Mariana Minerals

News

10.24.2025

Announcing Lithium One

Mariana Lithium One is the world's first GWh-scale facility for producing lithium from oil & gas produced water

Lithium is the modern workhorse for electrochemical energy storage. While electric vehicles and stationary storage are the primary drivers of demand, lithium is a critical component across defense, industrial applications, and portable electronics. Without lithium, we do not have high-strength glass, we do not have high-performing lubricants, and we do not have the energy-dense batteries that enable the mobile devices that power our everyday lives.

In the 1990s, the US accounted for more than 35% of global lithium supply. Today, US production accounts for just 1% of global supply, and the US lithium supply chain can only be described in one word: dependent.

The time to invest in and scale lithium production is now

Although the industry faces near-term headwinds, with prices recently falling from all-time highs to near all-time lows, long term demand growth calls for a >3x increase in lithium production capacity over the next 15 years.

The time to invest in and scale lithium production is now

While the "lithium is everywhere" narrative has truth to it, scaling production capacity is no simple feat and is better understood with context. Bringing an additional 3,000,000 metric tons of production capacity to market means:

>100 world-scale lithium mines & refineries
>$150 billion in investment
>50,000 skilled workers deployed at operating sites

Who is deploying $10 billion dollars per year to make this happen? With lithium prices depressed as a result of oversupply driven by aggressive capacity expansion in China, Western capital markets are shying away from investing aggressively to deploy the production capacity we need to build today in order to supply the needs of tomorrow.

Who is training thousands of workers per year to meet the needs of the lithium industry? While lithium production facilities have similarities with oil & gas, water treatment, and other minerals infrastructure, lithium processing is nuanced and achieving high throughput of high-quality end products (suitable for batteries and other applications) is HARD. This is apparent in the string of recent challenges as companies have attempted to stand up lithium refining capacity in Western Australia. A large talent pool is effectively non-existent outside of China.

We will not solve this supply gap with a single class of lithium resource (hard rock, continental brine, geothermal brines, clays). We need every potential source of lithium coming online at full speed. There is no silver bullet.

Lithium from oil & gas produced water

When oil and gas are brought to the surface from shale operations, extensive amounts of wastewater must be separated and disposed of — typically pumped back underground via saltwater disposal wells.

While the "lithium is everywhere" narrative has truth to it, scaling production capacity is no simple feat, and is better understood with some additional context. Bringing an additional 3,000,000 metric tons of production capacity to market means:

>100 world-scale lithium mines & refineries
>$150 billion in investment
>50,000 skilled workers deployed at operating sites

Who is deploying $15 billion dollars per year to make this happen? With lithium prices depressed as a result of oversupply driven by aggressive capacity expansion in China, western capital markets are shying away from investing aggressively to deploy the production capacity we need today in order to supply the needs of tomorrow.

Who is training 5,000 workers per year to meet the needs of the lithium industry? While lithium production facilities have similarities with oil & gas, water treatment, and other minerals infrastructure, lithium processing is nuanced and achieving high-throughput of high-quality end products (suitable for batteries and other applications) is HARD. This is apparent in the string of recent failures as companies attempted to stand up lithium refining capacity in Western Australia. This talent pool is effectively non-existent outside of China.

We will not solve this supply gap with a single class of lithium asset (hard rock, continental brine, geothermal brines, clays) - we need every source of lithium coming online at full speed. There is no silver bullet.

Lithium from oil & gas produced water

When oil and gas is brought to the surface from shale operations, extensive amounts of wastewater must be separated and disposed of, typically pumped back underground via saltwater disposal wells.

Growing US fossil energy dominance has led to a surge in the co-production of wastewater from oil & gas operations across the country. While this has historically been viewed as a liability, this waste stream opens the door to a new pathway to begin building a robust supply chain for lithium. This wastewater contains lithium, and in no small quantity. In the US alone, we estimate that the equivalent of 20% of 2024 global lithium demand, close to 250,000 tons of lithium, is currently flowing to the surface alongside natural gas and crude oil before being pumped back underground, leaving the lithium untouched.

When successfully unlocked, this resource will be a new source of lithium for the world with substantial environmental benefits in comparison to today's primary sources of lithium chemicals. Extracting lithium from produced water already at the surface also presents a meaningful schedule and capex reduction opportunity, piggybacking off existing wastewater extraction, collection, and disposal infrastructure that would otherwise represent >30% of project capex.

