254: Unlocking the Lithium Supply Chain – Teague Egan Interview

 Today on Still To Be Determined, we’re talking about direct lithium extraction. Yes, everybody, you heard it here first, and we’re excited about it, and we know you’re excited about it. And who are we? Well, I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci fi. I write some stuff for kids. I’m just generally curious about technology.

Luckily for me, my brother is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And Matt, we’re doing a bit of a way back machine here. This is being recorded at a time relatively distant from when it will be aired. Because even as I say this. I don’t know when this will be aired, but Matt, you had a, as you just shared with me, uh, the fourth in what has become an almost annual visit with a Mr. Teague Egan, who is the founder and CEO of Energy X. And you have had multiple conversations with him. And just very briefly, like, what are we talking about here? What is Energy X doing and what are they trying to get to?

It’s all about lithium. So obviously we need lithium for all of the batteries that are being made in the world and it’s only increasing, but it’s, it’s kind of like centered in only a few regions of the world where most of the lithium is extracted from.

You’re talking like China and Bolivia and things like that. And you’re talking about most of them, not most, but some of them are done by giant brine ponds that you’ve probably seen images of where it’s like these big kind of pinkish, huge, like huge brine ponds that are like literally just evaporating off the water to get to the salts.

And it takes like 12 to 18 months to get so big impacts in the environment to do this kind of thing. Not a lot of places making it well, directly. The extraction is like literally like you drill into the ground and you hit your water source that has lithium in it, you extract that liquid out, filter out the salt and then put the water back.

No brine ponds, just like you’re literally just filtering out what you want and then putting the rest back. So small footprint, you’re not doing giant brine ponds. It’s way faster. And you can start doing this in more places because it opens up a lot of opportunities. So for speed and environmental impact, it just makes so much sense.

So that’s what energy X is doing. It’s, it’s kind of redefining what lithium extraction can be.

It’s something as Matt has pointed out in his conversation with me before we started recording, as he just talked about it there. This is something that has been slowly evolving over time. He’s had an opportunity to see it happening over a four year period.

And so now here we go to Matt’s conversation with Teague Egan, founder and CEO of EnergyX to talk about direct lithium extraction, its impacts and its improvements in sustainable energy production.

So hi Teague it’s been, it’s great to catch up with you again. It’s been a long time since you and I have talked and Energy X has been extremely busy over the past one to two years since I think last time we talked before we jump into it.

Could you kind of give a, for people who might be new to you and Energy X, could you kind of give a quick rundown as to like, What Energy X even is.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first of all, it has been a long time. I think almost two years. Uh, so it’s good to see you again. And, uh, Energy X for, for people that I guess are meeting me for the first time is, uh, a lithium extraction technology and production company.

We started as just a lithium extraction technology company. And since we’ve talked a lot of exciting updates, we have gone into resource ownership and production. So we’re developing two big projects that should hopefully produce enough lithium to power over a million electric vehicles per year. Wow.

Okay. Last time we talked, you were, you were about to start going into some of it. You had just done the, I think it was the test project. Was it in Brazil that you had done? Bolivia. Yeah. That’s the last time we talked. So a lot has happened. Let’s just jump into like, you’re doing demonstration plants that you’re working on right now.

And a bunch of these are in the U S can kind of walk through like at one of them. Yeah. Okay. Can you kind of, yeah. Which one is in the U S?

So. After the Bolivia pilot plant, that was, uh, that was, that was one of our technologies. And we’ve, we’ve expanded from that technology. That was a membrane based technology.

We expanded to additional verticals of lithium extraction technology that includes solvent extraction, which is one of the most used separation technologies in the whole mining industry. Uh, for other base metals and materials, as well as adsorption, which is, uh, a really heavily used separation technology in water and wastewater.

So now we’re armed with three verticals of direct lithium extraction technology, those two plus membranes, and that created for us a direct lithium extraction platform. Of technologies that we can use, um, either singularly or in combination to create an end to end process where we take raw brine out of the ground.

