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A company that is at the center of lithium extraction and refining. And we all know what Elon said about lithium refining. It's like a license to print money. Well, Ting, we've talked many times before. It's nice to finally meet you in person. Likewise. And thank you for letting us use your office. It's completely crafted here. Yeah, and I just want to start off by looking at this map. These pens aren't decorative, are they? No, no. Those are places you've been? Yeah, those are places I've been. No, okay. I've been around here. I've been around there. I've been a little bit in Europe, but I mean, you've been to South America. You've been to Africa. You've been to all continents? I've been to all seven continents. Holy crap. Yeah. And in Antarctica, I think that was like three or four years ago. We took a ship across the Drake Passage. And man, that was a wild, wild cruise. There were 20 foot waves hitting our boat. And you'd be sitting in the cruise, it's not like one of these mega cruise ships. But there were probably 250 passengers, 80 crew. And you'd be sitting in the dining hall and you'd hit a wave. And the seats, the chairs, are chained to the floor. But all of the silverware and drinks would go fly off the table. And then everybody would scurry out and pick stuff up and you'd have to refill your plate. It was a pretty wild experience. And I mean, so I think that a lot of people have, again, maybe they've been to North America or they live in North America and maybe they've been to Europe. But I mean, even Africa, Southeast Asia, China, and a lot of South America. And that's, I guess, kind of where this story begins, is in South America. It is. That's the origin story. I think it's pretty cool that the aha moment came from a trick from my travels. Seeing the world, there's so much out there that people don't know about. Being able to travel really opens your eyes to what else is out there, opportunities that are out there. And yeah, it was pretty well documented. My trip to Bolivia is where I came across the first salt flat that led to energy acts as it is today. And so, I mean, you're down here in Bolivia. And I mean, the crazy thing is you can see these salt flats from space. And not like you can see the wall of China from space. Like you can look at a satellite image of all of South America and you'll see this big white dot stuck right here. That's what you, I mean, talk to me about that. Did you just kind of like emerge from the undergrowth with a machete in your teeth and you see the salt flats? Yeah, pretty much. I had like an American bandana around my head and my walking stick. And the salt flat is 4,000 square miles. I mean, that's like, I don't really know how to compare that to... Think of it in some states. Yeah, maybe. I think we're on the order of Rhode Island, if not a little bigger. Yeah. Damn. And so when you get there, I mean, it's literally just as far as the eye can see just flat white. And there are salt flats that look brown because of dust that is, you know, blown around. And there's salt flats that have like bigger salt chunks that are prohibitive to drive over. Like they almost look like rocks, kind of like big salt crystals. But in Bolivia, it's just flat white. I don't think that it's one of the seven wonders in the natural world, but like I think it should be. Yeah. Yeah. And so you see this giant solar and where in your, I mean, do you have to kind of consult with someone and say, you know, what the heck is this or, I mean, you must have been expecting to see it. It's on the map. Originally, this trip to South America was over New Year's 2018. And I went down to Uruguay, put into Del Estee with, you know, a bunch of friends. And after that, a smaller subset of us, I think like six or seven of us went to Chile. It was my first time to Uruguay. Mm-hmm. We went to Chile. It was my first time in Chile. I went to the vineyards. You know, they have great wine and Chile and went to the coast and we were in Santiago. And then everybody had to leave except me and one friend. We're like, you know, let's go to a few more places, right? Okay. You know, like I wanted to go hike Machu Picchu like I'd never been to Peru. And we're, we're Googling like what are the coolest places to go in South America. And some of the things that pop up are Patagonia, you know, like Torres del Payne. The Guizu Falls is probably the nicest or coolest waterfall in South America. I think that's in the middle of Brazil. I've been on a cruise to Brazil, but like seeing Christ the Redeemer, which is one of the wonders of the world, I've been, I've been there, so I've been in Brazil. But Bolivia, this, this salar kept coming up on, you know, like top 10, like treasures or sightseeing things to do. And I was like, let's go do that. Because I mean, I just want to, I've, I feel like I've traveled a lot, you know, and I look at this map and I go, oh, but I mean, what has, I mean, you're an adventurous guy. I mean, you have a lot of countries in Africa here. You have a lot of South America and a lot of, I mean, you just have everywhere. What has kind of driven you to do all this travel and traveling is, traveling is an addictive bug. And once you start traveling. But I mean, some people, they say that they travel and they're like, yeah, I travel. I go to Cancun or I travel, you know, I go to Disney World. But I mean, you're like, you're real adventurous kind of traveling because, I mean, to get to the salar in Bolivia, I mean, tell me about that trip. What did you have to do? I mean, it's off the beaten path a little bit, but you know, it's, you know, you just take it, you get down to 737 and then you land and it's outside the airport or what was it like? Yeah. I mean, the salar, uni is a little bit harder to get to. So we were in Santiago and from there, we actually had, we flew to Santa Cruz, which is like the capital, but most of the politicians sit in La Paz. But we went to Santa Cruz, you know, we're just trying to like go see these places, like in South America and we spent two days in Santa Cruz. I was fun. And then we're like, let's go to the soft lad in the union. We had to fly through La Paz, which is actually the highest elevation international airport in the world. Me. I don't know. I think it's like something like 14,000 feet of elevation, but it's hard for big airplanes to get up. Anyway, if fly through there, we had a very short layover and we kind of had to like run. Therefore, it's not too big. But kind of had to like hustle to get to our connecting flight and then it's only an hour down to the salt flat to uni. And I was with my buddy and he was like a pretty in shaped guy, kind of like a cross thick. Oh, you're running, but you're also at 14,000 feet. Yeah. This is like. So we're on the flight to uni and he had to ask for oxygen, which I thought was pretty funny. Well, what kind of plane were you in on the way? It was a 737. Oh, okay. Yeah. It was a little bit of a track, but completely worth it. But then how, I mean, did you have to take a bus and a train and stuff to get to the how far? I have an airport. It's a very small report. Oh, really? The landing strip, the terminal is like the size of this office maybe, maybe a little bit bigger. Yeah. It's right next to the town in uni. I don't know the population, but I think it might be something like 20,000 or so. Okay. Right. There are indigenous villages surrounding, but it's become an attractive tourist destination. Mm-hmm. I wouldn't say like super popular. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But like, there's a, there's a salt hotel for the hotel is called Palacio del Sol. Okay. Ah, Palace of Salt. Yeah. The hotel is like made out of salt bricks. So in the rooms, there's these domes above you and the domes are made of salt bricks. The columns are made of salt brick. Cool. It's a pretty, it's a pretty sweet experience. Neat. You're in this beautiful natural environment. You've just stayed in a salt hotel or at least you visited it. And then what makes you think like, oh, you know what I'm really want to do is start a business taking some of this stuff and making batteries out of it. When I went to that salt flat, I didn't even know that lithium was a salt. I didn't know that lithium, that this was a lithium mine, essentially, for all intents at Perc. I didn't know that. Okay. I literally learned that from our tour guide who was telling us about the history of the salt flat. Okay. I said, yeah, this is the world's biggest lithium reserve. And I was like, wait, what do you mean? Like that's lithium's important. Like you have a Tesla. Like lithium. Hell, and that's when your ears perk. Yeah. I mean, this was 2018 before Tesla had its meteoric rise. Yeah. I don't know. I bought my Tesla in 2013. But in 2018, they started selling some model th- Yep. Yeah. Yeah. That's why my mom was right around then. Yeah. But I mean, it was still nobody thought that it was going anywhere. Yeah. Elon was sitting there with his cardboard box, said bank whooped on it. Like it was really like, they're all the short sellers. Like he said, they couldn't have died. Could have died maybe. Yeah. You know, I didn't know. And electric vehicles don't, you know, nobody else transitions. So, okay. So you're on this trip. You see the lithium. You hear about lithium being in these salts. And then you go, okay, so I drive a Tesla. I know about lithium lithium. You think lithium's going to be big, and then you start a company around it. Exactly. And what even further kind of transpired it was the fact that while this is the biggest lithium reserve in the world, Bolivia wasn't producing any lithium from it. Really, they were just bringing tourists to look at it and saying they were hoping to find you. I guess. Exactly. They were saying, man, if only. Ironically, they're still not producing it. Right. You know, due to some technical challenges, but a lot of geopolitical challenges within that country. Yeah. Yeah. There are other salt flats, even in the same area. I mean, it's called the lithium triangle because you have Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. And so there are some that are in Chile. And I mean, and that's kind of, I heard that you have a resource that you're acquiring or you're working with in Chile to acquire it. You've acquired it? Acquired. What does that mean? Does that mean that you bought it? It does. I feel like you have the deed and everything. Yeah. That's cool. We have what's its