CERAWeek: Opportunities and challenges for the US lithium battery supply chain

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Eklavya Gupte:

Welcome to Energy Evolution. I'm Eklavya Gupte, and we've just wrapped up an exciting few days from CERAWeek in Houston, Texas, and my co-host, Taylor Kuykendall, still has a few more interviews to share from the event.

Taylor Kuykendall:

That's right, Eklavya. CERAWeek is one of the largest and most influential energy conferences in the world. It brings together world leaders from various sectors and across the world of politics, and we still have some more interviews to share with you.

All right. So I am live here at CERAWeek with Emilie Bodoin, Pure Lithium Founder and CEO. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Emilie Bodoin:

Thank you.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Awesome. Emilie, tell us what is Pure Lithium? What do you guys do?

Emilie Bodoin:

Pure Lithium is on a mission to commercialize the lithium metal battery, and this is a battery that is 10x more powerful than lithium-ion, and it was actually invented before the lithium-ion battery. It was invented in 1977 at ExxonMobil, of all places, by Nobel Laureate, Professor M. Stanley Whittingham.

So this technology is a step change from today's battery, and we are on a mission to solve all the associated problems with the technology and get it to market.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Excellent. And you have a big announcement today from the DOE. I don't want to spoil it. Tell us what's happening.

Emilie Bodoin:

Oh, wow. Well, we're going to work with Argonne National Lab in partnership to take some waste lithium metal. So lithium metal is a byproduct of some industrial processes that happen in the US, and I just need a tiny little speck of it, about 20 microns of it on a beautiful piece of copper substrate for the anode in the battery. So if we can create a closed-loop system right here in the United States using a waste product to make the most important component of a next-generation battery, I'm all for it.

Taylor Kuykendall:

I wonder, we hear so much about needing this domestic supply chain. Can you kind of maybe, in your opinion, why do we not have that here in the US already? What was the history of that?

Emilie Bodoin:

Oh my God.

Taylor Kuykendall:

And are we on the way to fix it?

Emilie Bodoin:

My favorite topic. We're not ever going to fix it. All right, so 77% of the most important component in today's battery is graphite. It is all produced in China.

So we were asleep at the wheel. We literally sleptwalk in this country through the battery revolution. Two of the Nobel laureates for that battery were in the United States of America and yet we did not develop a supply chain, we didn't fit together and make a long-term plan for batteries at all. So there is no supply chain in the United States of America, and batteries have complicated supply chain that is very, very, very global. Right? It's very dispersed.

So one way to turn on batteries online quickly is to develop batteries with materials that you can use that are local. And our battery uses lithium from all sorts of available brines, but it also uses vanadium on the cap outside. And lithium and vanadium coincidentally are co-located in many favorable jurisdictions like the US, like Canada, like South America, and even in Saudi Arabia. So you can start to envision these hubs coming online and completely displacing the lithium-ion battery.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Yeah. I wonder, given the kind of changing political climate we saw in 2024 to 2025, does that worry you about how people might be thinking about incentivizing electric vehicles and batteries or do you think that that demand is just going to keep going anyway?

Emilie Bodoin:

I think that incentives that don't, or the lack of incentives don't bother me at all because I think that they're somewhat useless. I think they're useless because if we can't have a battery that is cost-effective without incentives and tax breaks, nobody's going to buy it. So the technology really needs to stand on its own.

So at Pure Lithium we have been conscious of costs since day one. We have incredibly aggressive cost targets. We have a lot of brilliant scientists, and sometimes they'll come to me with this amazing chemistry that's going to work and it could have unobtainium in it, we won't use it. Everything goes through a very long cost model process before we even touch it.

So I think that the way that we look at building a battery, is it just because we want to be insulated from incentives and we want to be insulated from fads? Electric vehicle adoption is complicated for many reasons, charging is one of them and charging infrastructure.

The great city of Boston can't do a power upgrade to a building so I can turn on more batteries within a reasonable period of time. What's reasonable? Under four years. So it's going to take a long time.

