Chuck Yates Needs A Job

0:20 Hey everybody, welcome to Chuck Yates needs a job the podcast.

0:26 I saw that Exxon was going to mind lithium and Arkansas. And so I figured I needed to learn a lot more about this stuff. So I was looking around for the best experts on the planet Come geek out,

0:40 talk lithium. And so that's what we're going to try to do today. I'm honored to have on Daniel Layton and John Berba. And guys, I have one listener of this podcast. It's my mom Do you all mind

0:56 telling Sally Yates real quick who you are, and then maybe in just a minute or two, can we do really simple intro to lithium? What is it? Why do we need it? And then we'll try to geek out on what

1:12 you guys are doing

1:14 John, you wanna? Sure. I'm John Berba.

1:20 I've been in the chemical industry for a very long time. In fact, it's embarrassing to say how long. I've been in lithium a long time also.

1:29 Yeah, I was in the very first DLE project ever. And we built a plant in Ombre, Merito, in Argentina. And that thing started up in 1998. It's a direct lithium extraction plant. I invented the

1:44 absorbent that is used So I'll answer your question of what is lithium and what is it matter? Lithium is a salt. It's similar to table salt. It's different, though. And the reason lithium matters

1:59 is it is without a doubt the best battery metal on the planet. And so it allows the super high energy, super fast lithium batteries that are powering so much of our technology today.

2:19 Gotcha, Daniel. Say hi to mom real quick. Hi, mom.

2:26 You know, it's lithium is in its place. Not something that's going to replace hydrocarbons. It's something that's going to work alongside it for years. Synergies between oil and gas and lithium

2:38 especially in the United States are extremely strong. The numbers, the numbers, you know, there's a massive shortage coming up and it's going to have more. Whether you like the energy transition,

2:49 don't like the energy transition. It doesn't really matter because you have so much of Europe already set. They can't turn back on this. It's going to create an economic wave that will eventually

3:01 be, you know, really bad for the US. You know, so it's something that's lacked investment because people wanted to build gigafactories. Well, there's no raw materials supply those gigafactories.

3:12 Supply demand is really, really significant. I think people don't why you understand the significance of lithium and the effects it could have economically and send ripples throughout the world. I

3:25 mean, it's a significant thing. So if we're kind of breaking down lithium and we're talking about batteries, we're talking about everything, right? From cell phones to electric vehicles, right?

3:38 That there's no - Low controls, battery storage, replaceable, ever ready batteries or Durasol batteries And so, how do you get lithium,

3:52 give me a short history of how you actually mind lithium 'cause my understanding is it's not the prettiest process on the planet. Well, I'm gonna let this great photographer remember, Dr. Berber,

4:04 he's a very modest man. He is the one that basically invented the process of DLE. And we can explain later why DLE is absolutely critical to this and one of probably the only ways to any reasonable

4:17 numbers by 27 and 2030 without a massive economic collateral damage.

4:25 So thank you, Dan. I'll give you a really quick rundown. Lithium originally was a hard rock mining operation. Still is today. And today most of the lithium that's produced comes from this ore

4:40 spodumine. It is a typical mining operation It's open pit, there's a lot of crushing, huge amount of chemical consumption, gigantic amount of chemical waste, a lot of pollution, but they can

4:55 produce good quality lithium carbonate.

4:59 So that's one tier. The second tier is

5:03 brine

5:13 operation. What part of the world are these lithium found when you're talking about finding rock with him. The largest production is out of Australia. And basically they operate like a gravel

5:22 operation. They mine it, crush it. And they put the rock in large containers and ship it to China. And then the Chinese do the chemical processing.

5:33 There are other, there are obviously numerous other spodumine deposits scattered around the world. It just so happens that Australia has exceedingly high quality work Higher than just about

5:46 everybody else.

5:48 Then you've got solar evaporation processes or salt works processes.

