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The Oil and Gas Startups Podcast showcases emerging technologies and tells the stories of founders, investors and industry leaders.
0:00 What is going to walk out is welcome back to another episode of Willing Essar's podcast. I'm here with Scott and Dino from Lithos. Morning. Good morning. Thank you for having us. Great. You guys,
0:10 you guys braved the storm. Yes, we did. So you're in, you're in Denver. Oh, it's right. So it's like just just stuff. You're in Miami. Yes, correct. But we're in Houston. What is, OK,
0:22 let's start off. What is Lithos? So Lithos is a services company that's based upon a technology that at this time is patent pending that combines. It's called electro pressure membranes. So it's a
0:33 combination of electro dialysis, which consumes a lot of basically electricity to break apart a salty water into different components. And then we put that fluid through membranes under pressure.
0:49 And what we're trying to do is is basically attack the problem of these evaporation ponds that are used to produce majority of the lithium in the So there's three different ways where you can get
1:00 lithium. One's hard rock, that's called spodumine pegmatite. We have nothing to do with that. That's up in Northern Canada, North Carolina and down in Australia. You've got lapidiolites or clays
1:09 and
1:11 that's where like Thacker Pass just got some substantial amount of government funding. And that's in Nevada, we have nothing to do with that. And then there's these very salty, shallow reservoirs
1:23 that sit in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and the salt content there goes anywhere up to like 35, 36. So like super, super brackish water, and there's an enrichment of lithium inside of there.
1:37 Okay, so what is it, before we dive into those backgrounds, what is it, what does it actually do? Is it eating up the salt? Is it helping freeing up more lithium? It's breaking, so imagine
1:46 you've got, and I brought some little, I brought some little like things to simplify it. So imagine the lithium is this white package of sugar. Okay. And then we've got magnesium, we've got
1:57 boric acid and we've about sulfates, we've got calcium. Sounds like an energy drink. Yeah, and you dump it all exactly. It's like a super electrolytic solution, and you dump it into the water
2:07 there, and you're just trying to remove this. One of them. Just try to remove this as efficiently as possible with removing out what they're called divalent or these waste salts. So you're
2:16 basically trying to break a continuous stream of super salty fluid into a money track and a waste track that you re-inject. So what happens if you just pull it all out? Pull all the waste, all the
2:30 money track, everything at the same time. Is it just impossible to impossible? So basically it would make it render it impossible to what's called polish or purify it into a battery grade product.
2:41 Okay. So those contaminants will eat away at the yield and they'll render the lithium carbonated or lithium hydroxide, which are the end products that go into it, they won't meet the specification.
2:52 They won't be pure enough to be able to meet the requirements for like a Tesla battery for some type of like. localized grade storage. Are there different grades of lithium? Yes. Can you be like a
3:03 high level overview? So you've, like I said before, you've got like three different kind of, you've got a hard rock, clay, and a brine. And so each one of those produces a different kind of
3:14 lithium? It just basically is a different way of recovering it. So you've got with the clay, it's like lithiums that are like inside of a clay. In a pegmatite, it's like a what are called
3:24 spodumine crystals, and so you have to crush it up, run it through a very acid and water hungry process to effectively leach it out. The same way you would try to get like gold or silver from like
3:33 a hard rock solution. And then what we're focused on is like the lithiums in an aqueous form. So it's just suspended inside of this like super salty water and you're trying to selectively extract
3:43 that. And then are any of those considered to be more like high grade than the others? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Really, is it like a different efficiency of the lithium or is it a density or? It's
3:54 the concentration. So either on a weight percentage or parts per million. So if you look, for example, there's sort of two perspective areas in the United States. ExxonMobil picked up an acreage
4:06 in this Mac over. So over in Magnolia County in Arkansas. That has an enrichment that I've seen anywhere from like on the low end, like around like high 200s to over 700, I think is what standard
4:19 lithium has done with with Coke, Coke Industries. And so that's a really good reservoir that's just starting to get exploited. And then the other one that's recently come out is there was a report
4:30 up in the Northeast, so in Pennsylvania and the Marcella shale, and just to a lesser extent, the Utica, both of those have lithium enriched inside of the produced water. So there's a huge amount
4:39 of, I would say, activity within the more conventional, you know, unconventional, sorry, shale producers, where they've taken fluid assays and like, hey, maybe we can like find a way to
4:50 recycle our frack water And at the same time, Valorize the Lithium or maybe some other, like, rarest that might be suspended in there as well. So it's pretty cool. It's sort of the same level of
5:02 maturity that from 2001 or 2002 in the shale business. So to be an entrepreneur in it, it's very scary 'cause no one's made it work yet, it's scale, but it's a lot of fun. That is exciting. Okay,
5:13 so this is me, Masterclass and Lithium today. So
5:17 what does each shawls roles at the company? And then since then we're going to Deena's background, let's go to your background and let me figure out what's, how do we get here, right? Okay. So
5:26 what else roles real quick? So I'm one of the co-founders of the company and I'm the CEO right now. I'm the founding advisor to Scott and the chief development officer. Okay, Deena, so what's
5:34 your background? You're in Miami. You're in Miami, but I've had a privilege and honor to travel the world a little bit in the last 15, 20 years, doing international business development and
5:44 operations focused on international security, basically standing up international remote operations on borders and ports around the world, looking for contraband and helping governments around the
5:55 world, you know. interject contraband better as drugs, money, or people. Were you like a mercenary or what? No, no, we're a private sector company, or the founding member of the company.
