Canada Can Now Mine and Refine Lithium for EV Batteries. Can the USA?

On April 16, 2026, Mangrove Lithium opened a new headquarters and commercial production facility in Delta, British Columbia, near Vancouver. Essentially a proof-of-concept facility for its new Clear-Li refining process, it is nevertheless capable of producing 1,100 tons of battery-grade lithium per year. Sure, that’s only enough to power 25,000 electric vehicles (we produced over 1.3 million EVs in the U.S. alone last year), but that appears to be more than the various pilot plants and recycling facilities in the U.S. delivered last year. Best of all, it promises to clean up the battery production process.

Using Electricity to Refine Lithium?

The traditional way of cracking mined lithium (starting with hard rocks or clays, as found in North Carolina and Thacker Pass in Nevada) is to roast the ore or clay with sulfuric acid to produce lithium sulfate, then combine this with sodium carbonate, which precipitates out lithium carbonate, leaving behind roughly twice the mass of sodium sulfate dissolved in the liquid. This is typically not pure enough to sell for use in detergents, etc., and hence is considered waste. Lithium carbonate can be used to make cheaper lithium-iron-phosphate or low-nickel batteries, but high-capacity NMC requires another step to form lithium hydroxide.

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Clear-Li Catalytic electrodialysis

In Mangrove’s process, lithium sulfate feedstock undergoes electrodialysis, where electrolysis separates oxygen and hydrogen from water; electrodialysis causes ions to pass through membranes. In this process, hydroxide ions combine with the lithium to form battery-grade lithium hydroxide with no impurities, while protons bind to the sulfate to produce commercially useful sulfuric acid. Additional steps can result in production of lithium carbonate if that is preferred.

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Refining battery-grade (B.G) lithium from brines is simpler than from hard rocks (spodumene) and clays.

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Note that the red arrows indicate Mangrove equipment added at an existing older-style lithium refinery to provide circularity in the sodium/sulfuric acid circuit.

Note that Mangrove’s process can also be used to convert sodium sulfate waste from other facilities back into sodium hydroxide and sulfuric acid, meaning that older-style refineries could add the Mangrove equipment to recycle/reuse their sodium sulfate waste. If some of this sounds vaguely familiar, we covered a similar process developed by Nano One to form cathode active materials, called One-Pot Metals to Cathode Active Materials (M2CAM).

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Mangrove’s Delta facility is a best-case scenario thanks to British Columbia’s high percentage of clean hydroelectricity.

59–73% Lower Carbon Footprint

Simply by eliminating the need to mine and transport chemical reagents and their inevitable waste byproducts, the Mangrove process reduces the carbon footprint of battery-grade lithium production by a lot—especially when refining from hard rock. Carbon use is considerably lower when refining lithium from brines, and of course the overall carbon footprint is dependent on the source of the electricity used in the electrodialysis process.

Cost-Competitive Without Legislation

In an era when our government seems less concerned about emissions, one might wonder how ripe the market is for a new low-waste lithium processing idea. Well, Mangrove Lithium’s CEO Saad Dara told MotorTrend, “We’re not relying on regulations to commercialize the technology.” Rather, he reckons refining companies looking to build a new plant will ask themselves, “Do we want to invest the capital to treat the waste, or do we want to invest the same amount of capital in doubling our capacity of lithium production while also eliminating the waste?” He also noted that the electrochemical process remains cost competitive with electricity pricing as high as 12 cents/kWh. (The 2025 average U.S. industrial electricity average price was $0.08–0.09/kWh.)

Well-Traveled Lithium

For now, Mangrove’s Delta facility has signed a memorandum of understanding with Élévra to secure spodumene (lithium rock) feedstock from the North American Lithium (NAL) mine in Quebec, creating a clear pathway toward Canada’s first mine-to-cathode lithium supply chain—a 2,700-mile-long chain.

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Refine It Where You Mine It

Clearly, any sustainable long-term solution to on-shoring the battery supply chain for the U.S.’s million-plus annual electric vehicle production would involve locating larger facilities nearer to promising lithium sources like Nevada’s Clayton Valley brine mines or Thacker Pass clays, the Smackover brines in the Arkansas/Texas area, the spodumene in North Carolina, or the geothermal brines of the Salton Sea in California. (California’s electricity grid costs might suggest hauling those brines across a state line, but the rest should be fine.)

The good news is that since none of those sources is producing much output yet, there’s no existing facility refining via the old waste-heavy way, so as they come up to speed, it will make sense to install Mangrove Lithium’s system. Note, this system can also be used to refine the “black mass” that will one day flow out of battery recycling facilities like Redwood Materials, Li-Cycle, Ascend Elements, and Green Li-ion.