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The failure of the once-promising sodium-ion manufacturer caused a chill among industry observers. But its problems may have been more its own.

When the promising and well funded sodium-ion battery company Natron Energy announced that it was shutting down operations a few weeks ago, early post-mortems pinned its failure on the challenge of finding a viable market for this alternate battery chemistry. Some went so far as to foreclose on the possibility of manufacturing batteries in the U.S. for the time being.
But that’s not the takeaway for many industry insiders — including some who are skeptical of sodium-ion’s market potential. Adrian Yao, for instance, is the founder of the lithium-ion battery company EnPower and current PhD student in materials science and engineering at Stanford. He authored a paper earlier this year outlining the many unresolved hurdles these batteries must clear to compete with lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, also known as LFP. A cheaper, more efficient variant on the standard lithium-ion chemistry, LFP has started to overtake the dominant lithium-ion chemistry in the electric vehicle sector, and is now the dominant technology for energy storage systems.
But, he told me, “Don’t let this headline conclude that battery manufacturing in the United States will never work, or that sodium-ion itself is uncompetitive. I think both those statements are naive and lack technological nuance.”
Opinions differ on the primary advantages of sodium-ion compared to lithium-ion, but one frequently cited benefit is the potential to build a U.S.-based supply chain. Sodium is cheaper and more abundant than lithium, and China hasn’t yet secured dominance in this emerging market, though it has taken an early lead. Sodium-ion batteries also perform better at lower temperatures, have the potential to be less flammable, and — under the right market conditions — could eventually become more cost-effective than lithium-ion, which is subject to more price volatility because it’s expensive to extract and concentrated in just a few places.
Yao’s paper didn’t examine Natron’s specific technology, which relied on a cathode material known as “Prussian Blue Analogue,” as the material’s chemical structure resembles that of the pigment Prussian Blue. This formula enabled the company’s batteries to discharge large bursts of power extremely quickly while maintaining a long cycle life, making it promising for a niche — but crucial — domestic market: data center backup power.
Natron’s batteries were designed to bridge the brief gap between a power outage and a generator coming online. Today, that role is often served by lead-acid batteries, which are cheap but bulky, with a lower energy density and shorter cycle life than sodium-ion. Thus, Yao saw this market — though far smaller than that of grid-scale energy storage — as a “technologically pragmatic” opportunity for the company.
“It’s almost like a supercapacitor, not a battery,” one executive in the sodium-ion battery space who wished to remain anonymous told me of Natron’s battery. Supercapacitors are energy storage devices that — like Natron’s tech — can release large amounts of power practically immediately, but store far less total energy than batteries.
“The thing that has been disappointing about the whole story is that people talk about Natron and their products and their journey as if it’s relevant at all to the sodium-ion grid scale storage space,” the executive told me. The grid-scale market, they said, is where most companies are looking to deploy sodium-ion batteries today. “What happened to Natron, I think, is very specific to Natron.”
But what exactly did happen to the once-promising startup, which raised over $363 million in private investment from big name backers such as Khosla Ventures and Prelude Ventures? What we know for sure is that it ran out of money, canceling plans to build a $1.4 billion battery manufacturing facility in North Carolina. The company was waiting on certification from an independent safety body, which would have unleashed $25 million in booked orders, but was forced to fold before that approval came through.
Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Natron’s founder, Colin Wessells, stepped down as CEO last December and left the company altogether in June.
“I got bored,” Wessels told The Information of his initial decision to relinquish the CEO role. “I found as I was spending all my time on fundraising and stockholder and board management that it wasn’t all that much fun.”
It’s also worth noting, however, that according to publicly available data, the investor makeup of Natron appears to have changed significantly between the company’s $35 million funding round in 2020 and its subsequent $58 million raise in 2021, which could indicate qualms among early backers about the direction of the company going back years. That said, not all information about who invested and when is publicly known. I reached out to both Wessels and Natron’s PR team for comment but did not receive a reply.
The company submitted a WARN notice — a requirement from employers prior to mass layoffs or plant closures — to the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity on August 28. It explained that while Natron had explored various funding avenues including follow-on investment from existing shareholders, a Series B equity round, and debt financing, none of these materialized, leaving the company unable “to cover the required additional working capital and operational expenses of the business.”
