A Lowercarbon Capital LinkedIn post focussing on Lilac Solutions.....with lots of great quotes!
The article is written by Clay Dumas, a founding partner at Lowercarbon Capital and, as the team’s most active investor. It sounds to me that Clay and his Lowercarbon Capital Team have been well and truly convinced that what Lilac is capable of doing is a "big deal" before pumping in another $145M in fresh capital last week!
So, who are you going to believe? Lowercarbon Capital who have been working closely with Lilac and have seen everything there is to see on their process and it's potential........or a group of randoms on HotCopper that just go with "the vibe" that this thing just doesn't work? I'm happy to put my money with Lake and Lilac thanks.
Some excerpts: "What if I told you there was a way to nearly triple lithium recovery rates and slash costs while using only one percent of the land and water? Meet Lilac. Their process is based on a proprietary ion-exchange process they call Lilac IX that uses ceramic beads made of materials lithium loves to bind to. Brines from underground reservoirs are pumped through tanks full of the beads, the beads suck up the lithium, and the water is injected back from whence it came. It gets better. The process works even when the concentration of lithium in the brines is low. So resources that can’t be developed economically with evaporation ponds are suddenly in the money with Lilac’s tech. Their plants are 10x faster to build, cleaner to run, and cheaper to operate. It’s not a fair fight.
None of this is hypothetical.Lilac has already run this tech at a real-life plant, showing off the performance, reliability, and operability of their ion exchange tech at scale. That facility ran continuously for months, with 90% uptime during 24/7 operations. They even had multiple third-party engineers come in to double- and triple-check their numbers. Sure enough, they held up, along with the operations win of producing over 200,000 litres of lithium chloride (the stuff that later gets converted to battery-grade lithium) with 99.9% purity.
Now, with their doubters suddenly very quiet and nine figures of cash in the bank, Lilac is bringing their tech to an iconic American spot: the Great Salt Lake. Turns out the lake is a massive lithium resource, but its concentrations of the mineral are lower than traditional developers can profitably or technologically recover without turning the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere into one giant evaporation pond. Lilac, on the other hand, is already recovering high percentages of the lithium from Salt Lake brines, with the potential to multiply America’s domestic lithium production with minimal waste. Most important for local communities, Lilac’s operation won’t impact water levels of this drought-hammered lake — something traditional developers could never dream of saying.
If this all sounds cool to you, imagine how the large battery makers and automakers feel. Clean, pure, fast lithium sourced right in the U.S.? The phone is ringing off the hook. The company is already hammering out deals with many of these folks, who can’t wait to tap into a Made in America supply of battery-grade lithium."
"Phrases like “step change” get thrown around a lot in this line of work, but make no mistake, this news is a big deal. It’s big for Lilac, it’s big for the country, it’s big for the planet."