mining rights. Okay. So we acquired 90,000 acres of mining rights in a salar in Chile. And so why Chile? I mean, so I mean, with the inflation reduction act, I mean, don't we need North American lithium in order to qualify it as a battery mineral that qualifies for tax rebates and stuff like that? Yeah. So why Chile, right? I mean, it couldn't be Bolivia. Right? Bolivia owns all of their resources. Okay. So that pretty much leaves Chile and Argentina. Argentina has good salars, but Chile has the most production from brine to date. Okay. The big two existing countries or companies, Albemarle and SQM operate out of there. What even bodes further is that Chile is a free trade partner of the US. So because it's a free trade partner, it falls within the IRA. Oh, okay. So the inflation reduction act is anything that's produced domestically here in the United States or anything that's produced with a free trade partner. I see. So. That's pretty important. Yeah. So it falls within the IRA and that's super important for us because it's also important for our customers. Yeah, because if I'm Tesla, if I'm GM, if I'm BMW, if I'm any car company and I want to sell an EV and I want to get that full $7,500 tax credit, I need to be getting these battery materials, these battery minerals from places that fall within these. Exactly. Boom. Stamped. So you have a resource that you've acquired in Chile, which has the free trade agreement. IRA compliant, baby. So then, okay. So you're saying that there's these other places that are already producing lithium. How do they do that if they're not using your technology? You're doing it the old way, which is these huge evaporation ponds. And lithium actually used to be just a by-product of other salts that they would produce for other purposes because before electric vehicles, we would just be giving lithium to housewives or something like that? Yeah. Sprinkly on your stick with salt, right? Before electric vehicles, lithium didn't really have that much application for other things. To put this in perspective, the second biggest use of lithium is consumer electronics, right? iPhones, computers, but iPhones, right? And you may be thinking, well, there are tons of iPhones that are made. Last year, there were 230 million iPhones that Apple made. Guess how much lithium was needed to make 230 million iPhones? I don't know, like a million tons. The answer is 23,000 tons, which is not that much in the overall scheme of things. Today, the total lithium demand is about six or 700,000 tons. And by 2030, it's 3 and 1/2 million tons, and in 2040, it's nearing 6 million tons. And iPhones are 23,000 tons. And that kind of makes sense, because an iPhone is this big and only less than half of it's a battery, whereas you look at a Tesla or any other EV. 10,000 iPhones for one quad batteries. So you can start to see-- So 10,000 times more lithium for a car than for a phone. So you can start to see how lithium wasn't important before this huge use case of lithium. And therefore, the manufacturing methods never needed to be developed to produce large volumes. Oh, OK. Right. So the way lithium used to be produced, and it's still essentially produced today, there's two main sources. There's hard rock and then there's brine. But in brine's case, it's in these large evaporation ponds where they pump up brine from subsurface, and it goes into this pond system, these massive ponds that are 100 football fields for one pond. And is that producing all the lithium on Earth right now? I mean, for how big that? About half. In one pond? The pond systems from all the ponds systems. The pond systems in Chile are 15 square miles for one pond system. That's bigger than New York City. Wow. People are comparing it on the map. But the main product that used to come out of that was Potash, or Potassium Chloride, which is used as fertilizer. OK. You need hundreds of thousands of tons, or millions and millions of tons globally, for this fertilizer to grow food to eat, right? So it's a much bigger use case. And then at the very end, lithium would come out and then, you know, OK, cool. We can sell that to the iPhone people. Yeah. They only need a little bit. A little bit. iPhones, it's used a little bit of pharmaceutical, but you're talking about thousands of tons or something. But now it's all of a sudden millions of tons. So I mean, these evaporation ponds, I mean, what's the technology there? You get the sun, which has been here before humanity existed. And then you have shovels and a pump. I mean, is that all the technology that goes into it? There is no technology, right? OK. There's thought process behind how quickly you need to move brine from one pond to another, like the residency time. So there's-- There's some intelligence behind it. Yeah, there's intelligence behind it. But there's no technology. There's no 21st century technology. This is stuff that the Incas could have been using thousands of years ago. And that's like probably what they did to get their salt for their, you know-- Yeah, right. --put it on their stake or potentials. Yeah. Today, we have access to so much technology in the mining and chemical world, but it's just never been applied to lithium because lithium has ever been important, right? So what we've done is we've looked at these technologies that are being applied for separations of other things that we use in our daily lives and apply that to lithium. And you can kind of boil it down to three main categories. The first is membranes. Our society uses membranes for literally everything. Every single person watching this has a membrane underneath their sink that purifies their water and takes out some of the salts that are in water and tap water, right? Membranes are used to turn ocean water into fresh drinking water. Ocean water has about three and a half percent salinity. These brines we deal with have 30% salinity. So a little bit different, but the same premise of the membranes are removing salt in ocean water to turn it into fresh drinking water. You use membranes to separate things. Membranes are used in food and beverage. Membranes are used in agriculture. Membranes are used in wine. Membranes are used in so many different things. And what we've done is designed membranes that selectively separate lithium salts out of these salt brines. And so what you're saying is you're not really reinventing the wheel. You're just kind of making a wheel that's really good for a particular application. Exactly. So that's the first technology vertical. The second is solvent extraction. This is a little bit harder to connect the dots for people that aren't familiar with, say like the mining world, but the majority of copper that's produced in copper is using literally everything, wiring, I mean, the total global copper production per year is somewhere between 20 and 30 million tons of copper. And I just read somewhere that that's going to 50 million tons of copper per year is produced using a method called solvent extraction, which is a liquid-liquid exchange where you have a molecule that will grab something else in the process. And solvent extraction was developed almost half a decade ago, somewhere between 30 and 50 years ago. And like I said, it's used for more than half of the world's copper production and essentially all the other major metals, uranium, vanadium, cobalt, nickel. And that's kind of crazy because when you think about, or at least when I think about mining, when I think about copper, I'm kind of expecting some guy with a pickaxe and he hits it and then he goes like, "Oh, this is copper." And it's like, "No, that's not--" Well, that is the first step where they, you know, pick or mine are obviously huge industrial equipment. They have a big rock and they have to heap leach it and they put it through, it's like a pyro kind of system, but then solvent extraction happens. Yeah. Right. So many people think that it's going to be like smelting, you know, something that we've like seen in a video game or, you know, when we watched, you know, a history channel show about the copper age, you know, they weren't doing solvent extraction in, you know, the year 1000 BCE. So we've taken solvent extraction and designed specific solvent reagents to selectively attract lithium or selectively separate lithium out of these brines. And that is a really important part of our DLE or direct lithium extraction portfolio. The third is adsorption technology, a little bit easier to understand where this is a solid liquid exchange. So you have these like beads and we'll show you some of these beads or kind of like, yeah, you can think about them as little beads, like really little beads, like 10th or 100th the size of dip and dots, okay. And you pack them into a big column or we're working on different types of systems that they would operate in. And then as the lithium brine passes through this, the bead will absorb just the lithium if it makes surface contact and all the rest of the dissolved elements will pass through. And then now you have these saturated beads in a column or some sort of structure and then you need to release it to do the next one and you'll run water through it to release it and now you essentially have a purified stream of lithium now with water. And then it becomes easier to concentrate it up and crystallize it out. So those are the three types of technologies that we've developed. And what we've found actually is that when you start combining them, it creates efficiencies to get even higher recovery rates at lower cost. Which are the two goals? So okay, we're pumping some stuff out of the ground and it's water but it's not water that you typically think of. It's brine. It can taste salt if you want. I do want to taste something. Yeah, it's salty. I will. I'm going to try. Oh yeah. Alright, that sounds fun. So okay, so you have some very, very, very salty water. And normally when we think of salty water, we're thinking of table salt because that's what I add to my pasta, that's what I add to my dishes. But table salt is sodium chloride. We don't want sodium chloride. We want lithium chloride. Right. Okay, so is it all lithium chloride in this water or is it? No, it's a lot of sodium chloride and it's a lot of magnesium chloride and a lot of calcium and a little bit of lithium. So wait, so there's calcium chloride, so there's table salt, there's rock salt, there's another kind of salt that we've hardly ever used and then lithium salt. So that's a really hard step. So we need to, so we take this