Extracting lithium from produced water is not without its challenges:

Water volumes are often disaggregated, meaning less water and lithium concentrated in a single location, making it challenging to capture the economies of scale that are critical to making today's lithium projects economically viable
Lithium concentrations in produced water are considerably lower than commercially producing brine operations in South America, meaning significant volumes of water need to be processed in order to extract commercial quantities of lithium
Impurity profiles are complex, including organics that must be separated to ensure resilient performance of processing equipment and successful production of high-purity end products

In order to unlock this resource we need:

Productized plants and highly capital efficient project execution to offset the smaller scale of these facilities
Dynamic adjustment of the extraction facilities to adapt to the variability of the feedstock and to selectively separate lithium from wastewater, while rejecting impurities that would be detrimental to process equipment health and end product quality

Mariana's solution

Over the past 50 years, extensive work has been focused on developing methods to selectively separate lithium from other elements in brine resources. Today, several classes of technologies exist to accomplish this, typically referred to as Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE). Thirteen projects are in operation globally representing ~10% of global lithium production in 2024. The technology that enables lithium extraction from oil and gas wastewater has already been demonstrated at scale and a rich ecosystem of technology companies are working tirelessly to continue to innovate in the space.

Mariana's solution

But while DLE projects have been successfully deployed overseas (notably in China), American companies have struggled to replicate this success domestically. Assembling the experienced team capable of designing, constructing, commissioning, and operating this infrastructure has been the primary constraint. Mariana is here to address these challenges head on. Our internally developed extraction and purification process is designed to manage the complex impurity profile and relatively low lithium concentrations inherent to produced water, and our internal lab and pilot facilities are operating today, producing battery-grade lithium salts from real wastewater from oil & gas operations.

By marrying robust flow sheet development with a process simplification and product design mindset ("the best process is no process, the best part is no part"), Mariana is targeting a competitive capital intensity for Lithium One, despite lower production capacity than many lithium projects being built today.

In addition to cost-effectively integrating a robust process to produce battery-grade lithium from oil and gas wastewater, Mariana's PlantOS — our internal reinforcement learning platform that enables autonomous, short-interval control of minerals refining circuits — is key to unlocking this resource. Wastewater volumes and compositions can be highly variable, and operating set points and configurations must be real-time adjusted to optimize for lithium recovery, reagent consumption, energy intensity, and equipment uptime. Leveraging the same tool kit in use today for self-driving vehicles, humanoid robots, and other applications of physical-AI, PlantOS is aimed at accelerating project commissioning and ramp up timelines in addition to optimizing steady-state process operations. The ultimate goal is compressing start-up timelines by 50% and reducing steady state operating costs by >25% (we'll be sharing more on this in a future blog post). These improvements greatly enhance project returns, allowing Mariana to build more projects, faster, to bolster Western energy minerals production.

We're not just talking, we're taking action

Despite the US being the global leader in lithium production from the 1950s to the mid 1990s, we've fundamentally lost our ability to cost- and schedule-effectively deploy lithium production infrastructure domestically. The past 10+ years have been marred by companies making hefty promises to commercialize new resources and re-build this production capability, but today there remains a single lithium mining operation in the US (built in the 1960s) representing <1% of global production.

We need to break out of the pattern of never-ending pilot and demonstration plants that do not deliver meaningful units to market. We also need to stop marketing multi-billion-dollar first-of-a-kind projects that will take decades to build and start-up.

Lithium One is a GWh-scale lithium production facility, capable of producing up to 3,000 metric tons per annum of battery-grade lithium salts, and will be in commercial production in the first half of 2027. This project is a partnership with Select Water Solutions, a leading US water and chemical services provider to the energy industry, with operations across all major US oil and gas basins. Mariana's hub-and-spoke approach will first process water volumes flowing today on Select's pipeline in Western Louisiana and East Texas, before deploying satellite facilities that will produce a concentrated lithium chloride to be converted at the integrated hub facility.

This is Mariana's first step towards building a new major player in the lithium industry (formally launching our Mariana Lithium subsidiary), with the goal of eventually ramping to hundreds of thousands of tons per year of lithium from a diverse set of resources globally.

It's time to build.