Lilac Solutions aims to commercialize a lithium ion exchange technology, which can extract lithium from dilute brine solutions, rapidly, economically and scalably. It is progressing towards a pilot facility.
This would be world-changing, given our recent research finds 50% upside to lithium prices in the energy transition and 50T CO2/ton Li for marginal spodumene mining (note here).
Overall Lilac’s patents look promising to us. They contain some excellent, precise and intelligible details on making ion exchange materials that will capture lithium from diffuse brines, and have likely protected the company’s key IP.
Full details are in the data-file, including more details than we typically find into manufacturing methods for specific materials.