5:55 And that's a situation where you've got a lithium rich brine. It'll have a lot of other components in it. And so they pump that out of the ground into enormous evaporation ponds. And then as the

6:09 water evaporates, salts come out in a particular order based on their chemistry. So you drop out sodium and then potassium and so forth. And then hopefully you get lithium at the last, but it's

6:22 always very impure. So the purification steps necessary to get to high quality lithium are quite onerous and very expensive and the yields are not very good. So they're only getting about a 35 to 40

6:38 yield on those kinds of processes

6:42 And so all of that is kind of the reason that Dow Chemical, when I joined the company in 1979, was hyper focused on extracting lithium in a different way. So the group I went into, we were looking

6:58 for a way to just pull lithium chloride out of the brine and then let the brine go by. And so we didn't call it direct lithium extraction at the time, but that's what it was So we

7:11 started to cut you off, John, but just real quick to maybe level set up. timeline, and we don't need specifics, but just generally, maybe when did we first kind of start using lithium, the two

7:26 processes you just talked about on how to find lithium, when did we kind of start doing that, and then jump into what you guys did it down? Yeah, well,

7:39 lithium was discovered in the late 1800s, okay? So, but the first real serious use of lithium was in the early 1900s, and it was used in glass because lithium lowers the melting point of glass,

7:58 and it makes it stronger, okay? So that was one of the big uses. During World War II, the

8:07 US. Department of Energy, I guess it's Department of Energy, Discovered that you could use lithium compounds like lithium-steerate, and you could take that material and blend it with oil and make

8:23 a grease that does not melt. That was considered to be top secret for a long time during World War II because our tanks could operate without having to be regreased every six hours. German tanks

8:40 couldn't, so they were always having to stop and go out and regrease. The American tanks could operate because the grease didn't melt. So that was the first significant military use of lithium.

8:53 Then the next big deal of course was the atomic bomb, which was uranium, and then the hydrogen bomb, which is based on lithium.

9:03 Interesting. And so those took place, you know, the atomic bomb, of course, was during World War II, and then the hydrogen bomb came sometime everywhere.

9:15 interesting.

9:18 So then you joined Dow and you guys are sitting there going, this is so inefficient, et cetera, lithium is important. What did you start doing there? Okay, so Dow was interested in lithium

9:34 because at that time the company was exceedingly forward looking. They were really focused on understanding things and affecting life and technology. So they recognized that lithium was the best

9:51 metal for a battery. So you know all of the batteries we use are based on metals, okay? And so lithium has such an incredibly high voltage that it generates compared to everything else. It becomes

10:07 the ideal metal for a battery. And it's very, very light.

10:13 So, So Dow was focused on extracting lithium from their own resources. Dow was a Brian chemical company. They played around with spodumine a little bit, but they were not particularly interested

10:27 in mining. And so they started looking for lithium in all of their Brian resources, and they found it. And in one resource, it was pretty significant. And so then the question was, how do you

10:41 get lithium out of that Brian? Now, this was in the 1950s. And then starting about 1954, '55, they started a program that ran up to about 1968. And they poured ridiculous amounts of money in

10:59 that timeframe. They put tens of millions of dollars into, and this is 1960s dollars, into learning how to get the lithium out, and they failed, they couldn't do it.

11:13 The group that I joined was headed up by a guy named Bill Bauman, and he had been the Chief Technology Officer for Dow forever, and he was hired during the Depression. And he was at the age where

11:27 he stepped down from his VP role and all those things. And he just wanted to run his business, and he was fixated on lithium. And so his idea was we've got to find something that will reach into

11:39 the brine and just pull the lithium out.

11:43 In 1980, I invented that compound.

11:49 Nice. And so that kind of began our serious run. Now they had looked at some things that sort of worked, but they were not very effective. But this material that I invented was really significant

12:04 because it spontaneously pulled lithium and chloride ions into a lattice, and then when you rinse it with water, lithium

12:15 So that gives you a mechanism for picking up lithium exclusively from brines and then being able to cleanly release it. So we started doing a lot of lab work where we had a team that was working on

12:28 it. We formed, we created this material that we could put into an extraction column which is just like a pipe and we could run the brine through there and then run it groundwater and extract it and

12:43 we we set up a pilot operation in Arkansas and ran that for about nine months and then Dow sold the entire brine chemical business and that project was over for us.

