Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshatrati. This week sharkskins, plane wings and novel things. One of the best things I get to do in my job is to visit early stage startups full of passionate people coming up with the solutions to the climate problem. Some of them work with the kind of headline grabbing tech you hear about all the time, batteries,
carbon capture, and even nuclear fusion. But there's all sorts of weird and wonderful inventions out there which hope to fill in the blank spaces in the net zero puzzle.
What we've made here is inspired by sharkskin. It is much more simplified than actual sharkskin. So they're running in this direction. Yeah, and if you your figuzz you can hear that buzzing.
That's the voice of Henry Belinski, the founder of micro Tau, and the high pitch noise you can hear it is his finger running back and forth across a thin plastic film. This is the startup's innovation, a textured film that imitates sharkskin to reduce drag on airplanes. To the naked eye, it's basically transparent, but when you look at it under a microscope. You can see these tiny ridges known as riblets,
that mimic the pattern seen on sharkskin. Think about it like a high tech wrapping paper, but for planes, all in the service of using less fuel to fly and thus produce fewer emissions. Aviation contributes about two percent of global emissions, and its share is expected to rise in coming decades, so solutions are badly needed. Henry is showing me around a dimly lit room bathed in orange light. This is the lab microtower uses to three D print
this film. Henry says the film can reduce fuel consumption on planes by four percent. Now that might not sound like much, but if the film can be rolled out across every lane worldwide, the fuel savings and the emission savings would be huge.
So in five to ten years time, we'll will be flying on planes with our Sharkskin on them. But then we'll also be having them in the water in marine applications. We're replicating the patterns that we find in nature, and sharks are step one and a big problem for us to solve with big impact. But there's a whole host of really interesting materials.
On today's episode of Zero, we hear from two startups I met in Australia. The companies are trying to solve very different problems, but both want to clean up existing industries. First, we'll hear from Henry at Microtower about where he thinks Sharkskin fits into the future of air travel, and later in the episode we'll meet Stephen Vasaludis, the founder of Novolith, a company trying to introduce a lower carbon form of extracting lithium for batteries. Micro Tawer was founded in twenty sixteen.
It raised five point six million Australian dollars in a round led by the country's Clean Energy Finance Corporation. Then it got a three million dollar grant from the Australian government, which will go to fund trials with the country's low cost airline, Jetstar. I joined the startup CEO, Henry Bolinski, at the company's office in the outskirts of Sydney earlier this year. I also talked to Ian Leerman, the head of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, in a past episode
of the podcast. The link is in the show notes if you want to hear more. Henry, Welcome to the show.
Thank you, good to be here now.
We're going to talk about sharkskin being used for good things Before we do that, how did you come to working on sharkskin applications for stuff?
It was an unusual way to get involved. It came about from a global innovation challenge that the US Air Force Research Laboratory posted. It was actually late twenty fifteen that they posted this challenge, and they were looking for ways to reduce their eight billion dollar a year fuel burn. And the line's share of that came from their transport aircraft, so big heavy planes, things like C seventeen one thirties.
Well, the Department of Defense in the US is probably one of the largest, if not the largest, emitter of greeno's gases.
Yep, so I know the Air Force alone spends about ten billion dollars a year on fuel now, and so yeah, we've got we've got planes flying overhead to demonstrate it just for this podcast. We organize it. Oh no, we're under the flightpath here in Sydney. But it's a it's
a nice constant reminder of what we're focusing on. And so ten billion dollar a year in fuel, you're talking on the order of tens of mega tons of carbon being emitted, So at that time they were really just focused on reducing their fuel burn in terms of saving money and also a national security issue because you know they're dependent on being able to burn that. So there was a global challenge. I responded to it.
Is it a researcher.
No, I was actually getting admitted as a lawyer at the time, but I do have a physics background, and so I was looking at these kind of online open innovation challenges. The thing I was interested in is whether you could find new problems to solve with old technologies, especially by looking to outside industries. So I tried a number of these open innovation challenges, and this air Force
one came out. They knew about this idea of shark skin and that the microscopic patterns that you find on shark skin have the effect of reducing drag, and these microopak patterns reduced drag, but they didn't really know how to practically implement them on a huge service area like an aircraft, And so I proposed kind of modifying a
computer chip manufacturing method called pholotography. It's a way of printing things that are even smaller than what you need for sharkskin with light and put that in and frankly didn't expect to hear anything back, but was selected as one of ten awards from around the world and went and pitched at an air Force base in Daton, Ohio where the right brothers are from the right Perdison Air
Force Base. There was a whole process, but ultimately one a contract to build and develop and demonstrate this technology, and that's when I founded the company in twenty sixteen.
