Brines to Batteries

From electric vehicles to drones to grid energy storage, future demand for batteries is on the rise—and the cofounders of Electroflow Technologies are getting ready for it.

“Suffice it to say, if we need more batteries, we’re going to need more battery materials,” says chief technology officer Evan Gardner, who is cofounder of the startup together with CEO Eric McShane.

They believe the best way to insulate the United States from battery material shortages, whether from global pandemics or international trade wars, is to manufacture it on U.S. shores. Their venture has developed new technology to do just that.

Electroflow’s core technology converts abundant saltwater brines—found both in natural underground deposits and in many industrial waste streams—into a key battery electrode material, lithium iron phosphate (or LFP for short). If Electroflow is able to successfully scale up the technology, which is simpler, cheaper, and cleaner than incumbent methods, it could be a game changer.

“Our grand goal is to make the largest fully domestic U.S. supply chain for LFP,” McShane says.

Homeward bound

Today, 99 percent of this crucial LFP material is made in China. Given the current geopolitical climate, the startup’s mission is well timed.

“That’s an understatement, perhaps,” says McShane, who has taken to calling a Congressional act passed in July the “One Big Battery Bill.”

Adds Gardner: “If a lot of that supply is coming from China, but we want to scale up battery capacity, we have to onshore a materials supply chain. It’s unavoidable.”

Already the auto industry has begun to pivot. Tesla has battery factories in Nevada and California, and is building plants in Texas. Ford is constructing a lithium battery plant in Michigan, an hour and a half west of Detroit. GM is collaborating with LG Energy Solutions to build a factory in Tennessee, with commercial production slated for late 2027.

The Electroflow cofounders assert that North America contains enough lithium-bearing brines to drive over 300 million electric vehicles, if it can be extracted economically from low-grade brines that have been overlooked in the past. Major resources include the Smackover region in Arkansas and Texas, the Salton Sea in southern California, and a multitude of lower grade brines scattered across the United States.

So, the question now is less where battery materials will be produced—but how.

Busting bottlenecks

Typically lithium is extracted from beneath the ground in two ways. Either lithium-rich brines are pumped to the Earth’s surface and left to evaporate in large ponds over months, letting sunshine concentrate the lithium solution. Or hard rock containing lithium is mined, crushed, and chemically processed.

Electroflow is focused on a novel technique that captures lithium ions directly from dilute brines, skipping the need for ponds altogether. The cofounders told the Wall Street Journal that their streamlined process achieves 96 percent recovery rates of lithium, as compared to the 40 percent to 60 percent more common from evaporation ponds.

Conventional lithium extraction methods require at least 10 steps in total, at a cost ranging from $3,500 to $8,000 per metric ton of lithium carbonate equivalent, according to the Wall Street Journal. Electroflow shrinks that complexity into three steps, converting brine directly to battery-ready lithium, and then that chemical stream to LFP for customers at an estimated cost of $1,500 per metric ton.

The venture’s technology also saves water, using as little as one-tenth of the water resources, though it is not a direct comparison between the freshwater in their tests and briny water in South American salt flats.

Synergies with industry partners could help Electroflow get to market faster, especially geothermal and oil and gas companies that find trace amounts of lithium in their waste streams.

“They already have the pipes in the ground and the brines flowing. We could just latch on to their existing infrastructure,” says McShane.

With those efficiencies in the works, Electroflow has caught the attention of investors, raising $2.8 million in a pre-seed round in 2024 and an additional $10 million in seed funding this year to ramp up to the tons-per-year scale.

Electro-enthusiasm

The cofounders met in the Cargnello Group at Stanford in 2021, and by the laboratory’s first holiday party found they shared an interest in all things electrified.

“We just couldn’t stop thinking about it,” says Gardner, of their insatiable curiosity for the inner workings of the lithium supply chain. “We listened to every podcast and video we could find about the lithium supply chain, and we were always like, ‘That’s actually how they do it?’”

They both felt the industry had room for improvement. As postdoctoral scholars, their business plans got serious in 2023 when they had the conviction to apply for Breakthrough Energy Fellows, the clean energy accelerator backed by Bill Gates.

“That’s really where it hit that we should go after any opportunity that lets us spin this out and start a company,” says Gardner.

Soon the duo had earned an Innovation Transfer Grant from the TomKat Center as well.

“We’re super thankful for the TomKat funding. It comes at such a crucial time, not only for us, but for every company they fund,” says McShane. “When you’re spinning out, any amount of funding is so important. That’s when ‘capital is the most expensive,’ is what they all say.’”

Two years later, the venture has expanded to eight full-time employees, plus summer interns sourced from the TomKat Center, in a 13,000-square-foot warehouse in San Bruno with the capacity to “manufacture everything that goes into our electrochemical cell stack,” he says.

McShane looks back on a cell prototype that was once the size of a playing card. Now the cell stack is as tall as he is.

Gardner says he is excited to see the technology on the cusp of deployment, after months of prototyping. “Now we can start integrating all the ideas into something we can bring out to a site for lithium extraction—and growing the team to do that.”

This article is part of the TomKat Center Spotlight series designed to highlight the impact and trajectory of the work of faculty and students who received funding through our Innovation Transfer Program, TomKat Solutions, and Graduate Fellowships. Stanford University does not endorse any non-Stanford entities, programs, products, or services listed in the article.