12:58 But we demonstrated it at that time.

13:03 I went ahead did other things got tired of Dow and joined another company and then folded and then I ended up at FMC Corporation. All right, Before I joined FMC, Bill, who was retired and bored,

13:19 called me up and he said we gotta come up with a better absorbent than what we've made. And so he and I got together and we came up with a second generation material and we patented it. And then I

13:33 went to work for FMC, not on lithium, on other things. But FMC owned a spodumine mine in North Carolina

13:43 And they had depleted it. They had only about five or six years of ore left, and they had to do something. So they had acquired a resource in Argentina called Solara Ombre-Mirito. It's a very

13:59 famous Solara. And they tried to do solar evaporation

14:05 on the small scale there and it failed. The chemistry was not right for solar evaporation.

14:11 And so they were desperate. They were going to lose that lithium business. And so they asked me if the patents that Bill and I had filed would work on extracting that lithium. And I said, yes.

14:25 And so I was meeting with - my boss and I were meeting with one of the senior vice presidents of the company.

14:35 And his name was Reg Hall. He's a great guy. And Reg looked at me and he said, so you've only got about four and a half years to get all of this put together and get it started up. And he said,

14:48 how much of this magic material have you made? And I said, well, so far we've made 2 and 12 grams. And Reg just put his hands over his face and shook his head. And he said, we're all going to

15:00 get screwed.

15:04 But we had a crash program in Princeton, New Jersey. That's where the lab was And we pulled it off.

15:12 We made the absorbent, we tested it, we, I put together the first level design of the plant. FMC had a fabulous detailed engineering group, handed it off to them and they knocked it out, it was

15:27 great. And then the company very wisely hired Floor to build the plant. And so it was built and started up in 1998 and has been running ever since And that is a direct traction plan. So just to

15:42 comment, a lot of people act like direct lithium extraction was just discovered. The first commercial use began in 1998.

15:53 That's interesting. You know, it's my dad, one of his best friends from high school was a long time energy guy, really a midstream guy, pipelines, gas gathering, processing that stuff.

16:08 You know, me being very, very young in my career, I would go eat lunch about every six months with Jim. And we talk about the energy business. And at one point in the late 90s, early 2000s,

16:24 I was call it six or seven years into my career, thinking I really knew what I was doing. And oil was at8 a barrel. So I stopped becoming an EP guy. The internet was taking off. So I became a

16:37 power technology banker Marketing was very important in these things. And I kind of fell upon this thesis

16:49 of we need to rebuild the grid so that we can have more reliable power, because the microchip's a lot more sensitive than your refrigerator. And so I was flywheel batteries, fuel cells. And I

16:60 would go eat lunch with Jim and talk about this. And Jim would wax poetically about all these things but I didn't even know about 'em. And I was always so amazed at how current he was. He was like,

17:11 oh, hell, we had a wave of that back in the 70s. We had a wave of that back in the 50s. He said, none of this stuff's new. But anyway, that's the same thing. So if I kind of look at lithium

17:27 today-ish, how much are we - and you can just ballpark on this - how much are we extracting what I'll call crush mining evaporation versus DLE

17:41 stuff? Today, there's virtually no DLA other than the plant that

17:51 liveanones. And it's actually lithium America. Is it lithium Americas, Dan? No, no,

18:00 it's called Arcadium. Arcadium, that's right So FMC spun out live it and live it. did a joint venture that became Arcadian. So they're still producing around 20, 000 tons per year, roughly. But

18:16 they're the only direct lithium extraction operation that, you know, commercial that's out there of any significance. The Chinese may have a few small ones, but that's that's about it. The vast

18:28 majority, well, around 60 of the lithium production is spodgy me, the hard rock mining. Okay. And then, and then there's probably roughly 30, 35,

18:41 that is solar evaporation and chilling. Which is Brian. That's Brian.