So sharkskin looked pretty smooth. I've not touched a shark, but I'm assuming it's very small the changes that you are trying to replicate.
You're right, So they do look smooth, and sharks are very efficient swimmers, and you would usually think that a smooth surface is the best way to move through air or water. What they're covered in, though, is if you do touch them, they feel more like sampaper because they're these microscopic ridges on the skin of the shark.
Right.
Those ridges are known as riblets, so they know sharks have developed them of millions of years with the beneficiaries of that great R and D. But the first work sort of humans looking at this has happened a while Agore originally done by NASA about replicating these microscopic patterns.
So you're just you're kind of piggybacking off NASA's on science or US governments on science work, but actually showing them how to build it and apply it.
Yeah. So so NASA did that original work. So they made them on the sort of a millimeter scale that knew that you need to them down to the micrometer scale, so fractions of the width of a human hair is what we're talking about to get it to work in aviation. So yeah, definitely the beneficiaries of not just NASSA, but a whole lot of work has been done the intervening years throughout academia and different research institutions.
And so you propose this idea of making this stuff although you didn't have any equipment, you had never done it before.
No, I was Henry from Sydney, and I am very lucky that the US government but also the entire advisory committee there took a punt on myself and also the team that I pulled together. So yeah, I definitely am lucky to work with very smart people on this too.
And so now six seven years on, you are making stuff, yes, and we've got a tour of your facility and there is light printing happening. But just walk us through you briefly the steps involved in making this stuff, and then what happens once you do make these films? Right, they're basically plastic sheets.
Yeah, so we're essentially it's a pre fabricated film that you stick on to the outside of a plane, very similar to other films that are already applied to planes that are usually done for advertising or graphical purposes. So the way that we may factor and that kind of is our core IP and differentiator, is this process we call direct contactless microfabrication or DCM. That's basically this process
where we grow the structures, these microscopic patterns. So again, these ridges space about half the width of human hair. We grow them with lights, so we get a material that cures when it's hit by a ultraviolet light. We lay down a layer of this material. It will remain liquid or uncured until it's exposed, and then we have an optical system that projects that sharkskin patent into the
surface and grows the structures from the bottom up. The reason why I'm being particular on that point is what's distinct from typical three D printing is three D printing is usually really two D printing done over and over again. You print a layer in two D and then you do it so on and so forth. We actually can print entire three D structures only at the microscale in a single exposure step through this process in this effect.
So explain drag and how exactly this thing reduces drag.
So drag is the force that a body moving through a fluid experiences. So a shark has to expend energy to push through the water, or a plane has to burn fuel to push through the air. If you can reduce that drag, you can reduce amount of energy that you have to burn. The way that these structures work, it's counterintuitive. Usually a smoother surface is better when it comes to reducing drag. But what sharks have worked out is if you have these specific ridge designs, you can
interact with a phenomenon that's known as hepinvortices. So if you zoom down to that microscopic scale in what's called turbulent flow, so when the flow is all messy, which is most of the flow that anything experiences, especially planes.
I mean, I think one visual is an incense stick. If you burn it in a closed room, you get this nice stream. If you move your hand around it and it just becomes chaotic, and that's kind of turbulance.
Right, exactly right. So when it's all nice, clean streams of smoke, you can see, that's lamina flow, where everything's ordered and predictable. And then eventually, if you wait long enough, the top of that will get all messy and swell around, and that's turbulent flow. Now, on a plane or on a shark, most of the flow is turbulent flow. And if you zoom in small enough, there are these very
predictable structures called hairpin vortices. They're kind of in the shape of a hairpin, funnily enough, through about the diameter of a human hair. They're very predictable according to your flow conditions, and they provide additional scrubbing and energy on that surface, which essentially means more friction drag, more drag that's applying to the surface that's moving through the fluid.
But if you can make these ridges just narrower than the diameter of that vortex, then you can actually exclude it from the surface and it doesn't fit in between the ridges. And only interacts with these very sharp peaks. The result of that is that you get a net drag reduction effect because they're not actually interacting with the surface completely. Again, sharks get the credit for coming up
with this idea, and it works incredibly well. So with the material that we have made to date and sort of our our current generation of product, we reliably get an eight percent friction drag saving. That'll have a different impact depending on the application, but on a typical tube and we're getting aircraft, you've got half of your drag being friction drag, so that eight percent becomes a four percent net efficiency gain, So four percent less fuel burned, four percent less carbon emissions.