6:05 Like a private sector DEA? No, no, no, possibly yes, no, no, not at all. We provide a turnkey solution as they build on operates. The O's, we work directly with governments, sat next to
6:18 them at their borders, at their ports, providing them a service, which would allow them to basically get more information data, the power is in data, right? We have scanning and screening cargo
6:32 or people or vehicles crossing these points of entry, then
6:39 integrating those into command centers far away from where the operations actually taking place. So you don't have any per se influence, if you will, locally on a decision or the analysis of the
6:50 information, which will help governments increase tax collection. a contraband, interdiction, and much more. Just to manage their
7:01 overall, was leaving and going and out of their borders, right? 'Cause it's very porous. And there's a lot of issues out there. And I had the privilege of doing that for 15 years. I was a
7:10 founding member of it. We were basing the startup mode very similar to what we're doing now. And we were able to build it to over, well over a billion dollars in contracts around the world. And
7:20 really had a great experience with them. And when Scott called me up about two years ago, as we've known each other for 20 plus years, he's like, you know, I want to do this. I'm like, well,
7:30 look, I understand your business model. That's what I basically have done for the last 15 plus years. And I'm all about sustainability. And he was really promoting the idea that Letho's and the
7:43 technology which we control and are able to deploy will make these ponds and the operators and the environment more sustainable. and ultimately be able to create lithium and produce lithium faster
7:56 for ultimately the EV vehicles and other consumers of lithium around the world
8:02 to continue to grow their industries too because today there's not enough lithium, if you will, to understand the production today versus the demand tomorrow. Absolutely three to five years from
8:11 now. It's not one to one, right? The demand's gonna outstrip supply very easily. And you cannot continue to produce lithium in its current states And then increase the production. It would be
8:24 stripping our deserts of more water and Chile and Argentina would be basically unstable, right? This would be polluting the water solutions. There wouldn't be enough water. And the Brian's just
8:36 wouldn't be able to be produced fast enough to be able to deliver to market. And so it was very clear for me. I trust Scott, I wanted to move on and have some fun I was enjoying what I did before.
8:52 I come to a certain point in my career that I would figure out my global expert in that field. And a lot of my relationships and skill sets would play very nicely into what we're doing,
9:02 understanding the international environment, specifically Chile and Argentina, where there's some of the major producers currently are. And so I'm like, Scott, let's just go do it. So, you know,
9:12 you've known each other 25 years, what you said before? Yeah, yeah, since 2002, 2003, I believe. So, where - How'd you guys meet? Oh, well, you know, it was a blind date, and - I went to
9:26 university in Lagana, Switzerland. It was called Franklin College at the time, now it's called Franklin University. Not a bad place, like snows on palm trees. And so, I was a commodities trader,
9:37 and I had like an office in downtown, Lagana, it was Thursday afternoon, in like, I think 2002 or 2003, I can't remember. It's horrible And my friend Ken Lewin and Kevin Fearnelly. It was dad
9:52 was like one of the biggest like soccer transfer agents. This guy's a soccer nut. And so these guys call me up, look, hey, this guy, Dino, he's pretty cool. Um, so we got these return tickets
10:00 to Amsterdam. They're 99 bucks. Do you want to go? And it's like, yeah, sure. So we met and we've been friends ever since. Yeah. It was a great trip. Yeah. It was a great trip. Well, what
10:09 look at all at the end of the day is all the energy, right? Some respect for mutual respect for each other. And, and Scott and I have been a very much different path. You know, he's been oil and
10:16 gas, um, an engineering path. I've been on a business development operations path, but very much converging simultaneously because what he was doing was building companies, what he was doing was
10:26 building companies and taking ideas we had, taking pretty much paper and then trying to manifest them into reality, which is very, very difficult to do, as you may know, Jake, right? So, and
10:36 many of the audience knows as well. So that's what we're just trying to do again here. We're in the early stages of an industry that needs to be developed in the United States, that needs to be
10:44 developed in North America, the Western Hemisphere, if you understand the supply chain lithium going into whether Tesla vehicle or a BMW vehicle or vehicle made in manufacturing in China or other,