So the absence of incentives doesn't push me back at all because, again, everybody needs a phone for consumer electronics, batteries aren't going anywhere. And a lot of these incentives hurt. I have friends that have started companies based on what they can get out of the IRA. And guess what? If that isn't there, then their economics are not particularly sound.

I think a concern is that what we... Of course nobody really knew what was going to happen with this administration in the second go-round, but I don't think I'm alone in saying that I did not anticipate the stock market to drop so much so quickly.

And this is a problem for investors, because when investors have a lot of money in their portfolios, they're generally happier and generally happier to write checks en masse. When they start to pull back and when public companies, it could be strategic, start to pull back because their stock price is plummeting and their boards are risk-averse, it just makes it a very challenging place.

Taylor Kuykendall:

How exposed is your company specifically, but also the energy generally, to maybe some of this trade talk going back and forth? I hesitate to say anything about a specific policy because it's changing so often. By the time we get this podcast out it might be a completely different situation. But how is that impacting the industry?

Emilie Bodoin:

Well, we have a collaborator, E3, in Canada, and we just firmly assure them that we support them as a sovereign nation and have a few giggles about it. But I mean, I don't know, it's just going to be really interesting to see what happens.

Theoretically, the tariffs are only good for me because we use two US materials, lithium and vanadium. So bring on the tariffs, it's just going to help us, right? But at the same time, I feel that it's very short-sighted, because America cannot snap its fingers and turn on a domestic supply chain. It can take 25 years to build a mine.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Yeah.

Emilie Bodoin:

So in the meantime, if we actually wanted to have a battery industry in the US, getting materials from where they're available is not a bad idea. If we can't get materials, then we're never going to have a battery supply chain in the US.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Yeah. Yeah. And I definitely want to go back to something you said there about investment and how people are getting a little scared because the stock market's moving. Tell me how is that changing how you talk to investors? Are you having to shift your pitch a little bit or what are you telling them?

Emilie Bodoin:

Well, I mean, I'm a very direct Midwesterner at heart and pretty blunt, so there's no sugarcoating it. Just really the pitch is more like the time is now for these private dollars, because anyone interested in clean energy that's waiting for the government, if you firmly believe in the investment thesis that we're going to have batteries and need batteries and need these materials, I'm going to quote Robert Friedland, our investor, "Everything we see is either mined or grown." So if we're really going to have this, then now this is a time for your private capital to really go far.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Because I didn't want to be too pessimistic, so one of the questions I want to ask is what are some of the big opportunities you see in 2025? What are the reasons to be optimistic?

Emilie Bodoin:

Well, wow, I've never been so optimistic. For us, we're finally to the point where we're really scaling the company and the technology, and it's just so exciting to see the results and to see the data and to see the team get so excited about actually making this happen.

I'm optimistic because our goal is very obtainable. It's very ambitious, but it is obtainable. If you have the two main components of the battery in all sorts of different countries, there is no reason why this lithium metal battery cannot supplant lithium-ion just like the vacuum tube and transistor and semiconductors.

So I don't know. For me, I get more and more enthused every day, but there are challenges like in any business. Every CEO at some point in their life struggles with how are we going to raise money? What is the right way to raise money? Et cetera. But you just have to get really, really creative about it.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Absolutely. And you mentioned the incentives weren't that valuable, but I'm wondering too, is there any regulatory changes you would like to see that would make doing business in the US easier for your sector?

Emilie Bodoin:

Not particularly. I think we just need to get smarter. There's some tests around battery safety that are really outdated, and the industry's not that old, that need to be fixed.

But from a policy standpoint, I mean, I think that we need to be very careful with our national laboratories, because as we take a chainsaw and start to gut the government, no, all sorts of things could happen with the national laboratories.

In the Trump administration 2016 everyone was concerned about that. But the lab directors, they went to DC, they lobbied. And the labs went up with quite a bit of money for national security and for cybersecurity. But if the administration just says, "National labs, you cannot touch a battery anymore," then that is definitely a concern. I think it would be very good if we had some checks and balances on what the national labs can do.