This is basically like water with a lot of salt dissolved in it, lithium being one of those salts and process it all the way to, um, an end battery grade lithium material, either a lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide. So that is kind of the technology scope of energy X today. And after Bolivia, um, we ran a really successful pilot down there.

Uh, we hit a 94 percent lithium recovery rate. But we didn’t win the commercial contract and, um, it was ultimately awarded to, uh, a company from Russia and a company from China. Um, and while that was obviously disappointing at the time, I kind of look at it today as a blessing in disguise. But it made me realize that we can’t put all our eggs in one basket, first of all.

And second of all, uh, back when we were trying to demonstrate and prove that our technology worked, we were thinking about it through the lens of licensing that technology to existing resource owners. IE, the government of Bolivia who has the resources down there or, you know, other large mining companies that own lithium resources and are looking to improve their production methodology or use technology.

And we ultimately said that We needed to control our own destiny and we couldn’t wait on those types of companies to either adapt or not adapt our technology. There was far too small of a pool of potential customers and that we really, a felt like we had the best technology and B wanted to control our own destiny.

So vertically integrate that into resources. So we went out and we acquired a very large resource in Chile. Uh, that was in 2023. And then, uh, we’ve been developing that for a little over a year now. We just finished a 14 hole exploration program. So drilling wells to get the brine to then feed the plant.

And we built a pilot plant down there for that. And we’re in the process of building uh, a much larger demonstration plant. That’s roughly, uh, 20 to 30 times the size. And then we acquired, uh, a mineral position up in the United States. So that’s in the smack over formation, which is this prehistoric volcanic formation that goes from Texas into Arkansas.

Uh, and Louisiana over into Florida. Um, it’s where Exxon made a big acquisition of mineral acreage, uh, for, you know, a nine figure, some over a hundred million, I think a few hundred million. Uh, there’s a few other lithium players that are exploring in this area. And, you know, we were looking at the whole landscape of uh, lithium resource owners when we were intending to license our technology to them, you got a really good feel of where all these people were pursuing lithium deposits in the United States. And when we shifted our strategy to resource ownership, as opposed to licensing, we really had a good feel for where at least we thought the best lithium resources were, uh, that being the smack over formation in the Texas, Arkansas.

Um, so we went out and we acquired, uh, nearly 15, 000 acres there with the intention to bring that up to between 50 & 100 thousand acres um, in the not too distant future. So we have a pilot plant in Austin that we process that brine and now we’re building the larger demonstration plant there as well. That’s roughly 20 to 30 times the size.

That’s incredible. I mean, like, just for people who are not super familiar with this. There’s only a few places that have historically been doing lithium extraction. And then, of course, you see photos of those gigantic brine pools. And the big appeal for directly extraction is you don’t need this big brine pools.

So you’re acquiring this land to do this, but it’s also going to be a very small footprint. I’m assuming for you guys to actually do the extraction. Yeah.

Yeah. Very small. Very small. So you obviously need to bring the, the, the brine up. So you drill wells, kind of small, small little dots all over and then you, you know, pipe that brine to a central location, but a direct lithium extraction facility is one 100th to one two hundredth the size of what evaporation pond would be. So it’s really, you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, like a water processing plant. You know, it’s a couple acres as opposed to like, you know, 10 square miles or something and ridiculous like that.

Which also means a much smaller environmental impact of the process as well.

Exactly. And, and, you know, environmental impact comes from a few different standpoints. One, of course, is the land footprint, which we just talked about way smaller land footprint. Number two is the water usage. So let’s just take these evaporation ponds in Chile, for example, they bring up the brine. And, uh, the method of evaporation ponds is the sun naturally evaporates the water.

Uh, so it basically depletes the subsurface water system that some of these surrounding communities need for their agriculture. For us, we bring the brine up, we extract the lithium and then we re inject the brine so that it doesn’t completely mess up the subsurface. Um, and that’s really valuable for surrounding communities.

So that’s, that’s the other big, like limited freshwater usage is the other really big environmental impact standpoint.