Yao told me that the startup could have simply been a victim of bad timing. “While in some ways I think the AI boom was perfect timing for Natron, I also think it might have been a couple years too early — not because it’s not needed, but because of bandwidth,” he explained. “My guess is that the biggest thing on hyperscalers’ minds are currently still just getting connected to the grid, keeping up with continuous improvements to power efficiency, and how to actually operate in an energy efficient manner.” Perhaps in this environment, hyperscalers simply viewed deploying new battery tech for a niche application as too risky, Yao hypothesized, though he doesn’t have personal knowledge of the company’s partnerships or commercial activity.
The sodium-ion executive also thought timing might have been part of the problem. “He had a good team, and the circumstances were just really tough because he was so early,” they said. Wessells founded Natron in 2012, based on his PhD research at Stanford. “Maybe they were too early, and five years from now would have been a better fit,” the executive said. “But, you know, who’s to say?”
The executive also considers it telling that Natron only had $25 million in contracts, calling this “a drop in the bucket” relative to the potential they see for sodium-ion technology in the grid-scale market. While Natron wasn’t chasing the big bucks associated with this larger market opportunity, other domestic sodium-based battery companies such as Inlyte Energy and Peak Energy are looking to deploy grid-scale systems, as are Chinese battery companies such as BYD and HiNa Battery.
But it’s certainly true that manufacturing this tech in the U.S. won’t be easy. While Chinese companies benefit from state support that can prop up the emergent sodium-ion storage industry whether it’s cost-competitive or not, sodium-ion storage companies in the U.S. will need to go head-to-head with LFP batteries on price if they want to gain significant market share. And while a few years ago experts were predicting a lithium shortage, these days, the price of lithium is about 90% off its record high, making it a struggle for sodium-ion systems to match the cost of lithium-ion.
Sodium-ion chemistry still offers certain advantages that could make it a good option in particular geographies, however. It performs better in low-temperature conditions, where lithium-ion suffers notable performance degradation. And — at least in Natron’s case — it offers superior thermal stability, meaning it’s less likely to catch fire.
Some even argue that sodium-ion can still be a cost-effective option once manufacturing ramps up due to the ubiquity of sodium, plus additional savings throughout the batteries’ useful life. Peak Energy, for example, expects its battery systems to be more expensive upfront but cheaper over their entire lifetime, having designed a passive cooling system that eliminates the need for traditional temperature control components such as pumps and fans.
Ultimately, though, Yao thinks U.S. companies should be considering sodium-ion as a “low-temperature, high-power counterpart” — not a replacement — for LFP batteries. That’s how the Chinese battery giants are approaching it, he said, whereas he thinks the U.S. market remains fixated on framing the two technologies as competitors.
“I think the safe assumption is that China will come to dominate sodium-ion battery production,” Yao told me. “They already are far ahead of us.” But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to build out a domestic supply chain — or at least that it’s not worth trying. “We need to execute with technologically pragmatic solutions and target beachhead markets capable of tolerating cost premiums before we can play in the big leagues of EVs or [battery energy storage systems],” he said.
And that, he affirmed, is exactly what Natron was trying to do. RIP.
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In practice, direct lithium extraction doesn’t quite make sense, but 2026 could its critical year.
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 metric tons of lithium per year — will be profitable even if lithium prices hit last year’s low of $8,300 per metric ton. 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 metric tons 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 metric tons per year to around 3.5 million metric tons 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.”
A chat with CleanCapital founder Jon Powers.
This week’s conversation is with Jon Powers, founder of the investment firm CleanCapital. I reached out to Powers because I wanted to get a better understanding of how renewable energy investments were shifting one year into the Trump administration. What followed was a candid, detailed look inside the thinking of how the big money in cleantech actually views Trump’s war on renewable energy permitting.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Alright, so let’s start off with a big question: How do investors in clean energy view Trump’s permitting freeze?
So, let’s take a step back. Look at the trend over the last decade. The industry’s boomed, manufacturing jobs are happening, the labor force has grown, investments are coming.
We [Clean Capital] are backed by infrastructure life insurance money. It’s money that wasn’t in this market 10 years ago. It’s there because these are long-term infrastructure assets. They see the opportunity. What are they looking for? Certainty. If somebody takes your life insurance money, and they invest it, they want to know it’s going to be there in 20 years in case they need to pay it out. These are really great assets – they’re paying for electricity, the panels hold up, etcetera.
With investors, the more you can manage that risk, the more capital there is out there and the better cost of capital there is for the project. If I was taking high cost private equity money to fund a project, you have to pay for the equipment and the cost of the financing. The more you can bring down the cost of financing – which has happened over the last decade – the cheaper the power can be on the back-end. You can use cheaper money to build.
