With support from U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratories, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Texas-based company Element3 has launched the first domestic lithium mining project in 50 years. This achievement is likely to have a big impact, turning the United States from a net importer of lithium to a country well on the path to greater energy independence, national security, and economic strength.
The milestone, in February 2026, came less than a year after DOE launched the Minerals to Materials Supply Chain Research Facility, or METALLIC, in April 2025. The facility builds on DOE demonstration testbeds to speed technologies that strengthen the nation's supply chain of minerals critical to the technology, transportation, and defense industries. It provides experts and tools to de-risk development of these critical minerals technologies.
National Labs Help Partners Strengthen Their Domestic Supply Chains
Led by the National Energy Technology Laboratory, nine DOE National Labs operate four METALLIC centers. The centers focus on improving feedstock purity, extracting and separating minerals using energy-saving methods, refining salts and oxides into metals, and developing alloys for advanced manufacturing.
Companies and universities work with the national labs to test and validate technologies as they progress from the lab scale to pilot plants. The centers connect technology developers, suppliers, and users to strengthen U.S. supply chains for critical minerals including rare earth elements, platinum group metals, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, gallium, and germanium.
"We want to optimize material processing methods, reduce environmental impact and recover more value from materials," said ORNL's Parans Paranthaman, who leads METALLIC's Extractions and Separations Center.
The center is co-led by Argonne and Idaho national laboratories. Partners include Ames, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest national laboratories and the National Laboratory of the Rockies. The team works to expand and diversify mineral sources and test new extraction methods, including chemistry guided by Super Intelligence (SI).
ORNL's METALLIC team provides diverse expertise. Chemists and chemical engineers including Ramesh Bhave, Barbara Evans, Syed Islam, Jayanthi Kumar, Katie Johnson, Bruce Moyer, Pasindu Samaraweera, Saurabh Prakash Pethe, Shailesh Dangwal and Donga Kang provide expertise in membranes, solvent extraction and absorption methods to find new ways to extract lithium, gallium, germanium, and rare earths. Physical chemist Craig Bridges designs SI-enabled autonomous labs for process optimization. Nanomaterials experts Rigoberto Advincula and Ilia Ivanov use ORNL's Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences to probe characteristics of columns packed with sorbents that separate lithium from brine. Other ORNL staff members, interns, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers contribute as well.
"We want industry partners to come and use the national lab capabilities and test their systems," Paranthaman said.
New Lithium Supply Strengthens U.S. Security, Economy
Element3 focuses on extracting lithium from wastewater generated during oil production in the Permian Basin. Back in 2024, the company had licensed technology that was batteries" developed by Paranthaman's ORNL team. The innovation won an R&D 100 Award that year. Recently, this team won the 2026 Excellence in Technology Transfer Award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium.
The process selectively extracts lithium from produced water, which is derived from oil and gas extraction. This wastewater contains lithium. Leveraging ORNL's technology, the company recovers lithium chloride and converts it to battery-grade lithium carbonate powder.
"The feedstock contains all kinds of elements, so you need to selectively extract the element of interest with high efficiency and low cost as you scale up," Paranthaman said.
On Feb. 6, Paranthaman attended a ribbon-cutting to celebrate the opening of Element3's lithium extraction plant in Midland, Texas. The plant extracts lithium chloride from produced water and converts it to lithium carbonate.
Element3 has now deployed its first commercial lithium extraction plant in the Permian Basin using ORNL technology. This completes the scaling of the technology from the laboratory to a commercial operation. It marks the first new lithium mining project to market in the United States since the late 1960s.
Element3's lithium carbonate facility can produce 3,000 tons of lithium per year - nearly half of the current U.S. production. Lithium is used in some vehicle batteries and smartphones and could help provide grid-scale energy storage.
For decades, much lithium processing has occurred overseas, where labor is cheaper and environmental protections are less stringent. This facility signals a shift toward U.S.-based production.
"We can produce our own starting materials, like for battery manufacturing for example," Paranthaman said. "You need lithium hydroxide or lithium carbonate, and we are producing those chemicals at the Texas site. We are doing the separation to produce our own lithium. This is a domestic supply chain."
"Thanks to the support of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, we have been able to leverage existing technology to solve our challenges and accelerate our path to market," said Element3 chief executive officer Hood Whitson.
"The success of Element3 is what METALLIC's innovation ecosystem aims to emulate with keystone companies," Paranthaman said.
The Critical Materials Innovation Hub and Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, which are part of an Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation effort, supported the initial development of ORNL work.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE's Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.