10:56 it's a global marketplace, but it's primary controlled by one player. China. That's to be honest. So like the most striking thing that I found in my research was that
11:09 what would you think just is not having like taking a look at what percentage of the production of the actual like mineral of lithium, what percentage on a global basis does the United States. I'm
11:18 going to spoil this for you because I think I know. Okay. 85. 1 of what? Lithium. In the US or in China? No, sorry. China. Yeah. It's about 76. Okay. In the United States, we have one one
11:30 operating mine, Abermarle and Silver Peak, and it's probably less than 1 now. Yeah. It's pretty bad. It's just astonishing. It poses a bigger question because most of the going back to the
11:41 demand, you have all this demand, We have this need for all these critical minerals. much of this is being driven by the United States. We don't control any of the minerals. And so it kind of
11:51 poses almost like a bigger national security risk, absolutely, in my opinion. There's been less than one percent of venture capital has gone into critical minerals. Yeah, 'cause much like the -
12:04 So it's like, I'm sure as you understand me, like it's not the most, typically the most glamorous thing for these socially conscious funds to wanna fund like oil and gas business or critical
12:12 minerals. And this conception of like not in my backyard But the cool thing is, you know, the promise is that we've got probably 14, maybe 15 of the world's reserves. And
12:23 they're predominantly co-associated as I had before. There's another really nice reservoir in the Marcellus where they're producing lithium produced water. And the same thing down in Arkansas,
12:34 Mississippi, East Texas in the smackover formation. So we have a ton of lithium. We just need to unlock it. We just need to unlock it. Why haven't we?
12:44 I mean, think about the history of lithium a little bit, Scott, right? The Dursell battery or, or energizer battery in 1990 or whatever the history was, the first lithium, like small battery to
12:53 commercial purposes. But the real demand for battery, for lithium grade battery, if you will, be cell phones coming out, but even then there, there's very small consumer. It's the EV vehicles.
13:03 You're looking at grams considered to kilos, if you will, or pounds and pounds of, of lithium grade that needs to go into an EV vehicle Of course, there's other need for lithium, or it's military,
13:15 for radar, for missiles, or government issues, national security. So that's why I also put this part almost as the critical minerals discussion, which is happening around the world, the rare
13:26 earths, if you will. This is one of the lithiums very available throughout the world. It's just not available in large concentrations. And that's what people are looking for. And that's what the
13:36 problem is and how when you do find it, it's very sticky. So it sticks to other. you know, minerals and things. So how do you unstick it? And that's where people are using acids and other
13:47 chemicals and reagents and DLEs and many, many other processes in order to do this, but that's not sustainable. It just isn't the amount of water that's required to do these processes are just,
13:60 it's absurd. And Scott can highlight some of that as well. And what we're doing is trying to eliminate all that. I mean, Lee throws ultimately is we're, you know, catching ourselves directly to
14:10 the wellhead, taking the raw brine coming in, the operatorproducer, will tell us I need this output in order to then move down into my operation. And that's what we're doing. So we're condensing
14:15 in the operations we're focused on, which are the operation ponds,
14:22 a
14:26 nine to 12 month process in two weeks, reducing water by 90 plus percent usage, no reagents, no chemicals, and really just providing them a pure lithium stream, Because it was not well known
14:39 either. is that the amount of lithium lost in these processes around the world is ginormous. Yeah, it's like you're losing in these ponds, you're losing anywhere from like 40 to 60 of the in situ
14:52 lithium. I mean, like can you imagine that? It's like having like an oil field, you're leaking like 40 to 40 plus percent of your product like on the way to a mid-stream gathering system. It's a
15:03 pretty miserable situation. So once - It's an embarrassment to humanity as well like what I like to claim it If you've ever seen one of these ponds live. I wanna get into your background really
15:12 quickly while it's on top of my mind. Yep. So we have all these lithium resources here in the US. Why are we mining now? Is it becoming more expensive to get it from China and to buy? Or is the
15:25 demand just so great that we need it kind of from everywhere? I think you've got a confluence of both of those statements. So there's a compounding adoption of electric vehicles as Dino said And
15:36 then there's also like localized grid storage. So like out in West Texas, when it's. excessively windy and say like in January, February, people are not using their air conditioning. You
