Medford, MA — Lithios, a pioneer in domestic lithium extraction systems, today announced it has been selected to begin negotiations with the US Department of Energy for an up to $20M award through the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy technologies with Untapped Potential (SCALEUP) Ready program. This program will support the next stage of scaleup for Lithios’s ALE technology, building on previous funding through the agency’s SPARKS program, which helped advance ALE from laboratory research to active field operations.
“SCALEUP Ready allows Lithios to reliably demonstrate ALE’s advantage as a cost-superior solution for domestic lithium supply, and to expand our deployment to support the producers who have been leaving valuable sources of lithium untapped,” said Mo Alkhadra, PhD, Co-Founder and CEO of Lithios. “Lithium demand is growing at a pace that is rapidly outstripping supply. We are building the technology that will close that gap here at home.”
The award will support construction of a first-of-its-kind commercial pilot plant co-located with a US lithium producer in Arkansas, where Lithios’s ALE system is currently in active field operations processing lithium-containing brines. The pilot plant will operate for 12 months, producing lithium an industry-relevant scale of 100 tonnes per annum of lithium carbonate equivalent (tpa-LCE), a critical step toward retiring scale risk and establishing a pathway to full kiloton-capacity commercial production.
Lithios has demonstrated that ALE can reduce extraction costs by up to 40% compared to competing DLE technologies, enabling economical production from a wide range of brine resource types. Successful demonstration at the commercial pilot scale will validate improvements across lithium recovery rate, extraction throughput, selectivity, enrichment, and water consumption, establishing ALE as the lowest-cost option for processing low-grade brines.
The project will create new revenue opportunities for domestic producers while directly expanding the US supply of a metal critical to energy storage and grid resilience, defense systems, and advanced electronics manufacturing.
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About Lithios
Lithios is an American company developing the first scalable electrochemical lithium capture solution, Advanced Lithium Extraction (ALE), to efficiently extract lithium from vast untapped sources. Developed by MIT scientists and engineers with world-class expertise in metal separations, Lithios unlocks massive new sources of lithium at the lowest cost to meet demand from the growing energy and critical minerals markets. Learn more at lithiosinc.com.
Media Contact
Anna Scheidt
anna@lithiosinc.com