They’re basically only taking what you need and then putting the rest back. Exactly. That’s This is one of the reasons I’ve been talking to you off and on over the past several years It’s I’m very excited about what you guys are doing because this Is, oh, I always call it face palm technology.

It’s like when you hear about like what you guys are doing, it’s like, why have we not been doing this all along?

I mean, it’s, it’s also not just us. Like to your point, why have we not been doing this forever? Like the reason is because we’ve never really needed lithium. Yep. Uh, we’ve only started needing larger amounts of lithium when electric vehicles became popular.

Right. So because of that demand, the methods of production to increase the supply needed to change. And then, you know, I’m not the only one that realized that there’s a lot of other companies and now really big companies, um, like Exxon is using direct lithium extraction. They’re not using the evaporation ponds, uh, Rio Tinto, which is the second biggest mining company in the world is all in on direct lithium extraction technology.

Like people recognize that this is the way. And myself and energy X got extremely lucky that like, I kind of conceptualize this idea 6 years ago now and and had a head start on it and um, you know, surrounded myself with really smart scientists that help kind of push this industry forward.

Yeah. The other thing that I always hear a lot is there’s not enough lithium to make all the batteries we need, or it only comes from Bolivia or Brazil or China.

And it’s historically, that might be the case, but that’s not because there’s not lithium in other areas like your starting to drill in the United States to try to extract lithium. So it’s Yeah, there’s more lithium reserves than people I think people realize.

There there is, but that being said, like there is a finite amount.

Um, it’s, it’s, that’s just the nature of like a natural resource. Uh, so there is a finite amount of lithium, but the, the thing is that, so you extract all this lithium and use it in batteries, but the difference between that and burning fossil fuels, you’re not burning the lithium, like the lithium doesn’t, isn’t changing form to create energy. So once a lithium battery has degradated, meaning like it’s kind of worn down, the lithium is still in there and then you can recycle it. So lithium or battery recycling is going to be a big industry of the future as well, just to reuse these base metals that have created the battery.

Well, so you’ve made some really good progress. You’ve shifted gears to kind of being an owner of the, the brine that you’re extracting, uh, what challenges kind of remain for the DLE technology for full scale commercialization?

Yeah. So we’re building our demonstration plants, our pilot plants that we have both in Texas and in Chile were roughly two to three tons of lithium per year.

And then the demonstration plants are somewhere between 50 and a hundred tons a year. So everything we do starts at the bench scale. When we get a new brine, uh, we test it in essentially test tubes on the bench in the laboratory. Then the pilot plant is the next step up and that’s larger equipment that is like each subsystem might be the size of a bed, like in my hotel room here, right? And you connect those different things and it’s essentially a continuous process on like larger, like much larger equipment from lab bench to pilot is a 60 X scaling increase. Then you go from the pilot and that proves out the whole process to demonstration plant.

Um, which I mentioned is another 20 to 30 X. And that is, uh, to prove out the tech, the process on commercial grade equipment. Um, so stuff that like our commercial vendors would make as opposed to us making stuff in our build shop. That’s like the last big step that we are doing right now. And these demonstration plants each cost roughly 15 to 20 million.

Uh, so, so not inexpensive, um, but not profitable by any means. You need to get that number up a lot higher. So after the demonstration plants, which will be validated this year. We will look to build commercial trains that are modular and prefabricated. So we want to take away as much risk of building a plant in these remote arid regions as possible and make it more of like a manufacturing line.

Uh, so all this stuff will be made in the factory and then just shipped to the field and put in, and we’re looking to make trains that are about 7, 500 tons per train, and then you just add the train. So once you’ve proven one train. All your risk is gone. That’s a commercial plant. And then you just go from 7 7500 to 15,000 to 22,500 and keep adding commercial trains on there.