water out of the ground, it's really salty and it's full of all this and we don't want most of it. We just want the lithium salt. So how do you begin this process by like, you know, taking a whole bunch of garbage-y unpurified water and turning it into like, what's the first step? If you were thinking about how much lithium is in this, right, this is half a liter, right? But let's just say, let's just say it's one liter and the way that we think about this is you divide it into a million parts, those are called PPMs, parts per million and you basically judge it on a per liter basis. Salt would make up 30% of that. So this 50 is basically pouring this much salt, but the salt dissolves, right? Yeah, so it doesn't look like there's a huge block of salt in it. Right, it doesn't look clear, but it's like, it's just cloudy water. Yeah, very cloudy water, right? And then of that, that's 300 parts per million, 300,000 parts per million, right? Yeah, is salt. Basically you're going to have about 100,000 sodium, which is NA, right? And then there's a bunch of chloride, which is 150,000, and then there's magnesium, sulfate, calcium, which are all salts. And then lithium, a great lithium percentage is somewhere between 400 parts per million to, I mean, 1,000 is incredible. The best in the world in Chile is 1,500, right? Okay. So the lithium is that much, right? Would you say it's like a capful, like one of those capfuls, or is it even less? Less, maybe a half capful. Real? So that's good. That's the best. That's the best. That's the kind you're looking for. You got this much. This is the kind that you're, you're, you're a billionaire. Oh my God. So the problem is how to get it out, right? And the first step, it depends on the composition, right? So it depends on A, how much lithium? If it's 200 parts per million or 1,000, that can actually change which technology you use first. Interesting. What are the other dissolved salts that are in there out of the 300,000? If there's a lot of magnesium or calcium, those are divalent salts. So they have two charges. It's MG2 plus versus like sodium is Na plus, it only has one charge, right? So depending on the impurities and the ratio of those impurities to lithium, that can change what technology you use and what spot. Okay. But generally speaking, generally speaking, you'll first put it into adsorption. I don't know if you're going to say coffee filter. Yeah. Couldn't, what about a coffee filter? Like what if I was like real low tech, want to do this in my backyard and I'd take this brine out of the ground, you know, because I live in Chile or something. Sometimes the best ideas are generated from interviews on now, you know. So okay. I take it and I pour it through a coffee filter. What's going to happen? We ought to test that. But I mean, you know what's going to happen because otherwise you wouldn't have spent all this time and energy and money to build your technologies. It's going to flow right through. It is going to flow right through. But you actually bring up a really good point in that before any of this brine goes through our systems, we need to remove larger suspended solids. Okay. Stuff that's not dissolved, dirt, dirt, little little pebbles or crumbs or rocks or whatever it is. Okay. So coffee filters not such an idea. Yeah. And that's called pre-filtration. Okay. And you pre-filter it through their sizes of all these pores. Coffee filters might be a little bit too big. I think almost everything would flow through that except for like maybe big rocks, right? But we flow through like micro-filtration and that gets rid of the like stuff that would mess up our systems. Okay. Right. So that is just like off the shelf. Like that's just super standard. You don't have to invent. You don't have to reinvent the wheel there. Yeah. Somebody's all over there. Yeah. I've got like all oil and gas runs through a pre-filtration and it's like that. Okay. So then you said absorption. Yup. Okay. So absorption is where you start removing. So is it absorption or is it adsorption? Is there a difference? I feel like I learned this in chemistry class and I wasn't. There is a difference. We are using adsorption. With the D. Not the B. Not the B. Not the B. Not the B. Not the B. But ironically I think that yeah, the material are called absorbance. I guess that's cool. Yeah. There's a B in adsorption. Yeah. Still. It's not two Bs. Okay. Is everyone confused yet? Yeah. Okay. Good. Yeah. So first it's run through adsorption. Yup. So it goes the bulk of the pesky impurities. It doesn't get it anywhere near a point where you can crystallize the lithium out because you need to get to 99.9% lithium. And I'll show you. Actually I have some right here. Okay. This is 99.9% lithium. Lithium salt? Yeah. Lithium salt. Okay. And that's why it looks like salt. Yeah. And the forms are lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide. They both come in salt form. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean it looks like salt, right? Right. So you need to get this to 99% lithium salt. And what do you mean by that? Like in the solution. So there can be any other salts. There can't be any other salt, but those salts will crystallize too. Okay. And then you'll have a 98.5 or whatever it is. And you won't get it pure. And then when I go back to my battery, yeah, that can't go into the cathode. I see. Okay. So adsorption's the first step. Yeah. And so you're just getting it a little bit closer is what you're saying? I'm getting it a lot closer. Oh, okay. Good. You're getting it a lot closer. But nowhere near perfect yet. Okay. Right. So then after you've removed, so there's two things that you need to do in this process. You need to remove the impurities and you need to concentrate the lithium up in the solution. Okay. So if this were your leader and you still only had, you had no impurities, but you only had 300 or 400 parts per million, which is 0.04% lithium, it would be really hard to crystallize it out in the volumes that you need. Okay. So you need to both remove the impurities and concentrate the lithium up. You try to get it up to four or five, six percent, which is still not much, but it's a lot more than 0.03%. Yes. Okay. So we've removed all the impurities, but we haven't increased the concentration of the lithium yet. So how do we do that? So that happens in the next step. Do you just boil it? So that is actually what people are doing today or a kind of thought process for direct lithium extraction, it's called forced thermal evaporation. Right. You basically are applying heat to boil the water away, right? I'm making like a dirty glass out of lithium salt. That's very expensive to do. A lot of power costs and the volume at which you need to do it is somewhat prohibitive. Okay. Because I'm thinking like, if I did this in my kitchen, I'd have this, you know, maybe 300 parts per million, big, you know, big pot full of water and I'd get like a little crust at the bottom of the lithium salt and I'd go, "Great." But what I'm not thinking about is all the energy I've just wasted, because I would have had to boil that pot of water for like six hours and I would have been using, and just a little pot, you know, it's not that much energy to evaporate all that water, but you scale it up and all of a sudden it's the time. We're trying to make hundreds of thousands of tons of your time. You don't want to be just boiling a boiling water company because you wouldn't make any money. The energy costs would literally be higher than what you'd get out of it. Right. Okay. So then we need to do something else. Teak, what do we do? So next, we put it into solvent extraction and solvent extraction both removes the rest of the impurities to very low levels of impurities and it concentrates the concentration up to that four or five, six percent. I mean, we can go all the way up to saturation. So solvent extraction is a really important technology in the tech stack of how we do this. Okay. And so how does that work? You'll see it today, but you basically are feeding the product of the absorption into the second unit operation and you're putting this liquid solution that now is devoid of lots of the original impurities into what's called a mixer. And it mixes the solution with the selective reagent, the molecule that we've made that just grabs lithium, right? Okay. So now once the molecule touches the lithium, it grabs it. And from the mixer, so you know how oil and gas are impermeable, they don't mix. So if you have oil and gas in this water bottle or like oil and vinegar, the water will sink to the bottom or whichever is more dense sink to the bottom and they'll be what's called phase separation, right? So before you shake, you know, you take the salad dressing out of the refrigerator and it's separated and you go, ah, and you have to shake it. Exactly. Okay. Exactly. Yeah. What we want to do is mix it and there is a point where they just barely touch. Mixing that is called making an emulsion. This is a lot of cooking terms here. Yeah. It's basically like cooking. It's like a mayonnaise or a... I mean, this is, this is like breaking bad. Yeah. You know, like we have a bunch of chemists here and we can basically make whatever we want. I see. So you're making this emulsion kind of like when you shake the salad dressing only unlike when you make the salad dressing as opposed to now putting it on your salad. All of the... So basically you're saying one side of the salad dressing is kind of the product of the adsorption and then the other side is your reagent and then you've made all of these points where they touch because if you've ever seen an emulsion like under a microscope or something, it's like a whole bunch of globules and so you've created a ton of surface area. So our reagent is attracted to just the lithium that's in the brine. Okay. So it grabs that and then it goes into what's called a settler, pours over and this is a continuous process. And now it's in a settler where it starts settling out again. Oh, so it goes, you're basically leaving it in the fridge. And so you're able to take the part that used to not have the lithium, it now has the lithium. Right. And that's how you separate the two. Exactly. So now the part that has the lithium no longer has the lithium because it's been in the mixer touched our re-elective reagent, boom, over into the settler, settles out and then the way it works is creates that, it's called phase separation. And the now devoid brine or the lithium depleted brine exits out