Once you get that type of capital, you need certainty. That certainty had developed. The election of President Trump threw that into a little bit of disarray. We’re seeing that being implemented today, and they’re doing everything they can to throw wrenches into the growth of what we’ve been doing. They passed the bill affecting the tax credits, and the work they’re doing on permitting to slow roll projects, all of that uncertainty is damaging the projects and more importantly costs everyone down the road by raising the cost of electricity, in turn making projects more expensive in the first place. It’s not a nice recipe for people buying electricity.
But in September, I went to the RE+ conference in California – I thought that was going to be a funeral march but it wasn’t. People were saying, Now we have to shift and adjust. This is a huge industry. How do we get those adjustments and move forward?
Investors looked at it the same way. Yes, how will things like permitting affect the timeline of getting to build? But the fundamentals of supply and demand haven’t changed and in fact are working more in favor of us than before, so we’re figuring out where to invest on that potential. Also, yes federal is key, but state permitting is crucial. When you’re talking about distributed generation going out of a facility next to a data center, or a Wal-Mart, or an Amazon warehouse, that demand very much still exists and projects are being built in that middle market today.
What you’re seeing is a recalibration of risk among investors to understand where we put our money today. And we’re seeing some international money pulling back, and it all comes back to that concept of certainty.
To what extent does the international money moving out of the U.S. have to do with what Trump has done to offshore wind? Is that trade policy? Help us understand why that is happening.
I think it’s not trade policy, per se. Maybe that’s happening on the technology side. But what I’m talking about is money going into infrastructure and assets – for a couple of years, we were one of the hottest places to invest.
Think about a European pension fund who is taking money from a country in Europe and wanting to invest it somewhere they’ll get their money back. That type of capital has definitely been re-evaluating where they’ll put their money, and parallel, some of the larger utility players are starting to re-evaluate or even back out of projects because they’re concerned about questions around large-scale utility solar development, specifically.
Taking a step back to something else you said about federal permitting not being as crucial as state permitting–
That’s about the size of the project. Huge utility projects may still need federal approvals for transmission.
Okay. But when it comes to the trendline on community relations and social conflict, are we seeing renewable energy permitting risk increase in the U.S.? Decrease? Stay the same?
That has less to do with the administration but more of a well-structured fossil fuel campaign. Anti-climate, very dark money. I am not an expert on where the money comes from, but folks have tried to map that out. Now you’re even seeing local communities pass stuff like no energy storage [ordinances].
What’s interesting is that in those communities, we as an industry are not really present providing facts to counter this. That’s very frustrating for folks. We’re seeing these pass and honestly asking, Who was there?
Is the federal permitting freeze impacting investment too?
Definitely.
It’s not like you put money into a project all at once, right? It happens in these chunks. Let’s say there’s 10 steps for investing in a project. A little bit of money at step one, more money at step two, and it gradually gets more until you build the project. The middle area – permitting, getting approval from utilities – is really critical to the investments. So you’re seeing a little bit of a pause in when and how we make investments, because we sometimes don’t know if we’ll make it to, say, step six.
I actually think we’ll see the most impact from this in data center costs.
Can you explain that a bit more for me?
Look at northern Virginia for a second. There wasn’t a lot of new electricity added to that market but you all of the sudden upped demand for electricity by 20 percent. We’re literally seeing today all these utilities putting in rate hikes for consumers because it is literally a supply-demand question. If you can’t build new supply, it's going to be consumers paying for it, and even if you could build a new natural gas plant – at minimum that will happen four-to-six years from now. So over the next four years, we’ll see costs go up.
We’re building projects today that we invested in two years ago. That policy landscape we invested in two years ago hasn’t changed from what we invested into. But the policy landscape then changed dramatically.
If you wipe out half of what was coming in, there’s nothing backfilling that.
Plus more on the week’s biggest renewables fights.
Shelby County, Indiana – A large data center was rejected late Wednesday southeast of Indianapolis, as the takedown of a major Google campus last year continues to reverberate in the area.
Dane County, Wisconsin – Heading northwest, the QTS data center in DeForest we’ve been tracking is broiling into a major conflict, after activists uncovered controversial emails between the village’s president and the company.
White Pine County, Nevada – The Trump administration is finally moving a little bit of renewable energy infrastructure through the permitting process. Or at least, that’s what it looks like.
Mineral County, Nevada – Meanwhile, the BLM actually did approve a solar project on federal lands while we were gone: the Libra energy facility in southwest Nevada.
Hancock County, Ohio – Ohio’s legal system appears friendly for solar development right now, as another utility-scale project’s permits were upheld by the state Supreme Court.