I'm very afraid of going in and laying off 50% of people that work at national labs, because these are nation's treasures. These are our top scientists. The man that separated uranium-435 from 438, which effectively won World War II, still to this day has an office at Argonne National Lab.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Oh, wow.

Emilie Bodoin:

You lay these people off and they go, we lose this incredible force. And these policies at national labs, they really are impactful.

I'll give you the example of Clinton and nuclear proliferation. I'm very much in favor of nuclear proliferation, but when he was president, the national labs had to stop working on molten salt technology, because it was in that nuclear bucket. Well, it's also how primary metal gets made. So we've lost that capability since his presidency. You try to find one scientist in America that knows how to actually make molten salts and work with molten salts, there are about five of them.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Wow.

Emilie Bodoin:

Yeah. Everything's nanoed now, but nano, yeah, I mean, but which no one can manufacture at scale. So I would like to see the national labs stay very well-funded. That's a big core of our technology here.

Taylor Kuykendall:

And I always like to kind of end an interview with a big broad question. And the one I'm kind of wondering is there's all these stories out there, obviously as a podcast that comes out weekly we're looking for them all the time. Do you think there's an energy transition story out there that people are missing out on or an energy sector story that people just haven't really paid much attention to in 2025 and they should be?

Emilie Bodoin:

I think a good reality check, somebody like TIME Magazine or someone needs to do a story, we're sleepwalking into a natural resource crisis right now, and really start to look at what's available and what's possible and what's not and be very direct about it, because all of this nonsense about having a lithium-ion battery manufacturing arm in the United States, it will never, ever, ever happen.

There was a company called Northvolt that tried to copy-paste China in Sweden and that did not go very well at all for them. I mean, they did things like didn't qualify equipment before they had it turned on, right? You need to be incredibly smart. And the Chinese have done an amazing job bringing all of this online and prioritize it. We're not going to catch up to them.

The story is we need to leapfrog. We need to leapfrog technology and use new technologies if we're actually going to get ahead. And if we're not, we can pretty much say goodbye to batteries here. The US military has 30 days of batteries stockpiled, that's it. And they all come from China. So we kind of have made this bed and lied in it. That's a story.

People should start to get a little bit scared and really think about the things that they hold onto because they all, all of the materials and everything, we are not a primary producer of natural resources here anymore.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Wow. Well, thank you so much for joining Energy Evolution. Thank you for sharing those insights.

Emilie Bodoin:

Thank you.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Awesome. And enjoy the rest of CERAWeek.

All right. Well, I'm live here at CERAWeek. I'm speaking with International Battery Metals' new CEO, Iris Jancik. Last year IBAT launched the first full-scale commercial direct lithium extraction operations in North America, and that was also the first modular DLE commercial operation in the world.

Can you tell me, for any of our listeners that aren't familiar with lithium at all, what do we mean when we say direct lithium extraction?

Iris Jancik:

Yes, very good question, and thank you very much for having me. So direct lithium extraction actually comes as a new solution for extracting lithium, producing lithium, as opposed to the traditional methods of mining hard rock and evaporation ponds, which is how today most of the lithium across the world mines its lithium.

Mostly in Australia, Argentina, Chile, some Africa, and then most of that is shipped for processing in China, having China basically control more than 60 or 70, depends who you ask, percent of the lithium in the world.

And so wanting to obviously improve the environmental sustainability of lithium as well as having domestic production and reliability of the supply chain in the US, DLE has been something that people have been trying to solve for the past decade. It has been known that there are untouched, untapped resources in the US. The Smackover is the most famous one, but there are definitely others where the lithium is actually embedded in the brine, underground subsurface aquifers where the brine contains different lithium concentrations depending on where you are.

