Saad Dara, PhD

The majority of lithium is extracted in North and South America and Australia – but is refined from feedstock to a battery-grade lithium in China, creating huge supply and sometimes political bottleneck. In addition, incumbent technologies used to refine lithium are energy and chemical intensive, as well as creating sodium sulfate waste requiring disposal. Enter Saad: Over the last 27 months, Mangrove has proven that their electrochemical technology is able to domestically refine extracted lithium from brines, hard rocks, and recycled batteries into a battery grade lithium hydroxide at a commercial scale more economically, energy efficiently and without the production of waste by-products. Meaning that Canada and other producing regions can have clean, reliable domestic lithium refining, while eliminating the China from the equation.