15:46 actually have like sometimes electricity going negative into the grid. And that's where, you know, I think you guys have done a lot of work on Bitcoin. A lot of those Bitcoin operations are
15:53 feeding off of that power. So there's localized grid storage and there's localized sort of demand for the, you know, for electric vehicles that's causing that demand. And then I think also like
16:04 just a general, one of the, I'd say positive things for the federal government to agree upon is that this is a gap and it needs to be filled. And so there's been quite a lot of grants and programs
16:18 and incentives for entrepreneurs to try to get people from our generation to turn on their thinking caps and see, hey, is this something I want to participate in? So what's your background? My
16:29 background, I have a finance degree. I was a commodities trader. I worked in the stock markets for the past 15 years, though I've been in the energy business So I lived in, lived in Houston from
16:40 twenty. or sorry, 2012 until
16:44 2018. I've built a couple of businesses. The one I still run right now is called Reservoir Imaging Solutions, and it will consume either fiber optic data or download geophones. And it uses the
16:58 micro seismic response, or like when the rock is breaking, there's a bunch of acoustic emissions that's released. And those acoustic emissions will bounce off of different rock layers, but they
17:08 also bounce off of fluid And so we basically have this algorithm, the software that we built, where you can image directly where fluid and sand goes in the subsurface. And I'll tell you, I'm sure
17:20 your next question is, well, why did you think about this? I'll also share with you my epiphany. It was 2020. I had started up Reservoir in 2019 in September. And I just went on Darcy Partners,
17:34 and I was like one of the top three companies there. I was feeling like really good with myself. filled up a book of business. I was like, here we go. We finally got that. We crossed the chasm
17:44 and we're moving forward here. And then we went to HFTC and everybody on my team, except for me, got COVID. And then like a couple of weeks later, as we were talking about, I was watching the
17:54 Bloomberg terminal and I watched the price of oil go negative. And I would call vividly that my mother was visiting and I threw up in the sink and then I went in the bathroom and I cried and I was
18:04 like, how am I gonna make my mortgage? This is not good. This is not something that I guess an entrepreneur you could just buck up and go forward and push through. But I started thinking like,
18:14 hey, what else can I do with my brain and with my background that might be contributory
18:21 to society and to the energy business and I started taking a hard look first at the grid storage, right? That would be paired with like these Bitcoin operations and I was like, holy cow, that's a
18:31 lot of lithium. How much lithium do we produce in the United States? Wow, a pathetic amount. We have like less than 1 of supply chain and then I start looking at how. This process was done with
18:42 these evaporation ponds down predominantly in Chile and to a greater extent now in Argentina and even lesser so, some early stage projects in Bolivia. And I was like, holy cow, they're dumping
18:54 this fluid at the surface and putting in hundreds of millions of dollars of chemicals. It's a little bit of antithetical against the promise of the electrification of the transportation sector when
19:04 you start looking at how this stuff is actually produced. And then that, I had another epiphany I was like, wow, I've actually been out on some frack pads. And I've started to see five or six
19:14 years ago some of these companies that would come out with skid mounted units and rather than just trucking the produced water and putting into a saltwater disposal wall, they would be able to
19:23 recycle it, recycle the caustics, the acids, remove out the suspended solids and break the
19:30 water apart and recycle it for subsequent operations. I was like, holy cow, that's a really good approach and then I found this private company in Denver. It was called NLP water with my partner
19:41 Frederick Clavinis, and we ended up like making a deal and starting with those
19:47 Yeah
19:49 So so the the problem that you guys are focused on is specifically the frick ponds It's specifically the use of these evaporation ponds for what are called continental brines or salars. So these are
20:01 very shallow It particularly in Chile and Argentina, maybe like less than a thousand feet deep Super salty reservoirs that are you know somewhere between 20 to even 30 times as salty as sea water So
20:17 not potable and they have a cocktail of Different types of salts in them combined with a very high enrichment of lithium So you're actually helping produce the lithium from that. So this is something
20:28 that you yeah are So it's it's something you're injecting into it or is there a technology that you're putting into the so it's a technology It's kind of like a fancy Brita filter.
