Across the Permian Basin, the vast, mineral-rich swath of land in West Texas that supplies much of the nation’s crude oil, derricks pump out massive amounts of oil, roughly 6 million barrels a day. 

But that amount pales in comparison with the amount of dirty, brackish water that’s also extracted during oil drilling. Drilling in the Permian Basin also unearths roughly 26 million barrels of water a day, about the same daily water use as all of New York City. This water is often black-gray from oil residue, and has a funky odor from underground bacteria. 

Traditionally considered a by-product of energy production, this water, concentrated seawater from prehistoric oceans, is mineral rich. The Houston-based startup Element3 found that this so-called wastewater is a rich source of lithium, and endeavored to filter it to create a domestic source of this high-demand mineral. (Lithium is the third element on the periodic table, hence the company name.) It’s a creative concept that, in a poetic twist, turns a waste product of petroleum drilling into the raw materials for EV batteries and a clean energy future. 

“It’s a wonderful circular economy, waste-to-value story,” said the company CEO and founder, Hood Whitson.

S. Department of Energy research from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory on ways to filter this oil by-product, and is working across Texas to figure out ways to scale up production. The firm has raised a little over $20 million and has 15 employees, per PitchBook. For years, DOE researchers have been looking into what Whitson called “unconventional brine mining,” finding ways to extract lithium from California’s inland Salton Sea, for example, or pull rare earth metals out of industrial waste sites.

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