To learn more about EnergyX, check out the link below!
https://invest.energyx.com/
Watch our full interview with CEO Teague Egan over on our other channel, Disruptive Investing:
https://youtu.be/4gKJUJnDFE0
Now You Know Clips Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCacwzDEdpVEO2UjIO00CpqQ
Disruptive Investing Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTuFDdZdVXgfeZAxTubID0g
Use promo code “NowYouKnow” to get your free trial of A Better Route Planner Premium.
https://abetterrouteplanner.com/ref/NOWYOUKNOW
Check out our Now You Know Clips channel here!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCacwzDEdpVEO2UjIO00CpqQ
Check out Energy Pals here:
https://energypal.com/nowyouknow/
Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/nowyouknow
Advertising Inquiries:
https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out:
https://redcircle.com/privacy At Independent Financial, we know you work hard for your business. That's why we work hard for you. Our local bankers are ready to jump in and support your next vision or venture. And we have the resources to make it happen. Ready to get down to business? Let's talk. Learn more at iFinancial.com Independent Financial, banking for business, banking for life. Member FDIC. What if you could have a career where the opportunities are as vast as our nation, where it's not about mission statements but a shared mission? At US Customs and Border Protection, we go beyond to protect more than borders, from ship to shore, air to ground, cities to local communities, CBP agents and officers are keeping people safe. Join US Customs and Border Protection and go beyond for something far greater than yourself. Learn more at cbp.gov/careers. Lithium. Experts do say we could face a global shortage as soon as 2025. Lithium, lithium headwinds, lithium. More mining for lithium. There's enough lithium, lithium. The words lithium resers. Gold rush. This time lithium. A new lithium rush. Lithium ion batteries. Lithium mine. Lithium price went up very, very high. The need for lithium is surging. Hey, I'm Zach and I'm Jesse. I think we just found the solution to the lithium crisis right here in the US. Find out what it is next on In Depth. If you watch us regularly, then you know that we love EVs and renewable energy. We've been doing this a long time and when we started a YouTube channel that only talked about EVs and sustainable energy nine years ago, even many of you watching who drive EVs and have solar panels on your home today probably would have thought we were crazy back then. But since you're watching In Depth, well, you probably understand that electrifying the world's transportation and energy grids is not only well underway, but inevitable. But to make that transition happen, we're going to need a lot more of these. Now, one of the biggest pushbacks you get from the experts about why EVs aren't feasible is that EV batteries contain lithium. And we just don't have enough lithium. The same argument is made about grid scale storage batteries and home batteries needed to help the world transition away from fossil fuels. Where are we going to get all that with you? So we decided to travel to Austin, Texas and visit a startup company called EnergyX. We invested in them during one of their first funding rounds a couple of years ago. EnergyX is developing a technology that lets them capture lithium from brine quickly. We went down to their lab in Austin to see their technology in action. And I love to see science in action and get our hands dirty. I even tasted some lithium brine. There it is. All right, let's see. You're ready? Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm glad you volunteered for that. Holy [bleep] Teague Egan, their founder and CEO, is one of the most adventurous and first principled founders we've ever encountered. Teague got the idea for his company when he first discovered the lithium triangle. I think it's pretty cool that the aha moment came from my travels. It was pretty well documented, my trip to Bolivia is where I came across the first salt flat that led to EnergyX as it is today. 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. Uh-huh. And the salt flat is 4,000 square miles. 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 this was a lithium mine, essentially, for all intents and perks. 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've got a Tesla." Holding that's when your ears perk. Yeah. Yeah. 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. Okay. So the first thing we learned is that, yes, indeed, it's going to take a lot of lithium to keep up with the demand for all the batteries. To put this in perspective, the second biggest use of lithium is consumer electronics. Last year, there were 230 million iPhones that Apple made. Guess how much lithium was needed to make 230 million iPhones? The answer is 23,000 tons, which is not that much in the overall scheme of things. Okay. And that kind of makes sense because, you know, an iPhone is this big and only less than half of it's the battery, whereas you look at a Tesla or any other EV. 10,000 iPhones for one car batteries. So you can start to see. So 10,000 times more lithium for a car than for a phone. So what we just learned from TIG is that the typical EV battery uses about 70 to 80 kilograms of lithium carbonate. If Bank of America is right and there will be 2 billion EVs on the road by 2050, then we're talking 6 million tons of lithium a year. So how much lithium is being produced today? Well, last year, the whole Earth only produced a fraction of that, about 900,000 tons. And that's just the lithium we'll need for EVs. What about all the iPhones and home battery storage? Tesla's already sold over half a million power walls. And what about all the grid-tied storage? Tesla sold about 3,000 megapacks just last year. Do you have any idea how much lithium that would be? I do. And that would be about a million kilograms of lithium. All right. So I know there are two ways to get lithium out of the ground, hard rock mining and evaporation of brine. There's actually a third way, but let's have TIG explain. So the way the lithium used to be produced and is 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 a hundred football fields for one pond. 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? Okay. It'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, there's intelligence behind it, but there's no technology. There's no 21st century technology. 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. 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 applicant. 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. So we've taken solvent extraction and designed specific solvent reagents to selectively attract lithium or selectively separate lithium out of these brines. Okay. 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, really little beads like 10th or a hundredth the size of dip in dots. All right. Okay. You pack them into a big column. 