20:39 Okay. And a fancy toilet. This is what I like to simplify it. So you've got a raw stream of fluid that's coming out of the wellhead with a cocktail of impurities and that lithium inside of it. And
20:48 what we're doing is we're using electrochemistry to break that water apart into a money track and to a waste track. And then we're leveraging our like my sort of background in imaging fracks and
20:60 where fluid goes to make sure that that's managed. The reinjection phase is managed professionally and you're not creating any induced seismicity or sinkholes because of how close it is to the
21:10 surface. But it basically it's a filtering process where you're trying to selectively purify the lithium inside of a concentrated solution and then pass it down the line in the value chain to go get
21:23 upgraded and cooked into a, into a finally into a battery grade product. So what are the alternatives if they're not using your technology? How are they producing this? It's using these
21:32 evaporation ponds right now. So you're basically - so they produce it. and it sits into, it sits in a pond and they wait for, I'm guessing the water to evaporate or certain - Yeah, so it's a
21:43 combination. So you'll see these colorful ponds if you go and search in Google and look at what an evaporation pond is. And effectively - Keep talking about, I'm really good with this one. You
21:52 look at it, it kind of goes from a turquoise to like a brownie yellow. And what's happening there is the fluids being moved through this complex of ponds, it starts off with a more like turquoise-y
22:02 white color. And that's the raw fluid And it's basically, it sits in a lined pit. Like a - It's kinda cool looking. Yes, it looks - It's beautiful. It looks nice from afar, not so close from up
22:13 close, but - You can't get it on you. So basically what you're doing is you're pumping that raw fluid to the surface into a lined pit and then injecting reagents and particularly a lot of acid to
22:25 make the combination of the evaporative powers of the sun combined with those reagents to precipitate out the waste salts and that you can kind of do that in certain stages. And so that's why the
22:36 color changes because it becomes more acidic. So the point sounds like that process takes a longer. Yeah, it takes up to probably around nine months. I mean, it's a continuous, it's a continuous
22:46 operation. So you've got fluid coming out and fluid moving around constantly inside the complex, but to go from the wellhead to
22:54 a point where it's been concentrated and purified enough to go get upgraded into an actual like battery grade powder is at least nine months. So it's incredibly slow. I'm assuming y'all's doesn't
23:04 take nine months No, it's like it's basically like an oil filled operation. So you've got food coming in, certain gestation time to optimally break that fluid apart into the money track and the
23:14 waste track, and then it gets passed down a line. So you're taking a process that can take months down to say like less than a week. So the time savings alone is really three meters of value for
23:26 the customer. It's the time, the ability. So the fact that it's a faster process that also permits the operator to go out scale the green fields operations. So an existing mine can be doubled or
23:38 tripled very much more rapidly than you can with this current process. The ponds are horribly inefficient. So you're going from losing anywhere from say 40 or more percent of your product to like
23:50 our best performance. Like as of last month is about 97 efficiency. So when you've got an existing mine like Abermarle or SQM down in Chile, and they're producing, you know, four and a half
24:01 billion dollars worth of product with a process that's 50, mid 50 efficiency, you boost that up above 90, that's a tremendous amount of value that you're making an impact. And then the third part
24:14 is the overall social license. And in the case of the Chilean operators, they must change. So the government said, you will not continue to do this. We're not gonna sanction upgrades and more
24:28 permits unless you start using a more sustainable approach. vernacular in our business is called direct lithium extraction. And that's, it's a, it's a technique. Like I've just described to you
24:41 this kind of, I can't more can't do like a water management solution in the oil field. So, hmm. How surprising is that? Yeah. Because dirty fracker entrepreneurs are going into the lithium
24:53 business to try to help them out. That's ironic. It is, it's great. Still think you guys were all so evil. Very uniquely positioned How big, since the industry is still relatively new, I guess,
25:06 I'm gonna be the sort of the world. How big is the market? Like how many operators are there? 'Cause you guys are focused specifically in South America. So we're kind of in a bifurcated situation.
25:16 We, as a startup company, we wanna get into cash flow as quickly as possible. So we obviously are focusing on the largest existing, you know, well capitalized, multi-billion dollar producers,
25:27 the Avamrolls, the SQMs, the Rio Tintos.