Well, you give sharks credit. It's not like they were thinking about it. It's just that they kept swimming in the water and the more efficient ones one out and then they got evolved into the beast that they are beautiful as they are.
I can't claim to know the inner workings of shouts, but they definitely are the ones that came up with it. So whether they thought of it or.
Not, so what kind of impact do you think you can have?
So today global aviation spends about turning to billion dollars on fuel, producing about a billion tons of carbon, and we could be with our current products saving up to about four percent of that. On individual, say wide body aircraft, we can be saving on the order of a million dollars of fuel a year and three thousand tons of carbon.
And that's where we're currently at. And the other thing, which which I referred to when I showed you the lab and the tour, we really want to leverage the fact that we can make new designs and improve those savings. And we also work with the University of Melbourne. They'll be building us a dedicated testing facility so we can start rapidly iterating the different designs that we can make, test them in the testing facility and improve that performance.
And we're nowhere near any sort of physical limit as to what kind of efficiency gains we can be getting when it comes to functional surfaces and how we can improve the efficiency of aviation. So we want to push that up closer to ten percent.
And what will be required to pass what would be a pretty strict regulatory environment.
Yes, so you're right. Aviation is a highly regulated industry, which is great. That's why we're safely flying on planes and not worrying about them falling out of the sky, and so we need to make sure that we fit within that regulatory process. We have a great model for how we can get onto aircraft, which is the graphical films are referred to earlier, so they're already films that are up to spec and applied to aircraft and flown
on aircraft regularly. So we're installing in the same procedures, the same way, the same kinds of materials and passing those material specs and that's the method that we're using for we've got some upcoming flight trials, so we just had a project announced with some funding from the Australian through government, which is in partnership with Jetstar, which is our biggest low cost carrier here in Australia, and so we're taking that approach by using their existing framework of
how they get films on and that's great for the purpose of flight trials and initial applications. When it comes to launching this and putting this on many aircraft and really having the impact that we want to have, we'll be getting what's called a supplemental type certificate, which is an approved change to an existing aircraft.
And these films which they put on for advertising, etc. They take them off after a year or two. If that you're going to have to keep them on planes which last ten to twenty.
Years, Yes and no, you're correct. The graphical films are typically removed within say a year or so, but there are products out there that have flown for over eight years, so there is precedent in terms of having them on for longer. That's about the period of time that we want our product to last. And the reason we're not looking at longer than that is there are very well defined maintenance checks that are done on aircraft for the
same reason and of keeping them safe. And you'll have a heavy maintenance check, which depending on the aircraft and how it's operated, could be every five to ten years, and that's where all of the paint will be stripped off the plane and will be checked down to the core structure of the plane and then it will be repainted. So lasting any longer than that is not really relevant for our product, but you're right, we definitely want to
make sure that we're lasting that period of time. The business case is still very much attractive even if it was only a two year product. But we're looking to make that last as long as possible again to have that impact.
And on the dour we saw the lab and the testing facility. It's relatively small for what you need to do now, but where are you going to manufacture at scale if you're going to cover entire planes with this material?
Yes, so the facility that you saw here today that core technology. We talked about the way that we manufacture and essentially what we develop here are the materials and kind of the key manufacturing inputs to manufacture large amounts of product at scale. Those inputs go to a continuous role for roll manufacturing process and we currently work with different third party manufacturers where we go and have access
to their existing production lines. We're about to know the production run on the order of say a commu's worth material, which is plenty for us to do a couple of flight trials. And then when it comes to scaling up that manufacturing first, our first manufacturing scale facility will be here in Australia. But the volumes that we're talking about we expect to be building these in locations in the geography is where close to the markets that we need
to ultimately serve. So so we'll have something in Europe, something in the US. Is how we'll do this in the long term.
The applications, though, don't have to be just restricted to aplanes. Drag is a problem for all sorts of things, anything that moves really, whether it's in water or on the road.
Yeah, that's exactly right. Obviously, we're focused on aviation at the moment, and there is a reason for that. Aviation is very hard to abate industry. There's a trillion dollars of planes flying today which aren't going to be thrown away anytime soon, earning about two hundred million dollars worth of fuel and producing about a billion tons of carbon. So we're getting very clear signals that this is a
problem that the market wants us to solve first. But we're also looking at other applications further down the line, so we can be applying this to ships, say cargo ships, to improve their efficiency as well. I had a couple of other things, yes, because I listened to your episode
about flying cars. I listened to that and I was like, oh, that's probably why you want to talk to us, because you're skeptical about the transition of aviation to electric Exactly and I think that's a big part of what we're trying to solve, something which I think is why we're getting a lot of traction in aviation. The entire industry is committed to net zero by twenty fifty, and there is not a clear easy shot to get there.