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 and you'll run water through it to release it. And now you essentially have a purified stream of lithium now in water and then it becomes easier to concentrate it up and crystallize it out. Those are the three types of technologies that we've developed. What we've found actually is that when you start combining them, it creates efficiencies to get even higher recovery rates at lower cost. 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, right? And you want to de-risk your scaling until you get to that point. I think about these things in iterative cycle loops, where you want to iterate or prove something and then see what went right, see what went wrong, fix the wrong stuff, improve the right stuff, iterate again. The way that we think about that in terms of scaling is really four steps. So we started with bench scale stock, like test tubes, right? Very small sample sizes for volumes. 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. It's about one cubic meter per day, one cubic meter is 1,000 liters, which is one ton of brine, essentially. Shipping one ton of brine around the world is not cheap, but not super expensive. So we just shipped eight cubic meters from somewhere in South America that cost $50,000. So yeah, time is money, right? The most that we want to test here is at this pilot scale, right? Yep. Where we can do one cubic meter per day, that is the next step of validation after bench, right? But then you need to move to the bigger scale, which is demonstration. It's still not commercial size yet, but can do one cubic meter per hour on industrial scale equipment. Okay. So you can't really fly all of your brine from South America. Yeah. That might cost $10 million. So, and you're not going to get $10 million 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 brine. Right. And that's exactly what we're doing right now. We can roughly think about it of 30 to 50 tons of lithium per year. Okay. Okay. So we've got a lot of numbers that we've gotten a lot of feedback from major customers that are looking to produce huge plants that do 25,000, 1500,000 tons per year. That demonstration scale could lead to the full commercial plant. And that's when banks are like, okay, here's $500 million to go build this plant that can do 50,000 tons of lithium a year. Wow. And then at $20,000 a ton, that's a billion dollars in revenue. So I mean, Zach and I are investors in EnergyX, 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 going to, 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, at least, at least, like, so a lot of them. There's a lot of lithium. So that's that is exciting for me. So what are kind of the next steps for EnergyX? 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. Great question. The price of lithium has gone up. It just went up to $80,000 a ton. Now it's back below $20,000 a ton. 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 $600,000 to $6 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 EnergyX investors like yourself because there's no roadblocks. We control our own destiny with our own resource with that demonstration plan. So we are full bore ahead on that project. But in Argentina, we have POSCO. And POSCO is looking to build a 100,000 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 POSCO, 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 risks. 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 that's right in our backyard. We believe that the smackover formation, which is in Arkansas, in the Texas, where Exxon just made a big lithium resource acquisition, is the best US-based liquid resource. And we're building a demonstration plant there. We just won a $5 million 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 for any single one would get us to the next hurdle. Right. Because if it works in one place, it should work in another. And mitigating our risk enough so that we're not all our eggs in one basket, right? So if any one of those comes through, you're looking at the possibility of building a large commercial plant that is 25 to 50,000 tons that could generate a billion dollars of revenue per year. Every 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 up, but it might go up. We need a lot of lithium. We do. Like, if we want to do the electric car, six million, we need six million tons. There's no reason that if we have developed the best technology that we couldn't capture 10% of the market. So Teague, Zach and I invested in one of the earlier rounds, are we allowed to invest again? Yeah, you are. One of them 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 $9 a share. So you've already 10xed your money in three years, right? The approach that I've taken with fundraising is a dual pronged approach with traditional 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 at the end of 2020 into 2021. So the way we've thought about it is we alternate. So we do a retail offering and then we say, okay, we're going to 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? We didn't come up 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, you know, yeah, or figure it out. The 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 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? 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 $10,000 that I want to throw around. 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, we're well over 10,000 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. That's why we've alternated going back and forth. We've taken away power from those people and democratized 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. Interestingly, 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 when we have some good news, we have tens of thousands of people that want to share that because they're part of the journey. Keep in mind, Jesse and I are not financial advisors, investing involves risk. Please do your own research before you invest. If you're interested in learning more, visit energyx.com and please check out our full interview with Teague and Energy X's head of batteries and their CTO. You can find this interview on our disruptive investing channel. Thanks for watching. Now you know. I started to see some cyber trucks around often. Me too. Just wait until he's making a million cyber trucks a year. It's going to happen. Yep. And a lot of lithium in a cyber truck, a lot of lithium in cyber trucks. Yeah. Yeah. 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 money line, prop or parlay bets with the king of sports books today. Bet MGM and Gamestance remind you to play responsibly. See Bet MGM dot com for terms, 21 plus only, Colorado only, new customer offer, subject to eligibility requirements, rewards are non-withdrawable bonus bets that expire in seven days. Gambling problem? Call our text, 1-800-GAMBLER. At Independent Financial, we know you work hard for your business. That's why we work hard for you. Our local bankers are ready to jump in and support your next vision or venture, and we have the resources to make it happen. Ready to get down to business? Let's talk. Learn more at iFinancial.com Independent financial, banking for business, banking for life. Member FDIC. (gentle music)