There is still risk with our business right now and going from pilot to demo of course, like that’s actually, you know, the, we, we know the technology works like we’re producing tons of lithium, two to three times per year. Uh, and we’re shipping that out for validation or certification to our customers, the cathode producers, the lithium goes into a cathode, which is the component in the battery that contains the lithium and we’re, we’re producing 99. 9 percent pure battery grade lithium. Uh, but it’s the scaling that’s hard, right? It’s the technology risk is behind us now. It’s the engineering and the scale up risk, uh, and executing that that’s hard. Uh, no, nobody’s done that. We, we feel very confident that we will be able to do it. We’re working with Worley, which is one of the top engineering firms in the world.

This is like an engineering firm that has 50, 000 engineers globally that builds all sorts of big plants that’s working on 15 lithium projects and carbon capture projects and LNG projects and very credible group, uh, that puts tens of thousands of hours into the engineering that we’re working on together or working with commercial vendors.

That make, you know, big tanks and columns and, uh, make sure settlers and things like that. So, but it’s, uh, it’s exciting. It’s exciting.

So you mentioned building up these trains, like in a factory and then delivered on site and it reduces some of the risk. Last time we talked I think we had talked about how not you might still have to do kind of boutique kind of filtration systems, depending on where you’re extracting the lithium from. Is that still the case?

No, every everything will be a minimum 7500 ton train. Okay, I don’t exactly remember it was two years ago. I don’t exactly remember boutique type of

like we were talking about the MOFs and like how like some brines are slightly different.

So you might have to adjust the MOFs so that it works. To extract what you want to extract, but it sounds like since then, you’ve got those, you talked about those additional, uh, filtration systems that you’ve got. So it sounds like things have shifted a bit.

So, so MOFs were, uh, one of the types of membranes that we were exploring back in the day.

Uh, that was just, that’s just a material that goes into membranes. And we, we now have seven different membrane formulations. We are actually not using MOFs or metal frameworks anymore. And that’s just a consequence of technology development, things improving, iterating, seeing what works, seeing what doesn’t work.

And that, that continuous feedback loop, but that’s the purpose of the DLE platform to have these different verticals where depending on the brine, you can create a process that is tailored to that brine, but then it’s still the 7500 ton train for that brine, uh, that uses either one or multiple of these technologies.

And speaking of how expensive it is to build out these pilot facilities.

I know recently you’ve had, uh, was it serious beef, uh, financing a round of financing where you raised like 50 million dollars. GM is a major investor in this. I’m assuming that gives some like wind under your wings of like having a major company come in and saying, we kind of believe in what you guys are doing.

It’s, it’s huge. I would not be, like the company would not be where we are today without the support and belief of GM, uh, along with, so GM led our series B and then we also had two other major strategic investors that are more or less known, uh, but one is, uh, a group called POSCO not to be confused with Costco, which a lot of people do, but POSCO is a large Korean conglomerate.

Similar to the likes of Samsung or LG, except they don’t make consumer facing electronics. They’re a top five global steel producer, as well as battery materials producer. So they’re actually developing a hundred thousand ton plant, lithium plant in, uh, Argentina and interested in utilizing our technology, but that that lithium plant is only to feed their cathode business.

So they’re also interested in procuring additional lithium because the cathode business is their main business in battery material. So they sell cathodes to cell makers like LG, Samsung, SK, Panasonic, et cetera. Uh, they’re the second major and probably most strategic investor. And then the third is one of the international oil and gas companies, ENI or ENI, um, the Italians that operate in 60 countries.

This is a hundred billion dollar plus market cap oil and gas company, and very similar to Exxon oil and gas companies are interested in lithium because it’s bringing up a subsurface liquid. You’re drilling a well, you’re bringing up brine, and And then you’re refining that to create a product. And that’s, there’s a lot of similarities to oil and gas.

The only difference is the application, how it’s used, you don’t burn it once and it’s gone. So having those three companies behind us has given us credibility. Uh, it’s given us a lot of guidance, insight. Experience, obviously capital, um, they are potential customers, they are potential operating partners, their additional future potential investors.

So it’s been, it’s been really good having groups like that alongside.

One of the things that your company has done that I’ve found very unique is you also did crowdfunding where you opened it up to like individual investors to help be part of this where usually individuals are like locked out from being part of this process.