into one drain or channel. And the containing lithium organic goes into another. So now the problem is, okay, how do we strip the lithium from the organic because we need to reuse that organic? And so during this whole process, you've just increased the concentration because you can flow more adsorption product through than you do your reagent. So that is concentrating the lithium in a smaller volume. Right. And it's purifying it. So wow. Okay. So now you need to strip the lithium from the organic, right? And the way that you do that is you add HCl hydrochloric acid or sulfuric acid. Okay. That costs money or it could be generated actually is actually generated in a further step of our process. So you add, let's call it HCl, which is a hydrogen and a chloride, right? And the reagent molecule that we have actually wants that hydrogen. So it grabs the hydrogen and let's go of the lithium, which then attaches to the Cl. And now you have lithium salt. So now you have LyCl, which is lithium chloride, right? And the reagent now has the hydrogen and that recirculates back into the first step. And we'll go grab another lithium and release its hydrogen. Why does the... It's an exchange. Why does the reagent want to suddenly give up this hydrogen if it likes it so much? Because it wants the lithium more in the first step. But then why did it give up the lithium in the second step? It's based on the pH. Okay. So we have to control the pH. And in a certain pH, people probably think about pH when it comes to water, right? Whether it's more acidic is a lower pH. And then seven is alkaline and then above seven up to I think like 14 is alkaline. So you can add what's called a base or a caustic into your solution to control the pH. And that is what allows the reagent to either grab something or let something go depending on what molecule it is. It shows you how chemistry doesn't want to let go of this lithium. It really like you're fighting entropy here so much you're taking this lithium like going from 300 parts per million up to basically a million. It's like $60,000. 60,000 parts per million. Wow. I mean that's insane and all of the all of these chemical steps that go into it, this is why lithium is hard, hard to do. All right. Well I'm glad that you told me all your secrets because now I mean what's stopping me from going out there, changing some pH's of stuff and making some adsorption materials and making my own energy X competitor company. Well a few things. Okay. You know I think that when we started the company we put a big emphasis on IP, our intellectual property. Okay. That's not to say that a lot of other people aren't trying to do what we're doing. There's certainly a competitive landscape out there. There's certainly people that have their own ideas on how to make it work that might work. But if I wanted to steal your process. Oh yes. Yeah. So you're going to take our process. We've obviously put a lot of thought into and filed a lot of patents around and we have I think now over 100 patents on our processes. This has been generated over five years of work from now our team is over 80 people of which maybe a little bit less than half our PhD scientists. So a lot of brain power has gone into what I just described and any technology startup like ours it's very important to try to patent those things so that other people can't just go copy what you've done. But in between those patents there's a lot of know how there's trade secrets it would be hard to replicate even if we didn't have patents but that's just an added layer of protection I think. So I would need to go find, okay it's sounding a little harder. I'd need to go find you know 40 PhDs and not that you couldn't do it though. Thank you for your faith in me. I appreciate that. I mean yeah but I mean like I didn't even know what Lithium was when I went to Bolivia. But you have a five year head start too. I do have a five year head start. And you have the IP. We've made a lot of good decisions we've got a lot of good investors on board you know we've made a tremendous amount of progress in a relatively short amount of time and it's hard to build a company you know there's ups and downs there's high points when we landed big investors or super low points when we almost ran out of money. You know I actually had to sell my house to invest in energy acts. Wow. To keep it going we were one payroll away from the company going under. And I sold my house for like two million bucks and I put a million bucks into energy acts and then GM came through with the series B and saved us. Wow. Sounds awfully familiar to the Tesla world. Yeah. I mean you don't want to get to that close but like I'm sure that's something that a lot of entrepreneurs can like can relate with. I mean there's tons of the unlucky ones where they can't raise the money and then it goes bankrupt right you know and you know we were lucky enough that I had that option to go do that and save the company but easy yeah right starting company is anything but yeah. Did you know that going in that entrepreneurship was hard I mean I've talked to a lot of founders and I typically get the answer that they knew that it was hard going in but they didn't know quite how hard. You like let's say I teleport in that day in Bolivia and you're thinking you have these ideas in your head and I go hey at some point you're gonna have to sell your house and there's there was no guarantee that you were going to make you're going to make it beyond that point do you think you would have started. I do. Really. I do. Wow. It's it's in my blood you know it's entrepreneurship this is my first company I've had other companies I've never had to face a decision like that that's on the drastic end but it depends what you would have told me after that you know it right what it have worked out right maybe I wouldn't have told you when we be sitting here you know today yeah it it's all been worth it's all about the journey I think okay so we've gotten it down to sixty thousand parts per million mm-hmm up from three hundred parts per million mm-hmm it's in it it's a lithium salt in solution what do we do now in order to be able to sell to a company who wants to make batteries or sounds like you make your own batteries too so how do we how do we get to that point now so a few more steps okay lithium chloride is not the salt that would go into batteries no salt that goes into batteries is either lithium carbonate which is Li2CO3 more lithium hydroxide which is LiOH so how do we turn the lithium chloride into one of those two things going from lithium chloride to lithium carbonate is a well understood thing that's what everybody does today it's pretty straightforward it's basically a little bit more polishing you may use a little bit of ion exchange very simple straightforward steps and then crystallization what's harder to do is that if you want lithium hydroxide you need to first process into lithium carbonate and then process into lithium hydroxide that's costly obviously so what we figured out how to do is go straight from lithium chloride directly to lithium hydroxide and the way that we do that is do a process using our membranes okay so you feed this lithium chloride which is LiCl that's in water which is what's water H2O there you go there you go I'm keeping with it there we go into these membranes that can split water okay and by splitting water it turns it into H and OH still have your two H's and your one O mm-hmm and then our membranes also will split our LiCl and then those things switch so now your OH moves over to your Li and you have LiOH which is a little semi-drop lithium hydroxide and the Cl moves over to the single H which is HCl which is hydrochloric acid you needed that we didn't need that you need the hydrochloric acid into the previous step okay that's another patent that we figured out and by combining those two steps we can cut the cost of solvent extraction where the HCl is about 40% of the cost of running that oh so now by integrating these steps our costs continue to lower which is obviously good for end consumers yeah right so the good product well they're both good but LiOH comes out still in water but then we can just crystallize it and then the HCl which is our byproduct gets reused in a continuous dynamic loop in solvent extraction so all of these different steps I assume they weren't written down on a book somewhere you had to figure them all out yourself because that's how you get the patents for them if they were in the book they probably probably didn't get the patents for it but you figured out all these different steps how do we make a crapload of battery grade material now like how do we go from everything that you just explained to me first of all how do you make sure that all of those steps work you know that there isn't some kind of complication and then how do we go from that to Gigafactory Gigafactory's cost a lot yeah right and you want to de-read it enjoy all your favorite sports like never before at bet MGM sign up using code mountains and receive up to fifteen hundred dollars back in bonus bets if you don't win your first bet when you register with bet MGM you'll get instant access to a variety of parlay selection features live betting options and the best daily promotions in the business and with bet MGM at your fingertips every play in every game matters more than ever remember to use code mountains and receive up to fifteen hundred dollars back in bonus bets if you don't win your first bet place your 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and we have the resources to make it happen ready to get down to business let's talk learn more at I financial dot com independent financial banking for business banking for life member FDIC you're scaling until you got to that point I think about these things in in iterative cycle iterative cycle loops okay where you want to iterate or prove something and then see what what rights you went wrong fix the wrong stuff improve the right stuff iterate again and the way that we think about that in terms of scaling is really four steps so we start with bench scale stuff like test tubes yeah right and you have a small amount of brine where you first look at the bride and analyze it what is the composition of this brine and the characteristics are a how much lithium in it isn't it be what are the impurities in it see what is the temperature maybe of it and we get the composition and we test it in test tubes on bench scale right very small sample sizes for