General Discussion, page-1519

Conclusion
DLE is already being used successfully and likely to get a lot more popular this decade.In many ways DLE has significant advantages over conventional evaporation for brine projects. It can limit the environmental footprint and has greater efficiency (70-90%) at extracting lithium than conventional evaporation ponds (~50%). It is also dramatically faster. The negatives relate to the often higher upfront CapEx and the technology challenges. Surprisingly OpEx is often quoted to be similar to evaporation projects (time will tell on this).The current leading DLE producers are Livent and a select few Chinese lithium miners in China. They are already successfully producing lithium at scale using DLE.Starting in 2024 we should start to see several new projects start to emerge that use DLE. The near term DLE producers by targeted production start include: Eramet (early 2024), POSCO Holdings (H1, 2024), and then perhaps Standard Lithium (2025), Vulcan Energy Resources (end 2025), E3 Lithium (2025/26), Lake Resources (2025/26), SQM and a few others.DLE is already here and more DLE is definitely coming soon. It's just a case of how quickly new projects will be able to commence and then scale up production.