Could you kind of like walk through the strategy of that mixed approach where not only were you working with GM, but you were working with crowdfunding kind of sourcing.

We did. We did. Um, and how did it go? So it went amazing. Uh, we just completed a 75 million retail offering and uh, yeah, so. We have nearly 40, 000 retail investors who have invested along the whole journey.

Uh, so the last share price that we offered was $9 50 cents. Um, but some of the earlier ones that got in, in 2020, we’re at 81 cents. So they have a 10 X return on paper right now, obviously we need to have some sort of liquidity event or transact M and a IPO, you know, one at one of those types of events, but you know, it started because.

So I originally funded the company out of my pocket, uh, put in a million bucks and then went to friends and family and raised a little bit more. And we had a, we had a website up. Um, we started to get some press and I was starting to get emails from random people asking how they could invest. And You know, in the early days I was like, Oh, every single one I had to talk to, negotiate, send, um, like our subscription agreement.

And then one of my buddies, he, uh, called me up and he said that he had just started working at one of these crowdfunding sites. And this whole process is essentially automated and you create an offering page. You have your offering documents and subscription agreements. And people can shoot, they can see it all and they can go through the process and choose to invest or not.

And all the information is there for them if they want to make an investment. And the SEC, Securities Exchange Commission, passed, um, an act in 2012 called the Jobs Act, which introduced this ability for, you know, your average Mom and pop investor, angel investor that doesn’t have to be accredited to be able to invest.

There’s, there’s restrictions, like they’re not allowed to invest their whole net worth or something like that. Right. But enabled newer upcoming investors to be able to access or legally invest in startups. Uh, so we thought that that was an amazing thing and um, we wanted to, you know, allow these types of people to be on the journey with us alongside groups like GM, POSCO and ENI, and, uh, so far it’s worked out really well, uh, both for us in terms of, uh, raising additional funds to progress our business and them in terms of the, you know, return on paper that they’ve seen thus far.

That’s one of the things I found fascinating is that usually it’s, Oh, the GMs of the world are investing in this new technology, but it’s. Mom and pop can get on board as well, which we’ve done both

too,

which is like, which is, how do you balance, how do you balance that then between the big investors and the small investors.

Kind of go back and forth.

Like, so the, the smaller investors like on our, are not on our board or anything like that. Like the average investment size is. 2, 500 or something around that, which is obviously not the same type of rights as a GM who’s putting in, you know, eight figure checks, right? Like, like a 50 million round. Like it’s, it’s, they’re fundamentally different things, right?

That’s just in terms of their rights and voting and things like that, but they still own a share that was at a certain price. We did 81 cents and then 4 and then six 11 and then eight and then nine and then nine 50. So there’s been a steady gradual rise in the share price that correlates with the milestones that we’ve achieved and, you know, we’ll, now that we just completed the 75 million retail round, we’ll look to go, we’re deploying this capital, we’re building these demonstration plants. We’re getting, um, these third party engineering studies from Worley and we’ll look to go back to institutional investors like GM or venture capitalists or private equity and do another round.

And then we, you know, might go back and forth. That’s how we’ve done it thus far. I can’t sit here and tell you exactly what we’re going to do in the future. Um, but that’s kind of the strategy that we’ve employed thus far.

That’s fascinating. One of the questions I had for you was the, um, like the inflation Reduction Act, um, are there other policies that policy and other policies have that impacted how your decision making process has been going over the past couple of years as to where you’re doing pilot projects or demonstrator projects. Has that had an influence on that?

Absolutely. Absolutely. We feel that the best lithium resources are in South America, in the lithium triangle, that’s Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and. When looking at those three countries, uh, we made our bet on Chile because Chile has a free trade agreement with the United States, which makes it comply with the IRA.

So electric vehicle companies get the subsidy if they source their materials from Chile. Um, that was, that was one major reason. Uh, that’s also where we found a really great deal. We acquired over a hundred thousand acres of mining tenements in Chile as well. But then the, the IRA and the DOE specifically are giving out huge grants and huge subsidies to build a natural resource and mining projects domestically in the United States.