18:48 What should we do on DL? Got you. So, so maybe, maybe levels

18:56 everybody in the world needs more lithium. We're going to have so many more cell phones and car batteries and all that. What's going on? out there in terms of trying to find more lithium. And then

19:10 maybe from that, we'll roll into what you guys are doing and hear some specifics on that. Well, thank you. Go ahead, John, but you know, it's, it's,

19:22 you're, you're seeing a last minute scramble. People are trying to catch up. You've got a lot of games being played with pricing. And I think where this gets really interesting Chuck is, and when

19:33 you say, is it important? Well, if you think about it, you've got China trying to control the market. Russia was trying to before the war. You have Saudi Aramco, you've got Adnoc, now

19:47 announced they're getting in the Lithium business. You've got Exxon announced they're in an RN drilling. You've got Oxy that's in it. This is a really, really significant geopolitical energy

20:01 moment with this, 'cause this will it ever be more important than oil? Well, whenever this is probably gonna be outside of our lifetimes, anyway, by the time you're gonna see something take over

20:10 that far, the transition is gonna be measured in decades, you know, not in a few years.

20:16 And the thing is, because they put the mandates so unrealistically in the beginning, they got Europe hooked. I mean, Europe can't go back, just can't. You know, it's too far committed. But

20:26 you've seen things really get a lot better too, like charging capacities and the amount of chargers you can get in Europe. I mean, they're absolutely everywhere And they had the problem they were

20:35 having here. Remember, cattle's got a new battery right now that's supposed to charge in 10 minutes. That's a game changer. Yeah, you know, it's what's really interesting. So the other podcast

20:45 I do is called Big Digital Energy. We call that the weekly summary of the energy business for people that think Jim Kramer sucks. And

20:56 they're

20:58 four of us on there and one of

21:04 the things we've done is my biggest concern is that we're going to be able to do this. girlfriend's British. And so when we would sit there and talk about Europe, she would let me have it. Europe

21:12 is not a Uniblock. We're 30 different countries, blah, blah, blah. So what we did last year on the podcast is we took an individual European country and went through its energy uses, its energy

21:25 makeup, just in short order. And one of the things I didn't realize, but I found fascinating. The whole reason Europe could do all this stuff go as far renewables as they want. They have a

21:38 massive base load battery sitting in France with all these nuclear plants. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. On certain days, France is exporting 35 of the electricity it makes. So that's why the Germans

21:52 could ditch nuclear. That's why the Germans could do all the renewables same with with Great Britain, etc. And I did not appreciate that until we. started breaking down these, these countries.

22:06 So, so, it, it, real quick on the, the lithium market today, it sounds like to me there are two components. There's the, the, the mining slash evaporation. Let's get the raw material. And

22:22 then there's processing. Do we know kind of how much in the way of nationalities control each of those buckets? Because I mean, the, the one thing you always hear about is China's trying to corner

22:34 the market on all this stuff. No, right now they haven't cornered. They got 98, 97, 98 of

22:41 the processing. Yeah.

22:45 Interesting. It might be doubt might be down to 95 now 94, but it's still, it's still north of 90 the processing capacity. And you know, when this first rush started in South America, I mean,

22:57 the Chinese companies were down there. They've partnered with everybody. They've They bought up enormous resource positions. You know, paid hundreds and hundreds of millions, billions actually

23:07 for it. You know, they want to control it because they've got the, they've got the EV car business. BYD wants to become the number one, you know, electric car company in the world. Yeah. And

23:18 everybody's racing. That's why now you've, like I said, now you've got Saudi in it. Now you've got the whole UAE trying to get into the industry. I mean, this is the big thing Gotcha, so going

23:33 forward, what are people trying to do? Are there various competing technologies in addition to guys running around with tech axes, looking for more lithium or kind of how the, give me the state of

23:47 the environment? There is no, but John talked about it because the problem is there's nothing you can do. It's they've waited too long You are going to slow down. the transition or whatever you

24:03 wanna call it, you're gonna slow down the EV business, you're gonna slow down the battery storage business, you're gonna slow things out so there just isn't any way to get enough project. Now,

24:11 I'm not saying that John's technology saves the problem, saves the whole world and the problem with it, but it is one of the, it is the only thing that I know that's out there on the market that

24:22 actually takes an enormous bite out of it that can actually make a difference for people on a lot of levels, from the indigenous people in certain places because of the water attributes put into this.

