Lithium Is a Team Game: Faster, Cleaner | Martin Deetz, Tirtha Chatterjee, Kurt Bogaard, DuPont

Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (00:01): Welcome back to the winner's circle, everybody. I'm Russ Fordyce. We are here today, a special edition at the DePont headquarters in Wilmington, Del Delaware, with the sustainability squad team leaders who brought us some great innovations this year and award winners. So welcome to I'm gonna have to redo this. You don't have to stop, we'll just we'll redo it. I gotta go say your name one more time. Deep touch at OG. Tirtha. Just first names. I don't do last names because nobody can. Turtha and Martin. Tirtha, Martin, and Kurt. Alright, Kurt, we're restarting. Tirtha, Martin, and Kurt. Alright. Here we go. Welcome back to the Winner Circle, everybody. Today we're here for a special edition with the DuPont team. There's a sustainability squad that just won the 2026 Sustainability Awards. We're here today with Martin, Tirtha, and on the phone with us is Kurt. These are the guys that are actually making Lithium and the cleaning of lithium and the production of lithium a lot cleaner and more sustainable. So welcome guys and congratulations on the award. Well, thank you very much, Ross. So before we dig in too deep, tell us kind of this division of DePont you're in is in the water solutions group, and you guys really have developed this process specifically for lithium, but give us kind of that elevator pitch of what this is. Sure, I can start. So with what we do in water solutions is really develop separation technology. And separations can be all sorts of things from water purification to life sciences and pharmaceutical manufacturing. In this case, making lithium is a real separation challenge. It comes out as a very complex mixture of different ions and water, including a little bit of lithium. And so you have to use our separation technologies to remove the impurities and really get to the lithium, that's simple. And this was this was an exercise that you guys have been developing for a long time. And from what I understand from reading the material is this is something you guys actually do from end to end. And that was very unique in the business. Is a lot there's a lot of vendors in this space that do, you know, kind of one section, filtration or or the other parts of this process. You guys are doing an end-to-end solution. Tell us a little bit about that, Tirtha. Yeah. So in DuPont Water Solution, what we are trying to do to bring a Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (02:27): Holistic solution to the entire problem. And direct lithium extraction is a team game. As we are a team, three of us present here, but we are backed by a large team. Similarly, there are several unit operations that works in an cohesion to bring lithium out of it. And my favorite analogy is from American football. When lithium coming from the pond or brine source, it has a lot of impurities, solids, etc. And then first it goes to a pretreatment. The pretreatment is kind of your offensive line that is protecting your downstream. Further, there is sorbent, where that is the main job of extracting lithium out of that brine, which I like to say that the quarterback of the team. And finally, once sorbent clean. And extract lithium, then there are a lot of membrane-based technologies like nanofiltration, reverse osmosis, and low salt rejecting reverse osmosis. That's kind of a wide decipher that takes you to the sprint at the touchdown. So, this is this is where DuPont water solution is unique because I think that we are the only technical company who developed the entire product portfolio, 20 plus product, to take the lithium from the brine source. And deliver the very concentrated lithium chloride solution for conversion strip. And and this is super important now as we get into EVs, as we use more batteries and data centers and everything else, right? This is the the lithium is the core element in all of these batteries. And I can't imagine that demand is going down and we need better supplies and more domestic supplies. So Kurt, yeah, tell us a little bit about kind of the domestic supply and kind of what goes into all this lithium extraction for EVs. Kurt Bogaard (04:24): Yeah. So so ultimately, lithium is a key element to the electrification of the globe that push towards sustainability by bringing on more electric vehicles. That's probably the biggest single source of where lithium is used today. But also data center storage uses a tremendous amount of battery power. In fact, it's that amount of s that amount of bat lithium usage is increasing even more rapidly than electric vehicles. And then finally, the place where lithium's always has been for a long time has been in your personal devices like your cell phone. And so lithium is really key to developing these long-lasting batteries that make electric vehicles possible. And in and right now it's mostly automotives, but eventually it will become boats and planes. And and so the need for lithium continues to increase. obviously there's even a bigger push now with the price of of fossil fuels where they're at. so as we see the increase in electric vehicle usage and the increase in data centers, we see more need for lithium. And that's core to to to to the changing market. Just for example, in China year over year, 70% of new cars are electric vehicles now. The numbers are much less in North America and in Europe, but but but that transition is happening at varying paces all over the world. And there's the world needs more and more and more lithium to support it, which is why there's more and more exploration and new methods. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (05:46): yeah, I I too. I told my kids years ago to get into battery recycling. None of them listened to me, unfortunately. you know, the the batteries, this lithium process you guys have really industrialized. Why was it so hard to get it to this kind of industrialized state, especially, you know, kind of outside of China and outside of, you know, kind of in the Western nations and South America? Well, one thing to think about is that Brian's Kurt Bogaard (05:53): Yeah. Yep, absolutely. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (06:15): The brines are th the salty waters that the lithium is dissolved in are very different in different parts of the world. There's brines in North America, there's brines in South America, Europe, China, oil field produced water has lithium in it. So everybody's trying to pull out that little trace of lithium that's in all of these complex waters. And it's very difficult to to do that one at a time because In these different places, the impurities are different, the concentrations are different. And so having to develop an end-to-end process or or different tools that can do these different separations allows us to take one brine, understand its composition, figure out how to do these steps and and remove the lithium and purify, refine that stream as much as possible. And then Go to another Brian and start over from scratch and and use these same tools, maybe in a different order and a different way, to come to that same conclusion. This market seems very similar to the kind of the fracking market of kind of you've got a very volatile kind of commodity of lithium and lithium prices vary so much that it you know, depending on where you are, it's a very different process. How does that market fluctuation in price kind of change the way that you guys do business or maybe your customers do business? Kurt Bogaard (07:40): Yeah, I think Yeah, I I think the first thing to realize is that there's the DLE is the newest methodology of getting lithium from the ground. There's also solid rock mining, which uses a lot of chemistry to break down the rocks. And then there's evaporation, which can take twelve to eighteen months to let the other things evaporate away from the lithium. So we we there's lots of different ways. The reason that DLE has been developed is because it's first of all more efficient. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (07:40): Maybe Kurt, you could take that. Kurt Bogaard (08:08): you can get the lithium out in maybe a day instead of many days or or months. But it also puts they takes the water that you're basically filtering the lithium from and then puts it back into the environment clean. So you're you're you're you're not actually using a lot of water. It's a pretty sustainable process. And and and and so what I would say is that that that as the market moves more and more towards DLE as a as a primary source of lithium, those other methods won't go away. But but they need to find more and more efficient ways to get more and more lithium. And as they do that, we need to continue to find ways to further refine the process, make it more efficient, make the yields better. and and and in terms of the lithium price, it is really important because the process of extracting lithium is expensive. The price for lithium itself is pretty volatile. And so what we saw maybe a year ago in the market was a lowering of the price because there was A little bit of a glut of supply. And that made it so that projects slowed down. And now what we see is the price of lithium has gone up again. And that will be the steady state. That that downward that downward pressure was a short term impact on the market. We know what the demand curve looks like over time. And so more methods are necessary. And the biggest thing is just making sure that the companies we're working with are able to bridge those gaps if the price fluctuates a lot. Ultimately, though, yeah. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (09:33): Well that that that Kurt Bogaard (09:37): No, no, ul ultimately though, it it's a matter of just making sure that we build the most efficient systems possible because that can help to bridge some of those pricing some of that pricing volatility. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (09:49): Well this is it's it's such a massive investment and you guys are building, you know, as you said, you've you've got different brinds and different solutions for almost every every plant, I would imagine, in every part of the country. How d how do you go to a customer and kind of convince them to make that investment kind of is it is it a guessing game, or do you kind of know after doing field trials and everything else that it's it's gonna work? it's not a guessing game. In fact, I will add one point. From your previous question, direct lithium extraction, which is a new emerging technology, it's not only a game changer, it's actually bringing everyone on the same level. Initially, when we have hard rock mining or evaporation-based process, it could be applicable only to very high lithium resources. Otherwise, it was not economically feasible. So it was only for hard rock in Australia. Or high content lithium brine in Chile, Argentina, those regions. But direct lithium extraction can work to much lower lithium content in the resource. And that is why you hear that smack over brine in North America, geothermal brine in Europe, those are now economically feasible to extract lithium because of this technology. So that is why a new end user. Or new customers are coming up because they have lithium. In fact, one of the lithium resources is oil and gas produced water, very little amount of lithium, but they are having this water for earlier days of oil exploration. Correct. So, this all water was going to waste before, but now there are companies in Texas who are extracting lithium out of that water. So it may look like that we are. Pushing a lot, but it is not like that. I believe that with the right lithium price, we are going to reach to an ecosystem where all the resource owners they understand the value of their resource and then they know technology available. DuPont is one of the providers and there are other providers, but there are technology available where lithium can be extracted economically. And one thing please note that. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (12:18): Operating cost of direct lithium extraction is lower than evaporation or even the hard rock mining. It's gotta be just in the resources of time, right? You're talking about going from weeks and months to days or hours or whatever you guys are. Walk us through the development of this kind of of the whole process, right? I you've you've got you've got equipment, you have processes, you've got solvents, you've got all sorts of different things in here. Walk us a little bit through kind of the development life cycle of of this pro of this whole process. Yeah, so often it it starts with the customers, right? We we engage with the the resource owners, the owners that own the mine and the and the companies that work with them. And typically we start with you know, initial conversation. What does your brine look like? What are you trying to accomplish? And and from that understanding what is in the brine, we now go back to our tools and we use lab resources where we'll test. Some of that composition of brine. We have models that can, you know, computationally model what our processes or our technologies will do to that brine. And so all along the way, we take our, you know, typically a pretreatment step, that's our ultrafiltration, or some of our nanofiltration membranes. We go into a sorbent, which is a really selective material that can pull traces of lithium out of. very high concentration of other impurities. And then either even further refinement using membrane technologies. And at the end of the day, we concentrate that up, squeeze all that water back out, so that that water could either go back into the ground or back into the process. And and at the end of the day, the customer gets what they want. We we're trying to sell products, we get what we want. The earth gets what the earth wants is the water back. And it turns into a really sustainable win win. Well the the water is really kind of the hidden constraint in a lot of markets, I would imagine. I would imagine you can't get to a lot of places where maybe there is lithium but there's not enough water to produce it in the old methods. Does this kind of open up new markets for you and new minds for for investors and consumers? so yeah, go ahead, Clark. Kurt Bogaard (14:33): I I can I can I I can take that a little bit. We're improving our technology, as that technology improves, it's enabling companies to consider sources that were not feasible in the past. So, you know, small pockets of water stored near oil basically oil rigs across Texas would not have been an efficient place to go. But companies are looking at extracting that now. Or when there's a really low percentage of lithium that might not have been worth it in the past. The newer technology has made that more competitive to go after. And and so as as you look at what the trends in the future are for lithium, I think it's a combination of the technology continuing to get better, but that technology enabling new sources to become viable financially lithium. And I think that's kind of where the market will go over time and where the where where we'll see the continued evolution. