Lilac has raised $145 million from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, other investors
America’s biggest saltwater lake may hold a key to the country’s energy future. This summer, a California startup plans to start construction on a project to suck up water from the Great Salt Lake to extract one of its many valuable minerals: lithium, a critical ingredient in the rechargeable batteries used in electric vehicles.
The water will then be reinjected back into the lake, which Lilac Solutions says addresses concerns about the damaging effects of mineral extraction. At its peak, Lilac says it will use a series of pipes to suck up 80,000 gallons of water a minute to harvest the mineral. The company plans to eventually produce up to 20,000 tons of battery-grade lithium a year at its site in northern Utah, located among fields of cattle and pickleweed.
The effort is one of dozens of projects across the U.S. racing to build up a domestic supply of lithium and other battery minerals, with adoption of electric vehicles expected to boom as part of the country’s transition to cleaner energy.
The Biden administration is dedicating billions of dollars to strengthening the U.S. battery supply chain and reducing reliance on China, which dominates the global production of battery minerals.
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