volumes yeah once we validated that then we move up to the pilot scale and this is about one to two meters per minute this is 500 milliliters it's basically two water bottles per minute okay that would flow through the system okay over an hour you may have that's like 120 to 240 water bottles right which is decent volume running running through this it's about one cubic meter per day one cubic meter is 1000 liters mm-hmm which is one ton of brine essentially okay or without salt because salt weighs more but one ton of water is one cubic meter yeah right shipping one ton of brine around the world is not cheap but not super expensive so we just shipped 8 cubic meters from somewhere in South America that cost 50,000 dollars okay so okay we did it by air we did it by air because we wanted a quick sure but it's not cheap right right so even if even if you put it on a ship it wouldn't be I mean it would be somewhat cheaper but yeah time is money right right the most that we want to test here is at this pilot scale okay yep where we can do one cubic meter per day yeah and we could feasibly ship you know 20 or 30 for you know 2050,000 something like that yeah right that is the next step of validation after bench right but then you need to move to the bigger scale which is demonstration so now you'll see the pilot equipment and this is these are systems that we've built here right but energy X is never going to go build the equipment for a commercial plant we have third party vendors that professionally that make this type of equipment right so moving from pilot to demonstration is using those equipment vendors that are making industrial scale equipment it's still not commercial size yet but can do one cubic meter per hour okay on industrial scale equipment okay and in that event you probably want to run a test or a validation on a brine at demonstration scale for at least 1000 hours so you can't really fly all of your brine from South America yeah that might that might cost 10 million dollars so and you're not going to get 10 million dollars with the lithium out of that so that okay so does that that means you need to build that demonstration plant somewhere where there is right and that's exactly what we're doing right now okay that's the stage that we're at right now where we're building these larger demonstration plants that can process somewhere between one to two cubic meters per hour and in terms of lithium output that obviously depends on the concentration in the starting lithium feed but you can roughly think about it of 30 to 50 tons of lithium per year okay okay and that is a you know we didn't just arbitrarily decide on those numbers those are the numbers that we've gotten a lot of feedback from major customers that are looking to produce huge plants that do 25 15 hundred thousand tons per year but if we that that demonstration scale could lead to the full commercial plant so wait so these demonstrations could actually be supplying battery factories to make batteries yeah if you only want to buy 50 tons per year I see but but the quality of the lithium would of course be there but that would not be economic because it takes about 10 million dollars to build a demonstration plant and if it's producing 50 tons per year and the cost of lithium is 20 thousand dollars per ton that's one million dollars of revenue plus your op-ex right and it costs not quite the same amount but it costs maybe the same amount of people to run down the street and that's not going to be profitable so yeah so it's all about validating the technology to a point where it's what we call bankable so getting that validation point bringing in your EPC partner which is engineering procurement and construction these big firms that build big oil refineries are chemical plants or roads and highways or data centers that build these things getting their check off that they've done all the engineering they help procure all the stuff and that's when banks are like okay here's 500 million dollars to go build this plant they can do 50,000 tons of lithium a year wow and then at 20,000 dollars a ton that's a billion dollars in revenue okay so I mean these commercial scale plants sound really great but I'm seeing what you're saying you can't go from lab scale to commercial you can't even go from pilot to commercial it's all about de-risking there may even be a step in between demonstration and full commercial we would call mini commercial okay where we would go from 50 tons to maybe a one or two thousand ton plant before we go and that might cost 60 million dollars yeah before we go build a 50,000 ton plant that costs a billion dollars yeah so I mean Zach and I are investors in energy X because we've heard about this before and we think it's pretty cool thank you and it sounds like you're getting into this next phase where we're gonna get we're getting even closer to this commercial scale which to me is really exciting because a I really like lithium ion batteries I think that they're great I want to put them in all the cars in the world and if we did want to do that if we wanted to put all these cars in the world we need to increase lithium output by factors of at least and at least like so a lot of lithium so that's that is exciting for me so what are kind of the next steps for energy X because I mean I hear that you're working on a demonstrator plant how far out are we until we get to kind of the commercial the super bankable money money money yeah it's a great question so the things that I think about right now are one to your point of the demand right all commodities are somewhat cyclical like the price of lithium has gone up it just went up to 80,000 dollars a ton now it's back below 20,000 dollars a ton and but that's short term thinking the important thing is that in the long term the demand is going from where it is today at maybe six seven hundred thousand to six million right so there is going to be a huge huge need for lithium so our 20 to 40 year forecast is like untouchable right so what are we doing about that right now we're building these demonstration plans that's the next major step on our path to commercialization we are planning three of them so one is going in Chile for the asset that we just purchased nice okay that is really cool for energy X investors like yourselves because we control our own destiny there yeah there is nobody that can say oh we like another technology better and we're gonna go with them or you know the price of a plant is too much like we need to go raise that money like there's no roadblocks we control our own destiny with our own resource with that demonstration plant so we are full bore head on that project that in Argentina we have Pasco and Pasco is looking to build a hundred thousand ton lithium plant and they're one of our major investors alongside GM and our hope is to license them the technology for that plant and we're building a demonstration plant there so that falls into our licensing business model right so we will both license our technology to large existing producers or people that are building major new plants like Pasco as well as vertically integrate our technology into our own wholly owned resources right that's in Argentina which provides a little bit different type of country risk the third is in the US we want to mitigate risk in all areas of the company where we can that means that we want to have a plant in the US it's right in our backyard we believe that the smackover formation which is in Arkansas in the Texas where where Exxon just made a big lithium resource acquisition is the best US based looking resource and we're building a demonstration plant there we just won a five million dollar DOE grant that will go to help support the funding of that demonstration plant and then the idea is to push forward these demonstration plants and any validation from any single one would get us to the next hurdle right because if it works in one place it should work in another it should but even if they're always challenges right like what if Chile nationalizes their lithium like Bolivia did yeah what if right yeah there's nothing to do with our technology what if our technology doesn't work on the Argentinian brine like we thought it would or like does Argentina have a free trade agreement with the United States so I mean a matter of literally twenty miles over the border and all of a sudden that lithium is no good it was still works perfectly well in a in an EV but you're not going to get the seventy five hundred dollar tax credit exactly so that may have different a different set of buyers yep mitigate risk yep push multiple projects forward we've narrowed we you know we used to have a lot we used to be more than that we really narrowed it to those three as within our capability to execute and mitigating our risk enough so that we're not all our eggs in one basket yep right so if any one of those comes through you're looking at the promise or the possibility of building a large commercial plant that is twenty five to fifty thousand tons that could generate a billion dollars in revenue per year right so well if it's twenty five thousand dollar if it's twenty five thousand tons times we like to use twenty thousand dollars as our price for let them that would be five hundred million of revenue if the price goes up to forty thousand of time then it would be a billion right a year yeah per year personally every year every year per year and it could go up it could go up it might go down but I mean you know it might go down it might go but it might go up we need to put a lot of lithium we do like if we want to do the electric cars six million we need six million tons our goal is to produce five hundred thousand to a million tons of lithium per year by twenty thirty five a book either through licensing or through our own resources yeah but there's no reason that if we have developed the best technology that we couldn't capture ten percent of the market share like if we have the yeah if we have the best technology right and so I just want to go back to some of the other technologies because I think that sometimes you know oh maybe I'm focused too much on this technology and I'm not looking out for other ones so I mean right now with the brine ponds just just talk to me here I mean 15 square miles for a one brine pond which is producing just a lot it is producing but it's not producing that so that's a unique situation because well it's that's resource in the world sure but it's also easily scalable