24:35 And it's just, you know, there's a lot to this. Yeah, that's exactly right. So the solar evaporation issues, what Dan was just talking about are enormous. The water depletion, the wastage,

24:50 the salt pile, all of that, that's really putting a gigantic damper on solar evaporation processclears throat Excuse me. Virtually all the spodumine is processed in China. So direct lithium

25:09 extraction from natural resources, such as oil field brines, and there are some other brine areas that are useful, I think is the best path. The big issue right now is literally time to market.

25:26 How long does it take to find a resource, develop that resource, build extraction plants, and then produce products? And that's the big snag in the deal right now. So the core problem with the

25:44 direct lithium extraction, which is, I'll say direct lithium extraction, I think holds the highest potential of solving this whole lithium shortage issue. Because it has the potential of being

25:58 cleaner

26:01 and more effective at extracting lithium. Now we've got a different take on it than everybody else does. We have built a modular and transportable plant.

26:15 So we can pick our plant up. First of all, it's built in a fab shop. We can pick it up, take it in pieces, and move it to pretty much anywhere we want to take it, reassemble it and start it up

26:29 Now, this is a patented plant, our patents have issued, so we're really pleased about that. We have multiple patents on this thing. But the other piece of it is that that time to market issue

26:42 that I was talking about a minute ago is particularly important right now because of all the things that Dan talked about. A conventional lithium plant, and let's just say it's going to be 20, 000

26:52 metric tons per year on an oil field brine And, you know, so we'll just take that as kind of a place.

27:14 A 20, 000 ton plant is going to take about six years to build, if you build it from scratch. And 20, 000 metric tons is a fraction of the amount of lithium that we need to be producing over the

27:19 next six or eight or 10 years. I mean, that doesn't even move the needle. That's the reason I was saying time to market is such a big deal We can build one of our plants in roughly 10 to 12 months.

27:34 We can transport it anywhere in the United States at about a month. And we just proved that because we moved our first plant halfway across the United States in one month Yeah, because Exxon's

27:47 talking and I get that Exxon is not the pillar of speed in any way shape or form, but I mean they're talking first lithium in like 2030 right. and they claim they're kicking off the project and

28:06 Arkansas right about now. So I think that, you know, that's talking six years.

28:12 That's right. It's a problem everybody has, Chuck. And when you get in the US, here's a couple of interesting points.

28:22 It's our belief, and I think John and I share this, that the US. could become the number one lithium producer in the world You have so many advantages. We're finding resource concentrations that

28:33 equal Argentina. And you can get a drilling permit in a day. You can get a reinjection permit in 30 days.

28:41 In Argentina, in six months, you're lucky if you have your drilling permits and you're operating in really rough logistical situation where you have no utilities, you have no water, you have no

28:53 buildings, hotels. In the US, you pull off the road, you hook up your utilities. It's like an oil field site.

28:60 People like to make this narrative of EV, or electrification versus hydrocarbon. And

29:07 I think, I mean, I think we look at it correctly. I mean, the two are synergistic. I mean, what it does for the oil field to be able to go in and produce these oil field brines, you know,

29:19 you're not just bringing drilling companies back, you're bringing service companies, you're bringing small towns that maybe have been dead and depleted fields for a while I mean, rig counts will go

29:30 up. I mean, it's a significant thing for the oil energy. And that's why you're seeing, one of these, you're seeing all the big oil get into it. You know, this is a very synergistic thing with

29:39 oil. The two don't need to be fighting each other, they need to be complimenting each other. One of the, one of the regions that we're really interested in, I'm not gonna mention where it is,

29:50 but it's basically a depleted oil field. And the amount of lithium in it is staggering It is just unbelievable how much lay team is there? So Dan is 100 right. And I mean, from an economic

30:04 standpoint, we can revitalize areas that have really gone down when the oil depleted. So let me tell, oh sorry, I wanna get this in real quick, Chuck. This is important, don't hold me to this.