And like I mentioned, you know, we’d been surveying, United States for some amount of years and ultimately said, this is too good of an opportunity to pass up. If the government is handing out, you know, multi a hundred million dollar checks, we did win one 5 million DOE grant. We applied for the much larger ones.

And unfortunately we did not get one in either the first or second round, but not, not to be discouraged. Like. There’s a lot of benefits to building a project in the United States. I think that the permitting, uh, will be a fast, fast track. Um, it’s obviously much, much closer to a lot of end customers and the big battery plants that are being built in the United States, specifically on the East coast and kind of like Midwest and the Tennessee’s, et cetera.

There’s a lot of private investment that is looking to invest in this project to help us. So, you know, I’m, I’m happy with the two projects that we have right now. One’s called Lone Star in Texas. The other is called Black Giant in Chile. It diversifies our risk it, you know, we, we subsidize both with central intelligence.

So like, it’s not like it’s double the cost, like the same people are working on both. We do have to buy twice the CapEx and, you know, acquire the resource, but different groups are interested in, in either one or the other for different reasons. Um, so again, I didn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket, like the Bolivia situation like that, you know, that’s how you, that’s how you.

That’s how you lose your company, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Are there partnerships or policies that you’d like to see take place to help future proof kind of like the battery mineral supply chain? Are there things that you’d like to see happen?

You know, I think that the Biden administration was the best thing that could have ever happened for the energy transition.

President Trump from 2016 to 2020 talked about a trillion dollar infrastructure bill and didn’t get it done. President Biden did get it done. That’s what the IRA is. Now I joke saying it should have been called like the, the energy independence act, because we literally invested hundreds of billions or a trillion dollars into, you know, an energy transition and renewable energy and things like that.

But that’s the beauty. But Biden administration was permitting and they’re giving away all this money. But then the companies that are receiving it are having problems actually deploying and building it due to regulatory red tape. And that’s the beauty of the United States where we essentially go from one ideology to the other.

And, you know, we went from Trump and at the end of Trump’s term, people hated Trump. I mean, we’re in the middle of COVID. He drove the economy into the ground. COVID drove the economy into the ground and then we switched to Biden and he basically got all the jobs back. COVID subsided, introduced the IRA, and now at the end of Biden’s term, everybody hates Biden.

I think that’s like the lowest approval rating ever. And we’re going back to Trump and we need deregulation and fast track permitting. And he’s already said that he will fast track any project that’s like a billion dollar infrastructure project and he’s getting huge commitments from soft bank and all these, you know, the, the Saudis and all these people to invest in the United States.

And so that’s just kind of Americans humans in general are kind of pessimistic and kind of don’t like, you know, it’s like, I don’t, I fully expect people to be like sick and tired of Trump in four years and then we’ll probably, and then we’ll probably go back. Right.

Yeah. It’s like a pendulum swinging back and forth.

That’s why America is so successful because. What one party does good, the other party doesn’t, and vice versa. And that has allowed innovation and progress. And, you know, I believe that we’ll see that, uh, with, with this energy transition. Like, Trump wanted to make a trillion dollar infrastructure bill. It didn’t matter what it was.

It happened to be that, that it, the energy transition is the theme of that and Biden got it done and literally put a trillion dollars into the economy and now it needs to be spent, but permitting is standing in the way. So that’s what hopefully Trump will do good. And you know, that, that it’s a combination of their efforts that have, you know, pushed America forward.

More specifically to energy X. If you fast forward like five years, what’s one headline you hope to see about

EnergyX? Five years. So that’s 2020, not 2030, I guess. Yeah.

20, let’s go with 2030.

Yeah. 2030. Well, we are aiming to produce commercial lithium on these trains by 2027, maybe 2028, but like that’s one headline that should be far before 2030.

You know, I think that my goal is to have some sort of liquidity event for all these shareholders that have believed in, in me and my vision by then, uh, I’ve said that we will not go public until we’re commercially producing lithium. There’s just too much liability in that and kind of speculation. Uh, but once we have.