Yeah. I mean that's true for many industries, but particularly true for our aviation.
Yes, and even your colleague you were talking to said he's bullish on electric aviation and hydroen aviation and best case scenario that solves short and medium whole flight, there is no way that it's going to be doing wide
body along whul flights. But the other thing, and the reason why I made reference to the fact there's about a trillion dollars worth of planes burning fuel and operation today, not to mention all the planes that are being manufactured still to be burning fuel, is we need to think about something which has an impact in the next five to ten years. We can't just sort of hold on
for a new breakthrough in battery or hydrogen technology. I think it's very necessary and very excited for those things to come online, but it's an even longer regulatory road to get new platforms.
Off for sure. And even if you do get electric and hydrogen planes working, any amount of efficiency gain that you get for them, the easier their job becomes because then you have to put fewer batteries on, you have to put less fuel on. So efficiency is this weapon that few people think off or use as effectively as you can use to get to net zero.
Yeah, and so I think where we're coming at this is in the near term, we want to have an impact on the existing global fleet. You know, every airline's committed to say one half percent efficiency gains the plane, just buy new planes. We can be a part of that solution to not only help them achieve that, but save money in the process. You're not paying a grain premium,
you're saving fuel in the process. But as electric and hydrogen, you know, alternative powered aviation comes online, they'll be doing really short hops initially, and if maybe an extra five percent efficiency unlocks La to San Francisco, there's a huge impact there and we really want to be able to help with that transition as we have these alternative aviation platforms coming online.
Well, thanks for the tour. Nice to see sharks in a better light than a lot of people.
Think Sharks are great.
Absolutely. Since recording this interview, Microtower has begun flight trials off its technology and plans for it to be rolled out more broadly on commercial jets in twenty twenty five after the break. To meet net zero, we need enough batteries for a billion electric cars and lithium is a crucial part of that equation. Is there a cleaner way
to source it? While I was in Australia, I also met up with Stephen vas Ludis, CEO of Novalith, a company that wants to reduce the carbon emissions that come from extracting lithium. Like Microtao, Novallyith is another company that has raised money with the support of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, first two point five million Australian dollars in twenty twenty one, and then it completed a twenty three million dollar rais. I met Stephen at the Novlith office
in Sydney. Now we're going to talk about lithium mining and what it is that Novalith, your company is doing to make it more efficient and even maybe carbon negative, which is a bold claim. But before that, how do you come to do this?
So in terms of I guess the origin story. Sam chemical engineer by background. I worked in a number of industries prior to novelith oil and gas, conventional chemical engineering, you know, try to make things cleaner and greener, and that's really been the big push for me over the last decade or so, and that's what led to the genesis of Novel Earth. Looking at the way the world
is moving, right, we desperately need to electrify. The only way for us to do that is by using lithium at large scale, and the conventional means of lithium production are not particularly quick, clean, or cost effective.
Well, most people won't know this because most people haven't thought about lithium mining. They've thought about lithium's used in batteries because everybody has a smartphone and they have lithium in batteries.
And now EV's is a big push as well.
Right exactly. But let's go from the basics of how lithium is mined and processed.
Yeah, so in terms of lithium, you have kind of two main sources of lithium. So you have your contentle brands, So the lithium triangle in South America, so that's Argentina, Chiliblivia.
And that's basically liquids that are found under the Earth, which are very highly concentrated in different types of salts, including lithium in them. Correct, And so you just pull out a lot of liquid, you put it in these salt pans, let them dry, take what's left, which is usually some type of powder, and then make chemicals out of them.
Exactly. That's very much your Brian's right. They, you know, take their lithium chloride powder or slurry ship off to China to refine into a lithium chemical. The other way of getting lithium is from rock, and so the vast majority of kind of rock based lithium, so about sixty percent of the world supply comes from Western Australia in
the form of spodymene, and that's a hard rock. There's other sources of lithium so soft rocks, such in North America and Europe, but the vast majority at the moment is from that hard rock based resource.
And we've got some SPoD being here that you showed me. I mean, I've not been to a lithium mind, but the pieces of rock you're showing me are all different colored, like there's green and there's white, and there's purple and even yellow. I thought mine rocks would look lamer.
