Editorial comment
The lithium market has come to an inflection point. Now that prices have rebounded into the mid US$20 000’s after a period of oversupply that depressed prices between 2022 – 2025 and squeezed producers across South America, Australia, and North America, the industry is now grappling with a more complicated question: not simply how to produce more lithium, but how to produce it more efficiently, more sustainably, and closer to the point of demand.
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Direct lithium extraction (DLE) has moved from a niche technical concept to one of the more closely watched trends in the sector. It has moved from what many believe to be impossible, to now inevitable. Traditional evaporation-pond methods common in South America’s Lithium Triangle take 12 – 18 months to convert brine into battery-grade material, with recovery rates that are often limited. DLE technologies compress that timeline substantially while improving recovery from brine resources that might otherwise be considered marginal. Proponents argue this shift could meaningfully change the economics of brine-based lithium production, particularly in water-scarce environments where evaporation ponds carry significant operational and environmental constraints.
EnergyX has positioned itself amongst the leaders of DLE across three geographies:
- In Chile, EnergyX’s Project Black Giant™ spans more than 100 000 acres near the Salar de Punta Negra in the Antofagasta region, with an in-situ resource of up to 9.8 million t of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE). The project has completed a pre-feasibility study with global engineering firm Worley, and is targeting initial production of 7500 tpy by 2028, scaling towards 150 000 tpy in later phases. Downstream, the company is also developing Litio Mecca™, a planned 500 000 t lithium mega-refinery in northern Chile intended to convert lithium chloride into battery-grade lithium carbonate from resources across the entire Lithium Triangle region (Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia).
- In the US, Project Lonestar™, located in the Smackover Formation near Texarkana, has grown to more than 47 500 acres of mineral rights. Now with a DLE demonstration plant, described as the largest DLE facility in the country at 250 tpy of LCE, operating since March 2026, EnergyX looks to build a 50 000 tpy commercial plant by 2029.
- Lastly, in Utah, EnergyX has signed a non-binding MOU with Compass Minerals to build Project Powder Hound™, a planned 30 000 tpy LCE plant. Spanning over 55 000 acres near the Great Salt Lake, Compass quotes the resource at 2.4 million t of LCE. First phase production of 10 000 tpy is targeted for 2030.
Underpinning these projects is EnergyX’s GET-Lit™ DLE technology platform, a suite of adsorption, solvent extraction, and membrane technologies developed to treat a wide range of global brine chemistries, and integrated into comprehensive flow sheets bespoke to each project.
This kind of technological and geographic diversification reflects a broader industry trend: established energy and automotive companies, wary of overreliance on any single country or extraction method, have shown increasing interest in supply and technology agreements tied to DLE developers, even as many such projects remain in pilot or early commercial stages. While skeptics claim that DLE has yet to be proven at scale, this has now been debunked by Eramet building a commercial DLE plant in Argentina. Cost structures required to fully displace conventional brine or hard-rock mining are real and growing. Financing and in some cases integration with existing operations remain as the only bottleneck.
The broader pricing environment continues to weigh on sentiment, with lithium carbonate and hydroxide prices rising, but still well below their 2022 peaks. This has led to some delays and cancellations among higher-cost producers, while renewing focus on technologies like DLE that promise lower operating costs over time. Whether DLE takes over the industry at commercial scale remains an open question the industry will likely spend the next several years answering, as projects like Black Giant, Lonestar, and Powder Hound move from feasibility and pilot stages towards full production.