just because you just need an excavator and time to build a bigger pond and pump it full of water but I mean in terms of in terms of extracting resources in places that we want to be extracting the resources from i.e. places with free trade agreements or what I really like is in this Mac over right in our backyard in the United States that's pretty awesome you'd get some pushback if you wanted to do these 15 square mile brine ponds there's no pond there's no there's no friggin way that's gonna happen in the United States right yes it's a non-starred so I mean that's it's really interesting to me to think about it from that sense the other technology or the other lithium resource that I hear a lot about is spodjamine and I have a kind of a question about that because I know so spodjamine is hard rock and so it's rock and there's lithium in the rock and you have to take all the rock crush it up either bring it somewhere to do a whole bunch of other chemical processes on a lot of them involve heat a lot of them involve like a lot of what it sounds very expensive to do to tons and tons and tons of like rock and to move rock around its head does energy X have any plays into spodjamine we don't right now our technology could theoretically be applied so once once when you're processing spodjamine there is there is heat involved and at one point it does go through a solution phase which we could theoretically look at applying some of our technology it might need to be altered in some form or fashion but to me that could be something down the road right now we just have to get this one right yeah and commercialize with brine yeah and then the world becomes our oyster well cuz I just I want to look at the differences between the technologies as well in terms of just what this the plant is going to look like you know fully scaled up commercial plant because I think that for a lot of us we've seen either a power plant or we've seen some chemical plants and usually they're gonna have like a rail line that's bringing in coal or iron or or something in order to be processed into something else but here you're gonna be extracting this lithium right out of the ground and you're not gonna be putting it on a train to get to you right it you can flow it through a pipe yeah you flow through a pipe yeah and so what does it kind of look like like first the building and then also kind of the the rest of it so I mean we are designing our commercial plant right now okay and it's not going to look like your typical chemical plant or oil refinery which that may be they're a little ugly that may be encapsulated in the outside layer yeah but you know I think that I have right here the book of one of my favorite people I take a lot of learnings from him yeah and even what Elon did with the design of the gigafactory is cool yeah you can spot what Tesla gigafactory looks like or Germany or Mexico it has this like unique shape mmm to Tesla so you're saying like a Tesla factor it doesn't have to look like cuz I mean I have to look like that I've driven through some places out of Jersey and you know you're you're I'm just on my way to grandma's house or whatever but then you you're like what is this crazy pipe monstrosity you just put all this in a building regardless what it looks like right I think so okay and then everything else about it I mean I'm picturing oil fields and oil derricks and that kind of thing is it gonna be that kind of pumping yeah there is that kind of pumping you you have to drill well okay and but you're pumping up water okay yeah do I need a big oil Derek no you don't need that depends how depends how deep you have to go how deep are these brines so that depends on the place in the smackover they are seventy five hundred feet deep okay in our resource on and chilly they are 300 meter yeah 300 meters deep so 900 900 feet deep okay which is like that's a lot less deep yeah it's a very very shallow and I mean I'm just trying to think you know I think that a lot of people are like oh my god we're drilling into the earth and you know I've always thought that drilling must have been horrible and stuff like that but then I've realized that like I've been biking around my town recently and there's all these buildings in my town and this it's a cinder block building with propane tanks sitting outside and you go what the hell is this it's a water pumping station yeah it's like where my drinking water comes from there's one I think like 300 feet from my house yeah I've never thought about it my whole life until I biked past it and I was like who lives here and it's like a pump yes here it's I mean are we talking could it be as simple as that it is as simple as that so you're saying it's like a little little building with a pump in it yeah and then it's flowing water yeah which so I mean this happens I just would just for everyone to like pumping water out of the ground and then pumping it all over the place happens in every single city in the United States tell you our water yeah and so in this case we're taking water that water just has some salt in it this water wouldn't be so good for drinking right you're gonna try something I am good yeah this but this water wouldn't be so good for drinking and so we're gonna take that water and you're gonna reprocess it and then then what do we do with the rest of it we re-inject it okay so simple not a big deal it's less bad than even the water that I drink well I mean the water that I drink I you know pee out go just goes back into the water cycle but you're literally re-injecting into the soil it doesn't it's not you're not pouring it dumping it into a river no it's just going right back in the ground yeah so Teague Zach and I invested in one of the earlier rounds are we allowed to invest again yeah you are so the approach I've taken with fundraising is a dual pronged approach with traditional institutional and VC investors you know like venture capitalists and in our case strategics like General Motors and these big firms like Posco but also to allow angel investors like yourselves to invest and I think it's pretty cool that you guys invested before we even knew each other right yeah we did our first we call them retail offerings we did our first one in it was 2020 at the end of 2020 into 2021 so I think you guys were in that one yep which what which is now what for three years ago yep and the way we've thought about it is we alternate so we do a retail offering and then we say okay we're gonna go do an institutional offering now so it's allowed investors like you guys to get in in high growth technology startups that typically people don't have the opportunity to invest in before they go public on the stock market or stock exchange right and alongside these sophisticated investors that before now were the good old boys club that had the early access we've essentially democratized and we didn't come up with with this like this is something that is regulated by the SEC and it's relatively new it is relatively new it started in 2012 yeah and it took a little while to like even become no right yeah our figure this government was like yeah I guess you guys can do it and then it was like well how do we do it right yeah so I mean it's it's really taken off in just the past few years that we've been able to do like crowd funds for exciting companies what motivated you to do that because I mean I'm not saying you're a good old boy or something like that but like why not just deal with these people who have millions and millions and millions of dollars that they'd like to throw around why deal with me yeah I have like maybe ten thousand dollars that I want to throw around so the reason is because democratizing something is really important well there's there's actually a lot of reasons but one is that if somebody holds all the leverage over you like the guy with the big check and that's your only option then you're in a position of weakness if I can go to him and say well you know we've had over ten we're well over ten thousand investors now invest you know tens of millions of dollars I can just go do that and you don't hold as much power anymore interesting so that's why we've alternated going back and forth we've taken away power from those people and democratize the investment process because obviously tens of thousands of people that want to invest energy X want to be part of the energy transition want to invest in the battery market and the lithium market they see the demand yeah of but I mean it would be scary if all you had to deal with was GM and it sounds like GM is being a great partner yeah but you know I can at least say that maybe a part of that is that they know that you don't aren't necessarily beholden to them right and if they were it if you were beholden to them you know there's not too much that would stop them from saying hey you know this whole battery electric vehicle thing isn't something that we're interested in maybe we want to shut it down again I'm saying that not you yeah no I mean to your point though like GM has been great right it's not GM it's it's just venture capital in general right yeah there are horse social investors in general who right want to take control of your company want way bigger equity stakes than or give you a lower value than you might be were yep so it's always good to have alternative options and we've really utilized both in a good way and I think secondly is that we have now a really big investor base that is excited about what we're doing and helps promote you know these milestones that we continue to hit so we've almost turned that into a function where for other companies that may need to pay for marketing and that's an expense you know we have we have some good news we have tens of thousands of people that want to share that because they're part of the journey right right well and I do think that it's really cool that you know you can take someone like me who doesn't have millions and millions and millions of dollars to dump into a project like this and I think that again like you're saying there's over 10,000 people like me who are invested in you all because they like this idea they see where the future is going they see they know that lithium is going to be a really important resource because they sat down and did the math I think a lot of these people probably also have an electric car and you know had to listen to their stupid friends going like there's not gonna be enough lithium and they went like okay you know my friend George is kind