$VLTLF $LIB.v Okay, so we talked about the large overview and how the water flows through the site in the post below. Now let’s talk about where the magic actually happens…

The inbound water first flows through a basic media filter. Simple in concept, but pretty smart in practice. It’s the last cleanup and protection layer before the rest of the system. Kind of a safety gate before the real work starts. From there the water stages in tanks and begins the DLE process. There are a lot of moving pieces and a lot of variables being controlled. Water temperature, pH balance, flow rates, pressures. Honestly it almost felt like a giant high-tech aquarium system. Instead of protecting fish and optimizing their environment, they’re optimizing the environment to remove lithium from the water. Everywhere you look there are pumps, gauges, control systems, water moving from one vessel to the next. DLE in the simplest terms is basically the water flowing through the media where the lithium gets “stuck” while the rest of the water keeps moving. Once the media is loaded up, the lithium gets washed back out, the media resets, and the cycle repeats. That output stream, called eluate, gets collected into storage tanks. At that point it’s essentially lithium chloride solution waiting for the final refining stage. (The photo below is basically just the refinery part (ie the mad lab). The DLE is in addition, and for good reasons I’m not putting up photos of that setup)