And so to be able to extract the lithium directly from the brine without having to build the mine, which obviously takes about 15 years, billions of dollars, and has a huge disruptive effect on the environment, this allows for much smaller footprint, quicker deployment, much lower CapEx and OpEx, and of course a lot more environmentally-friendly.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Yeah. I'm wondering too, because you had some great pictures when I came over and watched the presentation you gave before, and for our listeners this is an audio-only format, kind of give us an idea of what this operation looks like, its size? Would you even know it was a lithium extraction plant if you came across it?

Iris Jancik:

The plant itself that we have built about three years ago, it was actually meant for a project in Chile with very high lithium concentrations. That project never materialized, the plant actually never left the US. And so it was stored for a couple of years until we mobilized it to the US Mag site, like you mentioned, last summer, and actually operated it at full scale.

The plant itself is a water treatment plant, and that's what it is. Most of the equipment is very basic commodity-type equipment, the membranes and RO and nanofiltrations, but of course it contains the heart, which is the direct lithium process, and that is where our technology, fully patent, both the media and the process actually where the DLE takes place, where the direct lithium extraction actually takes place.

The plant itself is modular, meaning it's all skid-based, so basically containers without the walls. So 40-foot containers that are loaded on a truck when needed to deploy and assembled almost like a LEGO.

The plant itself, because it has that flexibility of how you set up the modules, in a very comfortable setting, obviously allowing for safety and operational purposes, really is less than a football field. So I think that's something that everybody can grasp a picture of what it is.

And like I said, most of it looks pretty simple. We actually are very proud of the very elegant and straightforward design of the plant. And again, the magic happens in those columns. This specific plant has 12 of them, 12 three-foot diameter columns, and that is where the lithium itself is actually extracted.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Yeah. I wanted, to what degree, because we have these plans, we have some lithium resources in the US, I mean, with technology like this, can we handle all of our lithium needs ourselves here or what's the, I guess, the outlook look like for this? I don't know.

Iris Jancik:

Oh, absolutely. We have vast resources in the US. These things have been mapped and studied by the universities and by the academic bodies for a while, several decades actually.

I came by a study that's 30 years old of an area in New England that is rich of lithium, and it was recognized and mapped out 30 years ago. Again, there was just no way to actually extract it, and that is where all the technologies actually come into play.

So there are definitely vast resources. They need to be tapped into, they need to be drilled into, they need to be tested and sampled, but we won't be able to meet the lithium demand without them. Is it enough for the US? I don't know. That also depends of course on the growth of data centers and the growth of EV car supply and demand. But without it, we absolutely will not be able to meet those demands.

Taylor Kuykendall:

And I know every investor kind of arrives where they're at with different stories, kind of different theses and how they're thinking about things. But I wonder if we take a very simple kind of view of like I think EVs are going to explode because I drive one and I like it, and I know I need lithium for that, so I want to invest. But then I start hearing things like Trump administration doesn't like EVs. Should I be worried? What do you say to comfort a investor who's hearing someone's in a lot of power saying that they're not a fan of electric vehicles?

Iris Jancik:

I think that eventually it will have to happen. It could change the pace and zigzag a little bit. And even with this administration, depending on the day, depending on the month, we're seeing that things are changing and shifting. I think it is inevitable and we should prepare for it.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Makes sense. And this is asking to solve a big problem. One of the things I've heard a lot in regard to mining here at CERAWeek this week is people keep saying some of the things you just mentioned about kind of taking a longer-term view. But as we all know, a lot of the way that the kind of system in the US is set up is quarterly reports and how much have you made for me in the past couple weeks versus the long term?

Is there a solution to that? How do you get people to start thinking more about like, "Hey, we're going to need lithium in 10 years and we need to invest"? I mean, I think in the past it's kind of been like the government stepped up and filled that role sometimes, but is there a way to get maybe investors thinking that way instead too?

Iris Jancik:

So first of all, like I mentioned before, the big players with the long-term goals, those are players obviously that have additional and much, much bigger revenue streams, so they can afford to look at lithium as a long-term investment and they won't need it to move the needle quarterly, right? They have that long-term view.