30:16 This is, you know, estimates of what we use as our base estimate, you know, not any projections of what we'll do or anybody can do, but this is the rule of thumb we use Every 20, 000 ton plant,

30:29 all the way to carbonate, from resource to carbonate, at20 a ton, will do somewhere between 180 and 200 million a year, even up. So in a public marketplace, historically, when before the things

30:45 got a little roughed up here, 10x was not unreasonable. So you're talking, you know, 2 billion valuation for every depending on to be anywhere from 4 to 800 million

31:00 That's a pretty good return. It's significant numbers.

31:05 Yes, I wanna jump into the economics, but I did promise John that we geek out. John, I'm gonna put you a little bit on a pitch count. We don't have forever, but if you wanted to give your PhD

31:20 level dissertation to the engineers of the world, what is your process actually

31:29 doing? And I get that you have patents and commercial secrets. I'm not looking for that, but I'd love to hear just what are you doing? What's your special sauce? So basically we start with a

31:42 resource that has a reasonable lifting concentrate. We pump the brine out of the resource. There's some early stage cleanup of trash. Then that goes into our system And we have a series of very

31:59 highly efficient extraction

32:02 and the media that I and it said we have a dramatically improved media over what we did at FMC that is in these columns and then the Brian flows through those columns and the lithium is extracted out

32:16 so you know we measure concentration in parts per million okay so you know a million parts per million is all of it so give you an idea so the the concentration of the lithium in these in this Brian

32:35 is going to be around 600 parts per million which is like Dan was saying that's similar to what you would see in Argentina okay we will take that 600 parts per million down to single digits like one

32:50 or two parts per million in this process it just sucks it right up then when that media is saturated the you know we shift that over to regeneration step, we run a regeneration fluid through the

33:04 system, and we get a clean lithium chloride solution that comes out of that. We then, we hit yarn, we use water in our regeneration step, so we want to recover the water. So now we take that

33:19 lithium chloride solution, and we run it through probably the one of the most advanced RO systems ever built What does RO mean? Reverse osmosis. Reverse osmosis, okay. Yes, yes, I'm sorry,

33:33 thank you.

33:36 We all fall into the acronym thing, but.

33:41 And I have a passion for being ignorant, so it works well. I don't mind asking the question. So we'll take a lithium chloride solution that's a few percent lithium chloride in the water, and then

33:54 we will run that through the reverse osmosis process, we'll get about 12 lithium-ray.

34:01 In doing that, we have recovered 94 of our process water and that one step.

34:09 Then we're going to want to ship the lithium chloride to a production plant. So we want the concentration to be up around 35, 40. And so we do an evaporation step and condense water. And that

34:21 gives us another four and a half percent of our process water. So we'll be recovering over 98 of our process water on every loop

34:31 And we can do that because we don't have to use chemicals in our process. A lot of the other direct lithium extraction processes must use chemicals. And therefore they end up with salt water. And

34:46 that's wastewater. Can't do anything with that. And so that wastewater, they got to figure out what to do with it. And that's, that's not an easy task a lot of people think they can just pump

34:57 that back down into.

34:60 formation, uh, that's not the way the, uh, like in Texas, that's not the way, that's not the way the railroad commission looks at it, nor an Arkansas, you don't worry, don't worry. The

35:12 railroad commission doesn't actually look at it. You're fine. Okay. But at any rate, the point is we have the cleanest process, I believe out there, the, the, we can build one of these plants

35:26 and deploy it because it's modular. If we're in an area and that depletes, we haven't lost the plant. We simply pack it up, move it someplace and set it up again. So I want to it's very similar

35:40 to the oil field and therefore it's complimentary to these kinds of operations. I kind of want to tie y'all's two comments together and I'll throw out some random questions and you guys take it.