Built a commercial plant and, you know, deployed this, this breakthrough technology on a commercial scale. There’s all there, you know, that I, I, that, that’s the main thing. I want to reward all the shareholders, investors that have believed in me. So that’s like the main thing, um, we’ll be producing lithium.

We might have other vertical integrate vertical and horizontal integration plans. So like when I talk about vertical, I talk about lithium. Uh, and the steps that lithium goes into when I talk about horizontal, I talk about the other materials in the battery, how to, you know, round out the battery material supply chain.

There, there’s a lot of ideas that I can’t, that’s actually a good question. Nobody’s asked me that and I can’t give away like my future secret plans. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s a, there’s a long term vision for you guys and I’m assuming it’s beyond lithium. Lithium is the starting point. It’s not there is

there.

There is there. That’s why that’s why it’s called Energy X and not like, yes, you know, lithium something or other.

Just leave that as a tease of like, there’s more to come. It’s not just lithium. Okay. So is there anything we haven’t touched on about what’s happened over the past year or so that you’d want to touch on?

Oh, man. Um, I mean, we’ve, we’ve just had a, I think The, the two projects are the main undertaking of energy X right now, and that’s been my whole focus. We’ve made incredible progress, but these things go slow. Like the fact that we acquired a property, complete a 14 drill well program, built a pilot plan and op commission and operated that.

For both sites. And now we’re building two demonstration plants. The demonstration equipment is like, you know, 12 month lead time. Like this is big at one point in the past, like this, like these would be full commercial plants. Like when, you know, we didn’t need that much lithium produce a hundred tons a year.

Like that’s probably a pretty good business. Now it’s like a tiny little thing, but it’s still like, I walk into the factory and like, see them building these huge. You know, like 30 cubic meter tanks and I’m blowing away at least. So

yeah,

I’m, I’m super excited to, uh, make the videos of some of this progress and share that with, you know, our community and the industry at large in hopefully the first half of 2025, you know, things always take longer than expected when you’re, you know, dealing with big CapEx projects and exploration. Like when we acquired the properties, the mining tenements in Chile, there’s no guarantee that we would have hit lithium. And we actually drilled and we hit the third highest grade lithium ever discovered. Yeah, it’s wild. It’s wild. That

is awesome.

So, so Salar de Atacama is the best. That’s where SQM and Albemarle operate.

Um, they have like 15 to 2000, 1500 to 2000 parts per million of lithium. So Larda Maricunga is number two. That’s kind of like mid to Southern Chile, and then that’s 200 and then there’s Amway Muerto in Argentina, that’s high eight hundreds and we hit over 900 and like, I mean, that was just wild when we got those results back.

Cause you drill and you bring up this brine and it’s like muddy looking water, and then you run it through your analysis equipment. And first it was. First it was like seven hundreds and then eight hundreds and then over nine hundreds. And we were just like, mind blown. There’s still risk in Texas, although we are in the trend.

Um, and people have drilled wells all around us. We haven’t yet drilled on our property. So there is still exploration risk. Like when you’re drilling down, you’re going, you know, deep. Below the surface, like you don’t know what’s so there’s still a risk there, uh, but we’re, we’re really confident in the acreage position that we’ve got there.

And obviously, you know, stoked on what we have in Chile and now it’s just about execution.

Well, for a point of comparison for folks, like you just went through the parts per million for like Chile. What would, what do you expect the parts per million to be in like Texas?

Three to 500. Right. There you go.

Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s, uh, still, that’s a world class lithium resource. Uh, that’s what others have seen. Um, in some of their drilling, uh, in the smack over formation, it can be in the two hundreds that would still be a profitable project, a very profitable project. We start to hesitate or we, we won’t look at stuff that’s under a hundred.

Um, it’s, it’s technically feasible, but there’s obviously that inflection point when you’re moving so much water. Like if you have a bottle of water and you know, half of it is lithium versus a 10th, like. There’s just more lithium per unit volume, and if you have to move more water, that means you need bigger tanks and equipment and slower throughput, et cetera.

