known as Direct Lithium Extraction, or DLE, which promises to be faster, cleaner, and capable of unlocking lithium across a wider range of geographies.
The traditional method of separating lithium from brine is straightforward but time-consuming. Essentially, the liquid is pumped through a series of vast, vividly colored solar evaporation ponds that gradually concentrate the mineral over the course of more than a year.
It works, but by the time the lithium is extracted, refined, and ready for market, both the demand and the price may have shifted significantly, as evidenced by the dramatic rise and collapse of lithium prices over the past five years. And while evaporation ponds are well-suited to the arid deserts of Chile and Argentina where they’re most common, the geology, brine chemistry, and climate of the U.S. regions with the best reserves are generally not amenable to this approach. Not to mention the ponds require a humongous land footprint, raising questions about land use and ecological degradation.
DLE forgoes these expansive pools, instead pulling lithium-rich brine into a processing unit, where some combination of chemicals, sorbents, or membranes isolate and extricate the lithium before the remaining brine gets injected back underground. This process can produce battery-grade lithium in a matter of hours or days, without the need to transport concentrated brine to separate processing facilities.
This tech has been studied for decades, but aside from a few Chinese producers using it in combination with evaporation ponds, it’s largely remained stuck in the research and development stage. Now, several DLE companies are looking to build their first commercial plants in 2026, aiming to prove that their methods can work at scale, no evaporation ponds needed.
“I do think this is the year where DLE starts getting more and more relevant,” Federico Gay, a principal lithium analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, told me.
Standard Lithium, in partnership with oil and gas major Equinor, aims to break ground this year on its first commercial facility in Arkansas’s lithium-rich Smackover Formation, while the startup Lilac Solution also plans to commence construction on a commercial plant at Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Mining giant Rio Tinto is progressing with plans to build a commercial DLE facility in Argentina, which is already home to one commercial DLE plant — the first outside of China. That facility is run by the French mining company Eramet, which plans to ramp production to full capacity this year.
If “prices are positive” for lithium, Gay said, he expects that the industry will also start to see mergers and acquisitions this year among technology providers and larger corporations such as mining giants or oil and gas majors, as “some of the big players will try locking in or buying technology to potentially produce from the resources they own.” Indeed, ExxonMobil and Occidental Petroleum are already developing DLE projects, while major automakers have invested, too.
But that looming question of lithium prices — and what it means for DLE’s viability — is no small thing. When EV and battery storage demand boomed at the start of the decade, lithium prices climbed roughly 10-fold through 2022 before plunging as producers aggressively ramped output, flooding the market just as EV demand cooled. And while prices have lately started to tick upward again, there’s no telling whether the trend will continue.
“Everyone seems to have settled on a consensus view that $20,000 a tonne is where the market’s really going to be unleashed,” Joe Arencibia, president of the DLE startup Summit Nanotech, told me, referring to the lithium extraction market in all of its forms — hard rock mining, traditional brine, and DLE. “As far as we’re concerned, a market with $14,000, $15,000 a tonne is fine and dandy for us.”
Lilac Solutions, the most prominent startup in the DLE space, expects that its initial Utah project — which will produce a relatively humble 5,000 tonnes of lithium per year — will be profitable even if lithium prices hit last year’s low of $8,300 per tonne. That’s according to the company’s CEO Raef Sully, who also told me that because Utah’s reserves are much lower grade than South America’s, Lilac could produce lithium for a mere $3,000 to $3,500 in Chile if it scaled production to 15,000 or 20,000 tonnes per year.
What sets Lilac apart from other DLE projects is its approach to separating lithium from brine. Most companies are pursuing adsorption-based processes, in which lithium ions bind to an aluminum-based sorbent, which removes them from surrounding impurities. But stripping the lithium from the sorbent generally requires a good deal of freshwater, which is not ideal given that many lithium-rich regions are parched deserts.
