As the world shifts from a hydrocarbon-based economy to a low-carbon future, ensuring a sustainable supply of critical minerals has become a key challenge.
Watercycle Technologies is tackling this issue head-on by developing cutting-edge solutions for mineral recovery and water treatment. By creating end-to-end extraction technologies, the company is bridging supply chain gaps while addressing the environmental impact of critical mineral sourcing. In this interview, we speak with Watercycle Technologies CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Seb Leaper about how the company is advancing lithium extraction, battery recycling, and wastewater treatment to help build a more sustainable future.
Can you provide an overview of Watercycle Technologies' mission and how it aligns with addressing the global critical minerals shortage?
The transition from a hydrocarbon economy to a low-carbon economy requires different periodic table elements. This includes elements like lithium, nickel, copper, manganese, rare earths, etc.
Much of the world’s supply of these critical minerals is found outside of Europe. To ensure we have a sufficient supply of these minerals to power low-carbon technologies, we need to invest in domestic primary production and recycling infrastructure. Our company addresses both ends of the critical minerals supply chain and can enable countries like the UK to create a sustainable domestic supply of their own.
We do this by designing and building end-to-end mineral recovery and water treatment machines capable of treating liquid and solid waste to extract high-purity minerals. We are initially targeting end-of-life batteries, wastewater, and subsurface brines, which all contain significant quantities of valuable minerals essential for building a low-carbon economy. A byproduct of our processes is freshwater, and so we aim to mitigate water scarcity by creating an economic incentive to treat and purify the water.
Image Credit: Watercycle Technologies
Your Direct Lithium Extraction and Crystallisation (DLEC) technology is designed to produce battery-grade lithium salts from sub-surface waters. Could you elaborate on how this process works and its environmental advantages over traditional lithium extraction methods?
Lithium production today involves either hard rock mining or evaporative brine mining. The former creates approximately 10 times the CO2 emissions of the latter due to the high-temperature requirements (1100 °C) for heating the rock that contains the lithium.
The main issue with the evaporation-based method is that for every ton of lithium carbonate produced, approximately 500 m3 of water is evaporated into the sky. This depletes freshwater aquifers in the vicinity, causing wells to run dry.
Our DLEC™ addresses these two issues by selectively removing the lithium from the brine and then reinjecting the brine back underground, closing the water loop. Meanwhile, it does not require high temperatures like hard rock mining and so the carbon emissions are comparable to evaporation methods. In addition, we produce refined lithium salts, as opposed to lower-value intermediate products that require refining elsewhere.
This enables our customers to capture more of the value chain. Finally, many DLE technologies are very water intensive, and even those that incorporate water recycling still require an external freshwater source, often unavailable in remote, arid areas. Our technology produces freshwater from the brine, enabling a truly water-neutral or even water-positive process. This means it can operate where there is no external water supply.
In the realm of brine mining, what specific challenges does Watercycle Technologies face, and how does your DLEC technology overcome them to ensure sustainable lithium production?
In South America, challenges with brine mining include water scarcity, a lack of infrastructure, and experience in brine reinjection. There is a knowledge gap between geothermal power production and mineral extraction in the geothermal context since these processes do not operate concurrently.
As mentioned, our technology can be standalone and operate without significant surrounding infrastructure since we can incorporate onsite reagent production, water production, and energy production. In addition, our team’s expertise provides a bridge between geothermal and mineral extraction engineering that enables these new hybrid plants to come online and deliver the three benefits of heat, power, and minerals.
Your systems can treat highly concentrated water across various industries. How does your technology facilitate wastewater treatment while enabling effluent discharge compliance, and what industries can benefit the most from this application?
Many companies produce industrial wastewater with valuable residual components that their systems cannot treat. They are required to pay a service to remove and dispose of this water. Our systems allow companies to recover the value of this waste to obtain a saleable product whilst managing their wastewater. Every atom must be saleable, recirculated into the process, or compliantly discharged. This means that every byproduct generated is a potentially saleable product and we have to do what is needed to get it to be saleable. While we focus on brine mining, battery recycling, and desalination industries, our technology ultimately applies to industries like textiles, chemicals, agriculture, power and electricity, and many others.