of a but you know is he right and they sat down and they said like wow we aren't producing enough lithium whereas this lithium going to come from in the future so that way when my friend George finally does buy his electric car you know where is that lithium going to come from and it's like you know so then it was like oh if they're not producing enough lithium and they're it's going to need to be lithium in the future that's a business opportunity and you're like a pretty big player in it in terms of what could happen all this stuff needs to happen together you know you can't all of a sudden have you know 20 million electric vehicles per year with no lithium right we're never going to produce six million tons of lithium per year with no application yeah for it right so these things are happening together and the floodgates opened like GM has committed 35 billion dollars to transitioning to electric mm-hmm Tesla's goal is to make 20 million electric cars per year yeah Ford Volkswagen Toyota Mercedes every single company is transitioning to electric right and Chinese companies in the company YD yeah all these companies right so with that comes the demand for lithium right so we're in essence riding the wave you know we wouldn't be here if there wasn't huge momentum behind the transition to electric mm-hmm started to see some cyber trucks around often me too just wait yeah he's making a million cyber trucks a year it's going to happen yep yeah and a lot of lithium in a cyber truck a lot of lithium in cyber trucks yeah so so for the investment thing though you know finishing off on that yeah we have over 10,000 investors now it might even be closer to 15,000 and our minimum is $1,000 and for the people that got in early like you guys I think that your price per share was like 81 cents or something right now today we're selling at nine dollars a share so you've already 10xed your money in three years right now that's on paper still we obviously need to have some sort of go public or liquidation or exit event but like on papers this is yeah I'm very nice but also this is still at a point where we haven't yet commercialized like there's still a long way to go like in terms of where the stock could go yeah right like once we build these demonstration plants the share price will probably you know if you're all excited about them right I'm excited about it and they're not even producing lithium yet right yeah once we got to that commercialization point you know I think the sky is that it's how quickly can we scale from our first plant of 1,000 or 2,000 tons to that million tons like once we prove it on that commercial scale or even the demonstration scale yeah it's just about continuing to de-risk and continuing to have small wins and momentum forward awesome we'll take thank you so much for for talking to me today thank you so much for allowing me to be an investor in your company because it's just it's really really exciting goes both ways by a transfer thank you for being here the chemistry lesson that you guys just went through was really fascinating I am also fascinated by the fact that you didn't know that much about lithium when you got started so you weren't the expert you are today how did you build the team that is the expert that's out there doing it all right now I got an A+ in 11th grade chemistry okay but that was that was me that was that was the last of my chemistry experience you know my father is a successful entrepreneur and I've learned so much from him in at the dinner table growing up right and one of the most important kind of lessons that I learned in watching him is that the team is everything and what I have tried to do at energy acts is surround myself with people that are much smarter than me or better than me in certain respected disciplines that could compliment me what I am good at is having a big vision you know like this is obviously all my vision right and the vision is way bigger than you know what you see here like the vision is a 20 to 40 year vision like I think that through the energy transition there are going to be companies that are started and built that become 50 hundred multi hundred billion dollar companies I mean same thing with AI right like look at how quickly chat GBT and open AI like that same premise holds true for the energy transition I think that there's no reason that energy acts cannot become one of those companies right so the vision is big but then the team is okay how do I go create the team that can execute on that vision nobody can do it by themselves right I think that getting people to believe in your vision is hard but the most important thing right so along the way I got really lucky with some of the early people that have helped build this company amid our CTO our chief technology officer came to us from Rio Tinto Rio Tinto is the second biggest mining company in the world he was the director of global research and innovation for them in their industrial minerals group which includes lithium et cetera and they wanted him to relocate from Utah to Montreal he didn't want to do that and timing had it that he became a free agent and we got connected right so amid was one of the earliest employees and is one of my closest trusted partners and has really helped us grow the company from there while the mid has super in-depth knowledge on metallurgy and mineral processing and mining technology he's not an expert in membranes or solve extraction or absorption so we went out and had to find subject domain experts in each of those respective disciplines that we could then cross pollinate their knowledge with a myth on a technology side right it sounds hard so we went out and found a membrane guy who had over 150 patents developing new membrane technology this guy is obviously a PhD but 50 year old scientist who's worked his whole life developing new membranes brought him in and presented him the problem how do we develop lithium specific membranes and he worked with closely with the myth to develop what we have today same thing for solve extraction we went and got a guy who worked at one of the top chemical companies that was deploying solvent extraction all around the world for copper and other metals had deployed several novel solvent extraction molecules or reagents present in the problem we need to develop one specific for lithium same thing for absorption so that's how we've thought about developing the technology team and the same thing holds true for the business team the commercial team the operations team we have a really thorough vetting process to make sure that these people align with us on our culture we want creativity we want curiosity we want people to be self starters I take a lot from Elon and actually also from Jeff Bezos in this that even though Amazon is this massive company he always implores the day one mentality do you know about the day one mentality it's that even though Amazon has 200,000 people and is a trillion dollar company it's always day one I'm sure you see that picture of him in his office with that Amazon dot yeah it's always day one and that holds true for us obviously way more than them because we're still trying to get to a commercial product in the commercial revenue stream and so we also want to grow at the right pace I see a lot of these companies that raise a bunch of money and then just try to go start hiring right and then they get their spend too high and yeah they're monthly burn is too high and then they have to cut people and then that's the beginning of a downward spiral right right so we've tried to grow really methodically really thoughtfully with the best people for a specific position and you know this team this team is my family like yeah I'm just jealous like I was talking to Nick on your battery team like you got a guy who worked with Dr. Goodnuff and I was just talking to him about that the fact that he got to work with someone who's worked in like every field there is to know about this stuff for his whole life and you got to take like the key player from that you know at the peak of his existence and then take him from going it sound like he was just going to go into academia or something and you somehow convinced him to come work for you. He was going to go to academia and you know that that's where a little bit of luck comes in right like I feel like though you've got something more of the luck I mean the fact that you can convince someone like that to come work for a startup because I mean startups we all know that they can fail yeah so going to work for a big university that sounds great you know yeah I think that he's probably making more now than he would in the university but amid always likes to tell me you know I've amidst first contract with EnergyX I was paying out of my pocket it was literally you know I was the only finance year in the beginning and he was on 8,000 bucks a month or something which is what 96,000 a year and he thought you know I'll probably be with EnergyX for six months right and here we go here we are four years later so it's about stacking up those small wins it's about momentum it's about execution obviously it's about hard work like you know I'm in here dusk till dawn and a lot later trying to make the dream work right and supporting 80 families right that are relying on me and all the 10,000 plus investors that are relying on me that's what I think about I come to work every day so wow that must have been going through your head when you got to that point in your business where you had to possibly sell your house to fund it yeah all the right all the friends and family that had invested wow because I there's a there's a big class of founder CEOs that have come about lately I think as they watch Silicon Valley or something and they thought this would be just fun and easy and whatever and as you know it's not but they don't have the grit they don't have the like stick to it of ness to stick it through and you have now proof that you do have that and I just think that that's as an investor something you you hope to find in a CEO but you don't know if they have it with you I think we know that you have it appreciate that I really love that you go for a first principles approach for everything you do you know you're following Elon same thing where it's like you didn't even know this thing existed but you saw it right away they're like hey why can't this work where most people would probably come up the million reasons why it couldn't work you were like yeah but it could yeah