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (15:29): Where where do you see gu see this technology going in five years? I mean, this this direct lithium extraction is relatively new. How do you see this evolving in the next five, ten years as this market continues to explode? one thing we definitely see that traditional evaporation-based miner or hard rock miner, they are also looking towards direct lithium extraction. specifically. hard rock mining cannot be replaced by direct lithium extraction, but most of the evaporation-based miners are seriously looking into lithium-based direct lithium extraction because that expedites their process timing and efficiency. And as the new resources coming up, lot of oil and g oil and gas giants they are also getting interested in direct lithium extraction. So what we see now. since the lithium price is back, there is capital coming and more and prod projects are moving forward to like definitive feasibility study, or even some of those are moving towards the installation and commissioning. Yeah, and one other point, I I think we sort of touched on this, but this is really clear. I I want to make this really clear. What what direct lithium extraction does is it accelerates the supply chain. So the traditional ways and that they s we talked about of brine pond evaporation, it's really what it sounds like. You just put a whole bunch of salty water in a big lake and wait twelve to eighteen months, depending on the weather, when you can get that lithium out. Scoop it out. That doesn't help when, you know, the car EV companies on the phone say, I need more batteries and sorry, the supply chain's twelve to eighteen months. Direct lithium extraction from the time that Brian starts in it until it's done with this process is a matter of hours instead of months. Right. And what that can do to your whole supply chain is really is really wise. And the to me, the fact that you're using so much little water and putting it back is really, as we were talking earlier, the market opener. I mean, it I think you'll find new mines all over the place where this this technology is gonna be feasible. It's Kurt Bogaard (17:31): Yeah. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (17:51): It's a lot like the fracking market. It really reminds me of that. We never thought we'd be getting, you know, oil and gas out of, you know, shale rock, but it becomes feasible with you know with pricing, especially in in the United States. as you guys went to develop kind of the scale of this, I imagine you ran into some challenges going from kind of lab, you know, lab processes in into full scale development. What surprised you as you kind of took this up market and got it into your first kind of customer deployment? I think Martin already mentioned that and we learned it in hard way that no two brands are alike. So for a long time in early days, we are trying to create a single solution that will that will cater a large group of brand source or customers. And later we found that probably it is not possible or not something that we can do overnight. So if you Know that we have two different types of solvents. One is for low temperature brine resource and one for high temperature brine resource. Similarly, for nanofiltration, we have two or three different types of nanofiltration element depending on what type of impurity we have. So that is one of the challenges and learning we adopted during our path. That generally we try to bring a single solution for a single problem. But in this case the problem is so vast, we figured out that we need to bring multiple solutions because a single solution won't be able to serve the entire global customer need. Kurt Bogaard (19:27): Yeah. And and and I would add to that, you were discussing how long the process that it's a complicated process. And I think that both the end user and and and DuPont really understand that every situation is unique. So what happens is there's usually bench scale testing where we had a really small scale test some of these things, and then we make it bigger into a pilot. And then it goes bigger into full commercialization. So it's not like you come in and and decide, well, we have that, we have, we know what this brine is made up of. It'll work. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (19:34): And Kurt Bogaard (19:57): There's a lot of trial and error and a lot of testing that goes into developing the solution over a period of time to ensure that it works because of the large investment you were discussing. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (20:13): What what does that timeline look like when you're talking to a customer that you know to go from kind of you know in the lab testing the water for the first to see the feasibility to kind of going into that pilot and then going into for full s full scale commercial? Kurt Bogaard (20:18): Yeah. It yeah, between bet between financial viability and all the testing that needs to be done, I I think timelines can be as short as a few years, but we also see projects that are on timelines that are closer to 10 years. So it it depends on the complexity, where it's located and and and a lot of other factors. but the timelines can be relatively long because of that step by step evaluation process to bring the right solution and optimize it. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (20:54): Now you guys won for the sustainability squad. This wasn't a single person's effort. This was a team effort. Walk us through a little bit about the different roles that team members played and kind of the importance of that. Yeah, so some of the people that couldn't be here today are because they're in the different regions. We have people in Europe, people in South America, people in Asia, and and the group here, as well as functions of technical, marketing, communications, all had to come together to One develop the solution, communicate it to the customers, right? We have as Dupont, we have a global reach, but that doesn't help if you're a local person stuck in a in in a region that you don't have direct technical access, right? So we put technical people into those regions so the customers have a technical support close by. And so between the development of the products, developing of The solutions, the customer engagement, the understanding of where to play and and how to approach the market from marketing and the communications to get the message out is really where it all come together. Yeah, it's it's an amazing feat. As you go in to measure the impact, how do you how do you even start to look at the differences between kind of the old methodology and the new methodology if you're going to you know to do a kind of a lifecycle assessment or or even if you're going into a customer to explain to them kind of the impact? Kurt Bogaard (22:21): Yeah, I I mean ultimately yeah ul ultimately what I would say is that we're our customers are also very sophisticated, right? So to say that we're helping to make these decisions for them, we're certainly helping them to make the project feasible, but they've oftentimes done really in-depth financial and and metalar metallurgical analysis beforehand. And and and and so you know, they've really assessed whether they think it can be financially viable. And then our job oftentimes is to make sure Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (22:22): How d how do you do that from a numbers perspective? Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (22:28): Kurt, you want that one? Kurt Bogaard (22:51): That we can meet their requirements to make it viable. but one of the things that we see happening a lot that is another trend we see in the market is really trying to integrate DLE into the overall process that a that one of these operators is using. So one example is going right from the the the water that's left over from oil extraction and immediately extracting lithium from it. Others are building something for lithium, but then also extracting cobalt. And finding ways to make those min mines do to make these processes and these these systems do more than just lithium is another way that they can become more viable. So our the like the companies that we're working with, these end users, are really thinking about this as you know their entire world of of projects and how they can make lithium fit into that in into that universe and and how they can do it most efficiently and find ways to leverage the tools we're building for lithium. To also help with other other potential business propositions. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (23:58): I'm gonna pause for a second. Is there anything you guys wanna cover that we haven't covered already? Did we? each brine is different. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (24:11): mention we mentioned it but for a businessy audience it sounds like it's too your your customer's not watching this your investors Kurt Bogaard (24:31): No. I think we covered everything that I thought of we would. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (24:32): Think we're probably anything else, Tirtha? Or Kurt? Anything for you, Kurt? Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (24:41): Yeah. Okay. so we'll I'll come back and just thank you guys and we'll exit from there. Okay. Tirtha, right? Yeah. Tirtha Martin Kurt. All right, well, it's always weird going back. Sorry, inside base. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (25:07): Super interesting, you guys have done an amazing job with helping all of this extraction get super easy, it sounds like, or much more simpler and or sustainable. Sus much more sustainable in a in a much tighter time frame, which is just remarkable for to me. You're gonna like the market for this is outstanding. So Tirtha, Dennis and Martin. Nice try. I don't I don't I have Martin on a brain. We hardly do anything on our team on the I got Tirtha though, so Kurt Bogaard (25:24): You do this all day, so I get it. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (25:38): Denn Martin. Jesus. Dennis. Alright. Martin. Martin Dietz. I don't know why it's Dietz that's screwing me. It's Martin. Martin, Tirtha, and Kurt. All right. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (26:00): Montin, thank you very much for having us on. This has been an extraordinary lesson in how lithium is extracted and and the all the sustainable efforts that you guys are doing to make that just so much better for the earth and for everything else. It's really an amazing product to see an amazing process to see. we gotta start over on that one. Make sure we meant to sustainability real loud. This is why I don't do recorded videos too. Well that it's easier than doing it live and screwing up like that. It's easier live because you don't have to think about it. You just don't screw up. Or if you do it's you stink. That's what it is. I know. It is a hundred percent. All right. Tirtha, Martin, Kurt. I'm gonna start there. Martin, Tirtha, and Kurt, thank you guys so much for having us on. This has been an extraordinary lesson in sustainability and lithium. So we really appreciate it and congratulations again on all the awards. All right. Thank you, everyone. Thanks, everybody. Kurt Bogaard (26:56): Thank you very much. Bye. Russ Fordyce, Martin Deetz and Tirtha Chatterjee (27:06): It ended up.