Battery recycling is a critical component of a circular economy. How does Watercycle Technologies' system efficiently recover mineral value from end-of-life batteries, and what measures are in place to mitigate the risks associated with battery storage?
As we increasingly electrify our cities, old batteries are growing. The materials within these batteries hold value, and the UK must build the capacity to extract and reuse them. Our technology is a novel hydrometallurgical process that efficiently separates all minerals in the battery while recycling the water. We are now utilizing our pilot to incorporate more diverse inputs, like solid waste, batteries, and black mass, and we are building a new dedicated system for producing ton-scale lithium carbonate in the next six months, taking the learnings from the first system.
There are serious environmental and health risks associated with working on batteries, and we must understand and manage them for the safety of our workers and partners. We are in contact with several battery storage companies to offer the best advice on the safe storage of our batteries, as there is a lot of innovation in this area.
Image Credit: Watercycle Technologies
With the increasing demand for critical minerals, how does Watercycle Technologies ensure that its extraction and recycling processes remain economically viable and environmentally sustainable?
The UK and Europe have a critical mineral supply shortage. While lithium prices have been reducing in recent years due to lower-than-expected EV demand, prices for minerals like copper have been shooting up. In the long term, demand will still outstrip supply even with current and planned mining activities.
We also see activity from China limiting the export of minerals such as graphite to the wider world, which threatens the ability of other countries to achieve their Net Zero targets.
Our approach to achieving cost-competitiveness is not to rely on high commodity prices but to simplify our processes, increase atom economy, and recover value from any byproducts at each stage.
To comply with future regulations, battery manufacturers will require a lower carbon footprint. This means obtaining raw materials from old batteries rather than mines since old batteries have higher concentrations of valuable minerals than natural ores. Most, if not all, end-of-life batteries currently collected are sent outside of Europe to be recycled. The UK must develop this mineral recovery ‘know-how’, which is critical for a more sustainable future, remaining economically competitive, and mitigating China's threat in this strategic area.
Image Credit: Watercycle Technologies
Collaboration often plays a key role in technological advancement. Can you discuss any partnerships or collaborations Watercycle Technologies has engaged in to enhance its mineral recovery systems?
Collaboration has been vital to our progress. We currently have several active partnerships, with more to be announced soon. These include resource owners, government bodies, battery collectors, and several other organizations from around the world.
What are Watercycle Technologies' future goals in contributing to the Net Zero transition, and how do you plan to scale your operations to meet the growing demand for sustainably sourced critical minerals?
Our ultimate goal is to unlock a circular critical mineral supply chain in Europe and help provide a steady flow of raw materials to its growing fleet of gigafactories. There is still a way to go in this endeavor, with Cornish Lithium saying we need to produce 50,000 tons of lithium carbonate annually by 2030 to supply the UK’s needs.
We will achieve this through staged scale-up and proof of viability at each stage. We believe it is harder to go from grams to 100s of kg than from 100s of kg to 100s of tons as you move from a scientific problem to an engineering problem. It is not to say it is easy, and we are expanding our engineering team to ensure we succeed in this but we believe we are in a good position to achieve our goals and contribute significantly to Europe’s domestic lithium supply. We are looking forward to it.
Where can readers find more information?
https://www.watercycletechnologies.com/
About Dr. Seb Leaper
Dr. Seb Leaper completed his PhD in Nanoscience at the University of Manchester in 2019 before co-founding Watercycle Technologies with CTO Dr Ahmed Abdelkarim.
Following initial endorsement by Sandisk Co-founder Dr Eli Harari, Seb and Ahmed have recently raised $5.6m in Series A funding for the company.
Dr. Seb Leaper is now driving the commercial rollout of the technology. Seb’s passion for sustainability has been with him since school and lies at the heart of the company's ethos. Driven by curiosity and a desire to create change for the better, Seb hopes to inspire people to work together to build a greener future.
Before leading Watercycle’s research and development, Ahmed trained at the National Water Research Centre in Cairo. As an Egyptian national, Ahmed keenly understands the importance of water. He is fascinated by the opportunities membrane technology offers to address global challenges like water scarcity and resource security.
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