35:55 What is kind of the ideal scenario in terms and I don't even know what matters. to ask, but is there so many barrels a day of wastewater production or brine water production? What's kind of the

36:09 footprint of one of these plants? How much do they cost? And ultimately, I'm trying

36:18 to ask that question to if somebody hears this and they've got a good application for you that they call, as well as kind of just thinking through in my mind where are best places for this to work.

36:32 So if that kind of nebulous question makes any sense. Sure. Well, to begin with, I mean, if there is a lithium resource, whether it's a like a solar or something like that, our technology would

36:47 fit. In the United States, the most likely places for this to go, for instance, would be in certain oil field formations. And there are some that are enormous. very broad over the United States

37:03 and the equipment, as I said, because of this modular system, we can adjust, we can build, we can expand, we can break it apart, we can move it. So we can make this thing fit the production

37:18 requirements in the area. So for instance, if we're on in one of these oil field applications,

37:26 you might have enough Brian say to produce 10, 000 metric tons per year in a particular area, okay, and you might have to move two or three miles away to get another zone that's similar to that.

37:43 Okay, pretty soon it becomes very difficult just from piping to ship enough Brian to a static location. So a conventional plant is really not a very good situation for that We can put these plants

37:58 around. like I say, everywhere. The footprint of one of our plants is only about two acres, two and a half acres. So they're very small, and we don't have to have foundations. All we need to

38:11 have is stabilized soil, just like a drilling rig. So in many ways, this is absolutely comparable and

38:23 supportive of an oil field kind of operation So you go into one of these areas with a very good brine, it's just like oil field operations. You bring in a drilling rig, you drill down, you set

38:35 your casing, perforate, do whatever you're gonna do, and set up your flow lines simultaneously. You set one of these plants down, you hook it up, and you start it up, and you're producing

38:35 lithium chloride. Cool. So

38:52 that's pretty much the way it goes If that gets depleted, if that

38:57 well gets depleted,

38:60 We pick up the equipment, move it to the next location.

39:04 Interesting,

39:06 interesting. Is there kind of a, you had said 600 parts per million earlier, is that kind of an average? Is that sort of a minimum of what you need or are you not confusing numbers? No, you're

39:21 not confusing numbers. I think that I was talking about 600 parts per million, that's a really good brine for Argentina and also certain resources in North America. There are other resources that

39:35 are lower. There's some that are ridiculously low and it's not economic.

39:41 We like to look at a cut off around 200 parts per million. We could conceivably go lower. We're continually making improvements on our technology. So actually going lower than 200 may be a lot more

39:56 economic than we thought a year ago because of some improvements. we've made in our absorbent and extraction technology. So, but, you know, The higher concentration, the better. It's all a

40:10 function of more than us. Yeah, I reckon also you really want to get a quick, I like 350 is kind of a cut off on it just because the CapEx, you see, that's the next problem in the street. Face

40:24 is Chuck is that, you know, it's difficult to get institutional financing and the mining business is not getting better. You know, we're starting to get a lot more situations that are good on that

40:37 respect, but it's tough. And there needs to be more than one DLE company than us out there too, by the way. You know, there needs to be, there needs to be several. If you, if every project

40:49 that's announced comes online, we're still short lithium by 28, 29

40:56 So let me have one thing about the CAP-ACS that Dan was talking about, one of the advantages of our modular system, simply because of the way that it's built, our CAP-ACS is way less than half of a

41:10 conventional plant, probably around a third of the capital cost. So not only is it stunningly faster, it's less expensive. So we have some really significant advantages in both of those situations.