But I think there's also some misconception as to how quickly DLE projects become profitable. And in our models, we're seeing returns on investment in less than four years.

And so our system that has been proven, and we have operated it for a significant amount of time, has given us the ability to really analyze and then guarantee a very low OpEx. And so with less than $1,000 per ton of operational costs for the DLE, even at 10 or $11,000 per ton lithium prices, it makes sense economically.

Taylor Kuykendall:

And so if you talk to a miner or someone that wants to tap into this resource, what do you still hear is maybe why they might be dragging their feet? If you can get your return on capital that fast, is it because they think there's going to be a permitting hurdle or is it just because [inaudible 00:19:41]? What's their concern left if they can get their money back that fast?

Iris Jancik:

Nobody wants to be the first, right?

Taylor Kuykendall:

Yeah. [inaudible 00:19:47].

Iris Jancik:

Everybody wants to see what their neighbor's doing and what the big guys are doing and what the other players are doing. So I think it's a matter of personal risk mitigation. And again, nobody wants to be the guinea pig, but whoever will will definitely be successful. Hopefully it'll start with the second and third and then they'll jump aboard.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Well, and that's [inaudible 00:20:09]. Are you getting a sense the industry is moving towards that? Is there a shift? Because obviously the lithium mine has been going for a long time and a lot of people have been working in this space for a minute, but it does seem like there's been a lot of buzz lately in the last couple years. And I'm just wondering, does it feel like maybe you're in a different conversation now than you might've been if you were trying to pitch this three years ago?

Iris Jancik:

Absolutely. In general for the market and specifically for IBAT. For IBAT, we are at a point where our technology is proven on commercial scale. We're not talking about successful pilots in three-inch beakers. We're talking about successful extraction in three-foot columns.

And so we feel that we are very, very well-positioned to be able to share that data and stand behind it. We've ran thousands and thousands of cycles on our media, have seen zero degradation. And so we feel very confident in our position in the market.

And as a market in general, which you asked about, definitely we're seeing pickup in the buzz. Again, the funds aren't necessarily there, resource development is there, but it is the big players that are leading this charge. But there is a lot of interest. And I think the fact also that the EV vehicle's growth isn't where people thought it would be is kind of pushing lithium a little bit down the road. But like I said, it is inevitable. And if it takes another six months or another 12 months, it will boom.

Taylor Kuykendall:

And last question I just want to ask about for international battery now is what's something that, obviously you accomplished a lot the last couple years, it's a big deal to roll out a new technology like this, what's the next thing? What's on the horizon? What are you focusing on this year?

Iris Jancik:

So one of the biggest challenges that we're hearing, and definitely in CERAWeek this week I've heard it said over and over again and in different aspects of the energy market, is scalability and the challenge of really be able to provide a technology, a solution that is viable at scale. That is probably the biggest, most important milestones that IBAT has achieved with the US Mag plant.

And so we want to leverage that of course and jump into resource validations with partners, demonstrate the technology again at commercial scale, and give our partners and potential clients that confidence to go in to build a full-scale 20,000 ton a year type plans. So that is definitely our focus, to take what we've learned and what we have accomplished this past summer and build on it to real commercial-scale commercial extraction of lithium.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Excellent. Sounds like a lot of work to do, and good luck.

Iris Jancik:

Thank you very much.

Taylor Kuykendall:

Thank you so much for going on the podcast. I hope to have you back again soon.

All right, listeners, thank you so much for listening to the latest episode of Energy Evolution. I want to give a special shout out to our incredible podcast team members. I am once again Taylor Kuykendall, but other people behind this podcast include Dan Testa, Camilla Naschert, Christopher Coats, Karen Willenbrecht, and our wonderful agency partner, the 199.

To stay up to date with our upcoming episodes, be sure to subscribe to Energy Evolution on your favorite platform. If you have any ideas for future themes or guests, we'd love to hear from you. All you have to do is shoot us an email at energyevolution@spglobal.com.

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