25:32 the Levant's, sorry, Arcadium, those types of companies that already have existing operations and have sanctioned this process transformation, have pilot scale, you know, they've made pilot
25:42 scale attempts to try to transform from this operation, but it's a very clear line of sight for us to go into that existing operation and demonstrate that we can perform and then slowly scale up or
25:54 rapidly scale up as fast as we can within the, you know, within the bounds of those, those operations. Now, the other thing that's also really attractive is to help participate in a domestic
26:05 industry that's, that's being built. So it's probably most front of mind. You would see that, um, X on mobile, um, bought a land position from a company called galvanic energy down in, uh, in
26:18 Arkansas. And there's a very nice, um, you know, again, salty, briny reservoir that's enriched with lithium there in this Mac over formation. And then up in the northeast, um, We've seen some
26:29 promising data that there's another viable reservoir in the Marcellus produced water as well. It was the opportunity to sell the technology bigger than just saying, We're just going to keep us for
26:42 ourselves and start our own mining company. I think what we've done so far is to try to recognize that we're a startup company. We've got limited resources. If you look at the entire lithium value
26:52 chain, that sounds like a great idea, but think about going from being a, you know, imagine you're 20 years ago, you've just picked up your first leasehold in, you know, wicked or sorry out in
27:06 like West Texas, you're like, Oh my gosh, I've got this eagle for jail. Do you want to go and just try to assemble that land, flip it to someone else or do you want to be more bold and go out and
27:17 drill your first well? And then complete it and then bring that online and then bring a mid-stream gathering system and then build a pipeline and then ship it to a refinery. arrogant to think that
27:28 we're going to go all the way to the point of being like an Exxon mobile and go from a wellhead to a refinery right at the beginning. I think what we're focused on right now is building a business at
27:36 the wellhead and being the world leader in the pretreatment before you're doing any type of concentration, which is what direct lithium extraction actually is, or refining. So I mean, hopefully if
27:47 we can build cash flow and we can be successful on the front end, then we can use that to build the company out, but not be like some of our competitors where they're trying to go and wrap their
27:56 arms around the whole, the whole market at the beginning. That's a task. Let's talk about the life cycle of this, right? So you produce it, zap it with your technology. Where does it go next?
28:09 How does it fill in the gas between that and a Tesla? Okay. So there's kind of, if you decompose the whole value chain, we'd like to say that there's five steps. So you've got Rob Rine coming out
28:20 of the wellhead, then you've got conditioning and pretreatment, which is what we're focused on with what we call aquas, technology. And what you're doing there is removing as much of the
28:31 impurities and trying to pass through as clean and slightly concentrated lithium chloride. The next step is it goes through a concentration step, which is what a direct lithium extraction approach
28:42 is. And that's going to go from say like, you know, couple hundred to a couple thousand parts per million to like four to six percent concentrate. So 40 to say 60, 000 parts per million. Once
28:54 it's gotten that concentration step, it's going to be what's called polished and purified and it will go either to a lithium carbonate or to a lithium hydroxide. And those are the two final like
29:04 white powdered salts that are put into bags and that would be shipped off to Tesla. And then those get put into the, you know, put into the manufacturers of the make those those batteries. So it's
29:16 actually so it actually the end result is like kind of like a salt in material. Yeah, it looks exactly like a package of sugar that you just don't want to eat it.
29:26 What happened if you eat it? Well, I mean, lithium has been used to treat like mental illnesses when the right amount of doses. I don't think it's gonna hurt you too much. I do know from working
29:36 in my lab that I spilled some of the brine on my FR gear and I was eating a sandwich and I went like this afterwards to wipe some mustard off my face and it burned pretty badly. So I would not, I
29:50 would not recommend it. It's not something you wanna eat, eat or drink or consume. So where are you guys at in the life cycle of the company? Yeah, so we've set up a facility in Besmer, Alabama,
30:01 which is just outside of Birmingham. We found another group of entrepreneurs that had done some work with a technique called ion exchange in the extraction of rare earths from a coal mine. And so
30:14 they had an existing 55, 000 square foot complex together with like really good fluid chemical analysis, like something you would find in core lab It was staffed up that was humming along. And,
30:27 you know, rather than spending5 million, which we didn't have to try to replicate that, you know, in Denver or in Houston, we're like, okay, we can form a pretty quick partnership with these
30:37 guys and have our own space inside of their facility and have access to, you know, the analytical equipment and then staff up and build around that. So that's really where our main center of
30:47 operations is right now. Yeah, are you in the building technology phase or the commercialization phase? Yeah, I would say it's, so we're using an existing proven supply chain of membranes and
30:59 what I call these electro dialysis stacks. What we're doing is effectively creating like a customized version. So it's imagine like I'm a bit of a car nut. So you go to Mercedes, you go buy your
31:09 car and then if you have a sickness for speed, like I do, then you're gonna go to like Brabas or you're gonna go to Weistech and you're gonna put in new turbos and you're gonna chop off like the
31:18 catalytic converters
31:21 And so we're basically doing that the same thing with these existing components. So we don't want to be the technology manufacturer. We wanted, as Dino said, build, own, and operate with our own
31:29 like exclusive access to these technology toolbox that we can go and operate. So the lifecycle of the business right now is we've got several of the largest producers under contract. They've shipped
31:43 in several cases, like four metric tons of raw reservoir fluid to this Bessemer facility Each company is set up, each one of these sort of pilot scale production processes is set up in its own room.