So three to 500 would be great in, in Texas. And you know, we’re honestly like blessed that we hit, you know, what we hit in Chile. That’s awesome.

My final question for you. I’ve asked you this before. But as you progressing, you’ve been learning as you’ve been going with this as well for an aspiring, like sustainable tech entrepreneur, what advice would you give them based on the journey you’ve had so far?

So a, if you’re aspiring, you just have to start, right? Like, I remember my first phone call, you know, like when I told my first person about the idea, nobody is going to steal your idea. Let me just promise you that, like to execute on an idea takes everything you have and you want to find people that are as passionate about your idea as you to join your team.

So you have to start, you have to start talking to people about whatever your idea is and kind of like there’s, there’s a medium between people doubting you, like saying like, Oh, that’ll never work. Or like, that’s a good idea. I had a lot of tailwind for, for myself, you know, everybody saw the rising curve, the demand curve for lithium going up.

You know, I explained how evaporation ponds were really inefficient that there had to be a better way to do it. Like I had a lot, people were like, that’s a good idea. That’s a good idea. Then you have to find the team to come join you. And I got lucky on that. I’m starting a new company, actually. I’m starting a new, a nuclear energy company.

Oh, wow. So I’m going through the same thing. Now I have a little bit more credibility under my belt now with energy X. Once you’re kind of a proven commodity, uh, it makes things a little bit easier, but I’m about to go through the same rodeo and find. You know, nuclear energy experts, uh, both in fission and in fusion, we’ll be looking to make micro and small modular nuclear reactors that are, that was my question.

Yes. I was assuming

it’s probably SMRs.

Yeah. SMR that’s small, small, modular reactor micro is a little bit smaller than that, but something in the order of 15 to 20 megawatt energy reactors that can power, you know, community of 20, 000 homes or an industrial plant. Like we would theoretically be able to, we will need approximately 20 megawatts to power one of our lithium plants.

So we could throw one of these modular react. I mean, otherwise we have to like, what we’re talking about right now is building a huge solar farm out in the middle of nowhere or building, um, substation and huge power lines out to The middle of nowhere to power our plant. Like it’s, it’s far away from everything.

Like you have to build infrastructure, like. We had to build a road, you know, stuff doesn’t exist out where the resources. So I think that nuclear is the Holy grail fusion, particularly being the Holy grail fission being something that is proven today that’s here and the problem is miniaturizing as opposed to uh, like a technical breakthrough. But with the forthcoming energy demands of AI, uh, data centers, heavy industry, electrification, all of that requires so much power and nuclear is really the only way forward. So I think that’s a huge opportunity that I want to be involved in and I’m starting from, from square one, you know, talking to people, uh, seeing what technology I think is going to be the winner will probably pivot just like we did an energy X a few times, but like, uh, it’s an exciting journey having an entrepreneurial mindset.

And, you know, I think Elon said it best. He said, it’s like staring into the abyss with no hope, that’s what, that’s what an entrepreneur’s journey is like. And you just have to embrace that. You just have to love that in order to succeed. It

also sounds like, don’t be afraid to pivot would be another piece of that.

There’s never

been a single successful company that is not pivoted. Yeah. Like if you’re an entrepreneur. Embrace pivot, think through how to message that thoughtfully to investors, stakeholders, partners, because they invested in you for one thing. And then as the entrepreneur, you come to the realization that.

The best thing for the company is to pivot. You’ve run through a thousand scenarios in your mind. And you know, that’s, that’s a leap of faith that you have to be willing to take as an entrepreneur. Like you have to be willing to fail, but you have to be willing to pivot. Right.

That’s fantastic. Good advice.

And, um, thanks again for taking the time to talk to me. It’s always great catching up. I’ve been keeping close tabs on what you guys are doing. I’m just loving where you guys are going with this. Thank you. So, uh, best of luck and thanks again. Thanks Matt.

So, our thanks to Teague for sitting down once again with Matt, and thanks to all of you for taking the time to watch or listen.

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