Lilac’s tech relies on an ion-exchange process in which small ceramic beads selectively capture lithium ions from the brine in their crystalline structure, swapping them for hydrogen ions. “The crystal structure seems to have a really strong attraction to lithium and nothing else,” Sully told me. Acid then releases the concentrated lithium. When compared with adsorption-based tech, he explained, this method demands far fewer materials and is “much more selective for lithium ions versus other ions,” making the result purer and thus cheaper to process into a battery-grade material.
Because adsorption-based DLE is already operating commercially and ion-exchange isn’t, Lilac has much to prove with its first commercial facility, which is expected to finalize funding and begin construction by the middle of this year.
Sully estimates that Lilac will need to raise around $250 million to build its first commercial facility, which has already been delayed due to the price slump. The company’s former CEO and current CTO Dave Snydacker told me in 2023 that he expected to commence commercial operations by the end of 2024, whereas now the company plans to bring its Utah plant online at the end of 2027 or early 2028.
“Two years ago, with where the market was, nobody was going to look at that investment,” Sully explained, referring to its commercial plant. Investors, he said, were waiting to see what remained after the market bottomed out, which it now seems to have done. Lilac is still standing, and while there haven’t yet been any public announcements regarding project funding, Sully told me he’s confident that the money will come together in time to break ground in mid-2026.
It also doesn’t hurt that lithium prices have been on the rise for a few months, currently hovering around $20,000 per tonne. Gay thinks prices are likely to stabilize somewhere in this range, as stakeholders who have weathered the volatility now have a better understanding of the market.
At that price, hard rock mining would be a feasible option, though still more expensive than traditional evaporation ponds and far above what DLE producers are forecasting. And while some mines operated at a loss or mothballed their operations during the past few years, Gay thinks that even if prices stabilize, hard-rock mines will continue to be the dominant source of lithium for the foreseeable future due to sustained global investment across Africa, Brazil, Australia, and parts of Asia. The price may be steeper, but the infrastructure is also well-established and the economics are well-understood.
“I’m optimistic and bullish about DLE, but probably it won’t have the impact that it was thought about two or three years ago,” Gay told me, as the hype has died down and prices have cooled from their record high of around $80,000 per tonne. By 2040, Benchmark forecasts that DLE will make up 15% to 20% of the lithium market, with evaporation ponds continuing to be a larger contributor for the next decade or so, primarily due to the high upfront costs of DLE projects and the time required for them to reach economies of scale.
On average, Benchmark predicts that this tech will wind up in “the high end of the second quartile” of the cost curve, making DLE projects a lower mid-cost option. “So it’s good — not great, good. But we’ll have some DLE projects in the first quartile as well, so competing with very good evaporation assets,” Gay told me.
Unsurprisingly, the technology companies themselves are more bullish on their approach. Even though Arencibia predicts that evaporation ponds will continue to be about 25% cheaper, he thinks that “the majority of future brine projects will be DLE,” and that DLE will represent 25% or more of the future lithium market.
That forecast comes in large part because Chile — the world’s largest producer of lithium from brine — has stated in its National Lithium Strategy that all new projects should have an “obligatory requirement” to use novel, less ecologically disruptive production methods. Other nations with significant but yet-to-be exploited lithium brine resources, such as Bolivia, could follow suit.
Sully is even more optimistic, predicting that as lithium demand grows from about 1.5 million tonnes per year to around 3.5 million tonnes by 2035, the majority of that growth will come from DLE. “I honestly believe that there will be no more hard rock mines built in Australia or the U.S.,” he said, telling me that in ten years time, half of our lithium supply could “easily” come from DLE.
As a number of major projects break ground this year and the big players start consolidating, we’ll begin to get a sense of whose projections are most realistic. But it won’t be until some of these projects ramp up commercial production in the 2028 to 2030 timeframe that DLE’s market potential will really crystalize.
“If you’re not a very large player at the moment, I think it’s very difficult for you to proceed,” Sully told me, reflecting on how lithium’s price shocks have rocked the industry. Even with lithium prices ticking precariously upwards now, the industry is preparing for at least some level of continued volatility and uncertainty.
“Long term, who knows what [prices are] going to be,” Sully said. “I’ve given up trying to predict.”
Charging half steam ahead. EIA