41:26 And how are you guys doing this? Are you

41:33 going to go in, lease acreage, drill the wells? Are you trying to partner with oil and gas companies? What's

41:41 the business model going forward? I think it's all of the above. We're pretty opportunistic right now since we're just getting story. It's a bespoke situation. Yeah, got Gotcha, and have you

41:57 guys had a plant up and running yet, or are we still looking for our first project to put the puck on the ice with? Well, we tested this plant at the fam shop and

42:12 had it reviewed by a company called SLR and engineering firm. But we just recently transported our plant to a resource. I can't tell you where it is, it's all confidential But we transported the

42:26 plant about halfway across the United States to a resource. That whole transportation took one month and it was 37 packages that we shipped out on trucks. We relocated it in a month and we will have

42:42 it on stream and probably we're almost there. So it could be on stream and a total of about, you know, of another month So about two months to place it and start it out.

42:56 And, you know, we'll be running that process and extracting lithium. So we're really excited about this. This will be our first commercial process, commercial plan.

43:10 Oh, cool. I hope I have an invite to come out and bring a camera guy, 'cause we'd love to shoot some footage kind of out on side. We'd love to have that be. Yeah, it'd be awesome to see it work

43:24 So

43:27 maybe, kinda, I got one last question,

43:33 just to make sure I'm thinking about this, right? Basically, if I own oil and gas assets and I've got north of 200 parts per million lithium in my wastewater coming out and 350 and more even better,

43:53 I should reach out and give you guys a shout. least be something you ought to kill some brain cells talking about. Is that what I have, right? Okay. Absolutely. Cool. So

44:07 give me your company name, website, how do people, how do people reach you guys? Well, it's international battery metals. And the website is internationalbatterymetalscom

44:23 And the, you know, people could go on our website and you can see all of the key folks, but they can reach out to me. There's a fellow named Gary Flowers, Josh Abert. You can reach out to any of

44:38 us.

44:40 And we're more than happy to talk. They can reach out to Dan. And he's on our board. He'll be happy to talk with him as well. So,

44:48 you know, we're a small company so we don't have a lot of bureaucracy yet, so.

44:56 So Dan, if you're, you know what, I, I jokingly at digital wildcatters and the galactic by shroy, they told me I needed a title and that sounded really, really cool, right? Why not? So, so,

45:11 so Colin always says he has to run around, uh, behind me and correct everything I say. So is that they'll, they'll reach out to you and then John can come in and say, well, they didn't exactly

45:21 mean it this way, but,

45:27 well, you guys were cool to come on in and babysit me and, uh, and educate me on this. I really appreciate it. No, it's, it's, it's an, it's a topic that's not getting enough attention on a

45:40 lot of levels. It's starting to though, it's starting to, but that's mainly because of big oil coming in. That's what's getting at the attention And, and I will, I will say this, and I, I

45:52 truly believe this. If you really are serious about the environment and those type issues, you've gotta be somewhat pragmatic and recognize that we're gonna need to do these type things. And

46:07 despite anything you think about the oil and gas industry, the mining companies and all that, it is a lot cleaner and better for the environment if it's done in the United States versus other places

46:22 I mean,

46:24 yeah, if you're gonna

46:27 say we can't do it here in the United States and just export it to some other country, I always say on the podcast, we don't have a peeing and non-pying section of the pool. If you pee in the pool,

46:42 you've peed in the pool. That's right, yeah, that's correct. It's good analogy. Well, I really appreciate you guys coming on And this is fascinating to me, because. I really meant what I said

46:56 at the end. If we truly wanna be serious about the energy transition and not just demagogue and that sort of stuff, we need to be doing things in the United States. We just do.

47:10 Well, in any time you're trying to do something that's different, it's an opportunity for new technology, new ideas, new concepts. And that's what really turns me on. I like this. Yeah No, I

47:25 think that's right. So, nice to meet you guys. You guys have ever been used - Thank you very much. Yeah, you guys ever in

47:33 Houston, love to go grab lunch or - Drums there all the time. I may be back. I may be, I may be through Houston next week, actually. I'll be in Houston next week. I'll be in Houston in the back.

47:47 That part of this week, yeah. So I'll, I'm running to Vegas tomorrow play in the world. All men's poker tournament. And after I win,

47:57 I'll have money. I'll have money to be able to buy lunch whenever you guys hit the hit down. That sounds like a winner. Good luck. Have fun. Take care. Take care guys