31:56 We take the fluid, we run it through the system and it's a binary output, either you pass or you fail. In terms of removing the impurities. And so far we're bad in a thousand. So they're shipping
32:08 all this fluid to you by truck or pipeline or? Plane. Plane. Plane. It's like they're - And truck of course, but some of it's located. Planes, trains and automobiles, bro. It's to go from
32:17 like these like the Atacama desert Solar is in Argentina. I mean, it's literally planes, trains, and automobiles. Yeah. Like several hundreds of thousands of dollars are spending to ship, like,
32:28 like, chemical toots of food overnight, in many cases, because the need to solve the problem is so great. So really, it's about making smart investments on their behalf. And we're not the only
32:42 technology they've looked at or are looking at, but they've been very clear that if you can meet our
32:50 goal targets of a certain level of concentration, which is better than they are doing today, then basically you're going to be in play. Meaning you're going to go into the field, do your two to
33:02 three month field tests with their fluids, because what's unique about us as well from our commercialization standpoint is if we backtrack one year from today, last year and today, I think we were
33:16 just reaching out to these companies with the idea and the promise. that we could show them in results. And they've already looked at 50 or 100 companies and invested millions and millions of
33:28 dollars in time into trying to solve this issue, but what was an equal restud and what we were promoting was their pre-treatment. Everyone else was at the very end of the pond timeframe. So we're
33:41 thinking about nine months in a pond. They were at that seven, two, nine, eight and nine month period trying to take the most, if you will, already concentrated brines and just make that speed
33:52 up faster. Where we were like, let's skip all of that. Skip this entire pond issue. Go straight to the well head. Give me the rawest brine you have because we're taking a technology that's
34:04 already field proven. Although yes, it's a different brine per se. So you as fracking brine, let's call it that. And we're bringing this technology back into our lab and now we're gonna customize
34:15 it to your brine. and Mr, Mrs.
34:19 And let us help you do that. And like, okay, that's compelling. So we're gonna send you the most difficult brands we have. So you make it, you're the passive fail real quick, right? 'Cause
34:29 they're trying to break you as soon as they can break you, not to waste your time or their time. So we were able to show results that we're promising fairly quickly. And like, okay, great. And
34:42 so we continue to grow. We've now passed through the testing phases where we're out there, you know, showing these results, moving to the next stage, whatever that is in their internal processes
34:51 within these companies. We have a pipeline, a lovely pipeline, I like to call it the Ferrari model, 'cause we all know what Ferrari is, but good luck buying one, you're not gonna get one,
35:00 unless they already know you. And again, they know it's all about quality control at that point. So we have a pipeline of many more companies that wanna test with us than we can actually take at
35:09 this moment, which is a double-edged sword, 'cause we actually wanna be able to take them and test them and prove ourselves with everyone about as a young company. You really have to select your
35:20 battle and be very clear about it. So that's why we focused on what Scott naturally highlighted is the current operators, the teams that have to change from today over the next five years completely
35:35 eliminate their multi-billion dollar operation, which if you look again on Google at it, it's like five miles by five miles which is the size of San Francisco. And that's a large operation. You're
35:46 now trying to condense in something different and you have five years to do it. And you know, if you haven't run a company of that size or built operations in that size, that is an extremely amount.
35:57 That's not a lot of time. And you're going to make a lot of mistakes along the way. And if you do make the mistakes, that means, you know, billions of dollars off your market cap, revenue down,
36:06 everything else as well. And everyone's going to go find another supplier for them. But that's nice that we can focus on the current operators, but inherently we're a US. company.