first principles is a principle to live by especially apply to the business you know I also get a lot of that sense from my dad who is a serial entrepreneur and always asks why not which is the opposite how many people ask like worse that's not that's not human nature but always challenge the status quo a lot of the times it's not you know a lot of the times what's working is is the best right but not always right not always yeah you you saw firsthand that didn't make sense why they were doing it this way you know when it could be better mm-hmm I want to go to the battery section of this business which I think a lot of investors don't even maybe know much about you've had a whole division working on making batteries why bother with that like there's other companies doing that just focus on lithium extraction why go batteries yeah well it's hard to pass up the opportunity to work with you know the people that stem from dr. Goodness the life's work essentially yeah obviously he's passed away now but we have several of his former PhD students and postdocs and all that work was happening right here at the University of Texas which is where we licensed our original IP from that's number one like I think of myself as a very opportunistic type person and to pass up and like it's obviously close enough related where it's like that would be silly to pass up an opportunity to work on batteries mm-hmm with some of the top battery scientists that are right here in the city that we're working in at the University that we licensed IP from so I think that that was a pretty straightforward type thing then for a technical standpoint you know this is the next downstream item of what lithium goes into right so um there are a tremendous amount of synergies both from a practical standpoint of lithium production and then that lithium being used in batteries as well as cross-pollination of the scientists like these are a lot of electrochemical engineers and they know a lot about lithium and a lot of our lithium people know a lot about batteries that it really made sense to go from brine to battery or give you an example like the lithium that we produce can also the base can be converted into lithium metal so that lithium metals is another end form of lithium right and lithium metal can actually be a direct component into batteries so lithium carbon and lithium hydroxide need to be deposited into a cathode and that cathode is so there's one intermediary step right but lithium can be produced directly into metal electroplated onto copper which is the current collector and that is the component of battery so there's really a lot of synergy there's really a lot of crossover there's a lot of talent crossover um there's a lot of product crossover and I think a lot of investors don't realize that you don't need if if you don't want to become a battery maker like at scale you if you figure out just one key thing about a battery like how to make it safer which sounds like you're working on um or how to make it more energy dense or something like that you can license that technology you can work with a partner like there's so many valuable things in there we right now we don't plan on becoming mass battery manufacturers like that's a whole different undertaking but if we do develop this this incredible new chemistry or have a breakthrough in terms of safety that's something that the whole market would look to license or partner with so yeah it's it's it's something that we're excited that we're working on uh that could be a game changer. Mitt thank you so much for being with us I've got the CTO of EnergyX here and thank you for letting us see your lab play around in your lab today it was a lot of fun I feel like I really understand it a little bit better at least than I did this morning um but what I'm really interested in is you know Teague amazing CEO amazing founder but he did admit to us to like he didn't know a whole lot about lithium when he started so he really needed you tell me about that tell me about you know working with him from the beginning on the foundations of the science for what you're building yeah absolutely I mean Teague definitely as you said had a great vision and I had the background in this area uh I was with Rio Tinto when I was first contacted by Teague I'm curious about that you're with this giant company yeah and then this startup comes along and this guy who doesn't know much about you know lithium why did you start working with him yeah I mean like I said I was with Rio Tinto and among other things I was quite heavily involved in developing their large lithium project in Serbia and had been added for decades and things take long at larger companies which is when Teague approached me about this these brines in South America the Rio Tinto project was actually a hard rock project in Europe so the brines really intrigued me and more we started talking I realized that there could be a way to very quickly make an impact in this area you know which is difficult sometimes when you are at larger companies because they're procedures that have had to be followed there's risk abatement procedures that have to be followed but being in a startup environment I thought that I could make a real big impact in a real short time frame yeah and I think I really liked his vision and decided that it was time for me to work for other GX to the rankly speaking I didn't think I would work for very long but here I am four years later and enjoy every moment of it so I mean you in a very short span of time it does seem like energy access gotten way deeper in fact like Teague was talking about in the beginning you're kind of just focused on one piece of the puzzle now you have many pieces is that because it's a startup that you're able to kind of do all that in such a short amount of time yeah absolutely I mean the flexibility and the talent that we have been able to attract that has been the major contributor in the success of Energy X today in fact it's funny during my interview process with Teague I actually asked him that there are companies who are trying to do this probably seven or eight years before you what makes you think that we are going to be the successful ones and sure enough I proved myself wrong and really having the vision with Teague fostering this culture of innovation and really being all in on it behind us and really empowering the people and attracting the right people that has made the difference and I can tell you that it's not just about me I mean I was like the seed of science you can see I mean the quality of people that we have attracted and all of these different areas they are really world-class experts world-renowned experts in their respective fields and then working together as a group is why we have been able to achieve what we have with what we have well that must be so exciting it's really exciting to watch you guys grow and I can't wait to see what you guys are doing in the next few years thank you so much for your time today I appreciate it Nick thank you so much for showing us around the lab showing us how battery goes from brine to battery and then I get to charge my phone on one that was sick thank you I'm just really curious about you joining Energy X you came from a really cool background you're working with Dr. Goodnuff of who is like the father of batteries can you tell me more about him and how you work with him yeah so total I was from undergrad to my PhD I spent about 7 or 8 years working with John I had the fortune of being his last PhD student in the group and yeah you got all of his knowledge well as much as he could impart you know it's being in the field for 50 to 60 years you can only impart so much knowledge and 7 or 8 but no how to it really changed my perception not only of you know science and engineering but actually a lot about how I approached life in general so I want to go to the batteries that you're working on I think in people out there in the battery world even myself think that like we are looking for the ultimate in everything for the battery right it's got a cycle life it's got to have high energy density it's got to be safe but even if you could fix one of those things like make one of those better that would be great for batteries so is that your approach is like to just make a couple of those things better yeah I think so we we sort of have a two pronged approach the first is to like you mentioned sort of tackle one specific thing and you know it's safety with our next generation liquid electrolyte and then sort of our longer term you know our indigles is to really tackle energy density and safety so it sounds a little trivial at first but when you actually start getting into things even providing a step change in one area while keeping the other sort of you know key performance metrics stagnant or equivalent to current lithium ion technology is a really big challenge that you know we're working on so we're seeing footage right now of all these batteries in a tester a little cell you know coin cell batteries that you've made and they're all being tested for stuff what are you looking for in all that testing so I mean each one of those coin cells represents you know a different formulation either of our electrolyte or well really that's that's our primary what we work on is you know the electrolyte so each each one of those coin cells represents a different formulation that we've tried or a different sort of combination between you know liquid electrolyte and separator or you know separators that we've treated and then in some cases you know solid state electrolyte so each one of those you know you call them coin cells we call them samples right so that's really you know that's the coin cells especially is where we do our high throughput they're you know quick to make quick to evaluate and then sort of if they pass that preliminary test and they move on to the you know larger cell formats that we test thank you so much because this I was really nerding out Jesse was to over the fact that we were going from basically brine to all the way to battery thank you so much for letting us play in your flat thanks so much for having me yeah it's been wonderful thank you so much for watching don't forget to hit that subscribe button we love doing the work that we do but it's not cheap or easy flying around the country bringing you quality news so we'd really appreciate a like if you enjoy the work we do we'll see you next week on 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