Building a more resilient lithium supply chain with direct lithium extraction

Posted: October 06, 2025

Lithium is dirt cheap right now, which might suggest that supply is no problem. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), lithium is the most essential mineral for achieving climate goals, and demand is expected to increase five-fold by 2040, with shortages beginning in 2030. 

Not only will all current mining operations be insufficient to keep up, but current mining methods—such as open-pit mining and evaporation ponds—and proposed projects won’t be able to meet projected demand before the end of the decade, according to the IEA.

Though the construction of a new mine or evaporation pond only takes a couple of years, the discovery, exploration and feasibility studies can extend the process to over ten years. On top of that, current methods use lots of water and energy and can introduce contaminants into the environment. A new technique known as direct lithium extraction (DLE) may create more lithium, faster and more sustainably.  

The vast majority of lithium is produced either by evaporating water from lithium-filled brine or blasting lithium-rich rocks out of the ground and then purifying them. Both methods are land-intensive. Evaporation ponds strain water-scarce regions in South America, and lithium ore from hard-rock mines requires extensive chemical processing, about 95% of which happens in China. 

Pilot projects show that compared to open-pit mines and evaporation ponds, DLE can pull out more lithium with a higher purity from brine deposits. And crucially, with this approach, it takes much less time to start up a new operation and deliver lithium to market. 

Evaporation ponds: Slow and water-intensive

In arid regions of South America, lithium-rich brine is pumped to the surface and dispersed across a vast area, forming ponds. As it sits in the sun day after day, the water evaporates, leaving behind a salty lithium precipitate mixed with other minerals. This precipitate is harvested and processed into a battery-grade mineral.

Evaporation ponds, located primarily in the lithium-rich regions of Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, produce lithium in cycles that take months or years. And they require lots of water in already water-scarce places.  

Furthermore, starting up a new evaporation pond can take several years, and lots of new projects have been delayed, hastening lithium shortages.

Hard rock lithium mining: Energy and chemical intensive 

Spodumene is a type of rock that contains lots of lithium—around 1.44%, which is higher than other lithium-containing ores. Once it’s mined, it must be processed by superheating the rock, applying sulfuric acid to dissolve the lithium, and then separating the lithium from the resulting liquid. 

Despite high recovery rates, the process is chemically and energy-intensive and leaves behind acidic residues that must be cleaned up.  

And starting a new mine is even slower than starting a new evaporation pond. According to the IEA, it can take more than a decade for a mine to start producing ore after initial discovery. And because it takes so long, there will be a tightening lithium bottleneck unless new lithium extraction technology is commercialized soon. 

Direct lithium extraction: innovation to reshape the industry 

Compared with evaporation ponds, which can take months or years to start producing lithium after deployment, DLE can begin to produce after mere hours or days. And while hard-rock lithium mining requires intensive chemical processing, DLE techniques are often more environmentally friendly.  

DLE is an umbrella term. Adsorption and ion-exchange are two methods that use sorbents, solids that attract lithium out of brine and incorporate it into their structure. Both methods are currently in commercial use by companies like Rio Tinto.  

In adsorption, a resin is added to a pool of brine and attracts the lithium, which binds to its surface. To release the lithium, the resin is washed with water. Similarly, in ion-exchange, lithium is captured into a solid, but it does this by swapping places with ions rather than simply attaching. When joined to a sorbent through ion-exchange, lithium forms strong chemical bonds. To break them and separate the lithium out, acid is often needed. 

Adionics, a French DLE company, has developed a proprietary, liquid medium it calls Flionex^®, which doesn’t rely on adsorption or ion-exchange. “We are the only ones doing what we call supermolecular technology, meaning, actually, we have a technology that is a lock and key. The lithium is the key, and our media is the lock,” François-Michel Colomar, head of external relations at Adionics, told Our Industrial Life.  

First, brine is combined with Flionex. The two solutions are like oil and water, so they don’t dissolve into one another. But if they are continuously mixed, the Flionex will come into contact with more and more lithium, continuously pulling it out of the brine. After sufficient mixing, liquid lithium chloride molecules populate the Flionex, and the brine naturally separates, allowing it to be pumped back into the ground. The lithium-rich Flionex is washed to remove impurities, and then mixed with water and heated, which releases the lithium chloride out of the Flionex and into the water. The lithium is then ready for processing, while the Flionex can be reused in another cycle.

Unlike ion-exchange, which create strong chemical bonds, Adionics’ supermolecular liquid-to-liquid DLE only needs a temperature increase and a little bit of water to dissolve the far weaker bonds between the metal and the medium. Colomar emphasized that Flionex minimizes water usage while improving the quality of its lithium product. It leaves the lithium-depleted brine otherwise untouched and uses minimal freshwater during lithium recovery compared to evaporation ponds and even other DLE technology. At its pilot facility in France, Adionics reports higher recovery and purity rates from natural brines than evaporation ponds.  

“Basically, we catch most of the lithium chloride and we leave the rest untouched,” Colomar says. “It’s very important because it makes a [product] that is quite pure. Being pure, it’s easy to recover more water than other technology and to recycle it in the system. So that’s an element that is very important for us in our objective to try to be as sustainable as possible in the mining space.”   

Arcadium Lithium launched one of the world’s first adsorption-based DLE operations in Argentina in the 1990s, pairing it with evaporation ponds.   

Rio Tinto, a large hard-rock mining operator, made a multi-billion-dollar investment in DLE when it acquired Arcadium Lithium this year. "We were new to DLE, so we built a starter plant,” said Jakob Stausholm, CEO of Rio Tinto. “But when we acquired Arcadium Lithium, we gained access to 28 years of DLE experience. They invented it. We're not experimenting—we're scaling proven technology."   

Arcadium Lithium put its spodumene mining operation in Mount Cattlin into “care and maintenance” in 2025, an indefinite suspension of its operations, because hard-rock mining is no longer economically viable.  

What will it take to scale DLE? 

Right now, the problem is getting this technology to scale. In a saturated market, investors are nervous about allocating funds to new technology when its competitors remain operational. Lacking economies of scale, DLE has higher upfront costs, which make it especially difficult to deploy widely. Its operating costs, however, are comparable to evaporation ponds and lower than hard-rock lithium mining. 

The current high supply of lithium won’t last forever, or even the next five years. But if DLE becomes prominent in the industry, despite its initial investment, it could outcompete older, slower technologies, and possibly reshape the market altogether.  

Long term, innovation in DLE could be a promising way to foster a more resilient supply chain for lithium. With DLE, production can more easily be scaled up or down to adapt to market needs, making major surpluses or scarcities less common.