36:16 We have an intense interest to help develop the US industry here as well, which is from our presidents and from DC, all the way down into our large, if you will, military apparatus here in the
36:30 United States and just energy consumption in our EV. And we're not the largest EV vehicle consumers or users either, where I think we're number two or number three, I think China's number one,
36:34 Europe is number two, I think we're number three, but ultimately that production in order for our companies to scale their vehicle market, they need more lithium access. Everyone wants domestic
36:34 supply. So you see the
36:52 exons of the world, you see these big names now who are traditional oil and gas, but they're not any longer that. They're just big operators of whatever they can get their hands on, 'cause they're
37:00 smart and they have capital. So they're getting into markets where they can control and then supply an industry, whether, yeah, and we can be a part of that. In Alabama, it's a great location.
37:10 We're right next to Smackover in Arkansas, Mississippi, and East Texas, plus you have. Mercedes-Benz, you have Hyundai, Hyundai all there, the largest manufacturing plants in the Western
37:20 Hemisphere, not the world producing their vehicles. So you can really create a raw brine to where we find lithium within just miles of each other and put it into a car. And we feel that we're in a
37:31 strategically positioned there. We're working and applying the grant for the Department of Energy. We receive grants already with the DOE, and we continue to embark on that path. So, but again,
37:42 we're a small company You know, we actually are Scott. You have Joe, and Gabe, and Michael, and Seth, and Chris, and Chris, and a great team. I mean, if you look at our management team,
37:53 because as you all know, any entrepreneur know, the mission is one part of what makes you get up in the morning and wake up. The management ultimately is the one that's gonna propel the business.
38:06 And then from there, can you successfully develop a product and do marketing around it? And ultimately, we are in the business of making money, right? But to do it with people that you actually
38:17 like, outside of work is pretty cool. I'm sure you guys have, you guys have kind of built the same thing here, which is pretty cool. So it's about having that. Everyone has, I think on our team,
38:25 a very interesting background. You can check it out on ethostechnologycom or some of our teams on there. But, and we have the guys who have basically been working on these issues in different
38:35 industries, which is the removal of sodiums, removal of salts from super industrialized processes around the world. They are a part of our team, original patent holder and patent creator of the
38:45 technology we're using as part of our direct team today, still helping solve these problems in a much more complex scale. So, I'll just maybe like put a little color there to show you like this
38:55 generalized use of electrochemistry was first used in Tokyo. So, to produce soy sauce at scale. Soy sauce. Soy sauce, which is like, you know, really - Soy sauce, incredible. Then they
39:09 started moving into the Middle East for desalination projects. and then down into Napa Valley to help condition wine then production of glycol at scale. And then most recently with what I saw at
39:25 Frederick's company is recycling for aquater. So a lot of really interesting, diverse, different applications of this general technology. And we're very thankful to have a chance to work with the
39:35 same group of people and introduce it into this, you know, into this vertical. This has been awesome guys. I've learned a lot about lithium There's a lot more than, I didn't know what I was
39:43 walking into today, I didn't know I was gonna walk out with this, but this is awesome. So I think you guys are very uniquely positioned based on my understanding of, especially with the government
39:50 coming down and saying, hey, you guys gotta figure this out. And it seems like you guys have a really great solution. So I'm excited to follow those progress. You know, thank you very much.
39:59 Thank you very much. Yeah, I appreciate you guys coming down. Thank you so much for having us. Absolutely. We're people find out more information about you guys. So
40:09 wwwleathosetechnologycom is our website Um. You're on LinkedIn, right? Yeah, we're both on LinkedIn as well. On our problem, email us. You know, we're really available and accessible. And the
40:19 key part is that we want to be collaborative and industry that needs collaboration at this time. And so we'll work with anyone big or small and anyone has an idea, we'll hear it out and see if we
40:30 can share even if it's not directly impact our business. We're happy to lead it, you know, give a helping hand. I think the fun thing we'll be to see is like, you know, a year from now, two
40:39 years from now, three years from now, how much more of this industry has expanded, you know, out of Houston and into the United States with people that have taken those skillsets from the fracking
40:50 business and gone out and built a company. And you're gonna see a lot of cool entrepreneurs that are gonna pop up and it'll be a fun ride. Yeah, like seeing in the geothermal space and now you're
40:60 seeing in lithium. Same thing, exactly like that. It's kind of like being in your prime at the onset of the development of shale gas. Yeah, super exciting. Thank you so much for having us.
41:10 Absolutely, guys. Thank you. All right, guys. Take two seconds. Share this with your friends.