Yeah, look, I think we're actually in a pretty cool game with the lithium rocks. Lithium rocks generally all look quite pretty, and there's one hundred and one different types of kind of lithium bearing ores. They all look pretty cool, I mean, except maybe the clays. The clays are I guess a bit boring, right, They just look like a clay.
And so you take either rock or brine, and then what do you have to do next?
So the conventional process is, you know, once you've kind of mind it, you've then concentrated to increase the amount of lithium from you know, so you're one or two percent to say five or six percent. You then ship that spodyman concentrate to China, and about you know, eighty to ninety ten of the world's lithium is currently refined in China or roads lead to China in the lithium game at the moment, and I think the world is trying to change that, but it'll take a little while
for that to pick up. But yeah, so once it gets to the the lithium refinery, depending on the source of lithium. There's a quite a complicated and long winded chemical process, but in a nutshell, you heat it up, you hit it with a very very strong acid. So sulfuric acid, sulfuric acid us A SULFORG generally comes off the back of oil and gas, right desulfurization.
Just so people know, sulfuric acid is one of the strongest acids there is.
Definitely, Yes, it's not something you really want to leave out in the kitchen table. And if you're working with it, I mean there's a lot of safety considerations that you need to take into account. And again that's one of the things that we're trying to move away from, is in terms of using quite a harmful chemical, not only for personnel but also from the environment.
Yeah, even though lithium mindes are located in places with relatively high concentrations, lithium only makes up a small percentage of all the material that is dug up. Steve told me it's only a few kilograms for every thousand kilograms of mind material. So to separate the lithium you want from the materials you don't want, miners use sulfuric acid. It does the job because it's highly chemically reactive. But
that also creates a whole bunch of other problems. First, it's not selective, which means other metals contained in the mind material are also extracted alongside lithium, creating a complex chemical soup that you have to further purify. Second, it's toxic, so managing it and getting rid of a way safely is expensive. Nobile It's idea is to do a way with sulfuric acid altogether and use carbonic acid instead, which can be made by mixing CO two with water.
So when you mix CO two in water, you form carbonic acid. It's the same thing you're using a soda stream at home. Yeah, right, but you don't think of it as an acid, right. You can drink it.
Yeah, but if you drink too much soda, your teeth go bad, and that's because it's acidic.
Correct, correct, So don't drink too much soda as a general kind of like health this claim hehet. But yeah, you don't worry about the kids playing with it. You make it, and it's great to have with a slice of lemon. But under the right conditions, we can actually use that SEO too. Water mixture very very effectively and efficiently to extract lithium from the lithium bearing oles directly as a lithium carbonate. And that's kind of like the little Noblis black box and our pattern.
The lithium used inside lithium ion batteries isn't pure lithium. Instead, it exists as a salt, either lithium hydroxide or what nouvlid makes lithium carbonate. In using carbonic acid to turn mind lithium to lithium carbonate, the startup can skip over the step where sulfuric acid is normally used. Because carbonic acid is a weak acid. It also produces less toxic waste, and what waste it does produce is much easier and
thus cheaper to handle safely. However, to make a weak acid work as effectively as a strong acid, nouvlith had to design a different process of extraction. So you have the black box. Yes that's the IP, but it's patented so you can talk about what's public right, what is it? Yees?
So I mean I feel free to look up for those of you who do enjoy digging in patterns. If you imagine putting a little bit of spodgyman in a glass subside one on the table. Not very much is going to happen, right, you will form lithium carbonate. But
we'll be talking about this inside three is time. And so with that process, the way we've managed to do this and ast you found that it works really really well is by changing temperatures and pressures, and so under a very strict set of conditions, we find that we can very effectively extract that lithium. And the other thing we've looked into is the type of reactors that we're looking to use. So going to you know, chemical engineering again,
there's one hundred and one way to do something. We found for our process that a fluidized bed reactor works really really well. We can get great extraction efficiencies and control that mass transfer, which is what we're.
As bad reactor, which is a chemical engineer. I know what it is, but now that I think about it, it's a really interesting name because it sounds like a massage table.
Yeah, yes, well it's to be fun like you can kind of imagine it, right, So if you get a straw and you kind of blow bubbles at the bottom of a glass fall with a bit of sand, right, you're effectively making a fluidized bed reactor, and so you can see the bubbles kind of passing through the sand and it's all kind of jiggling about and doing its thing. And that's really what we're doing, just a large.
Scale massaging the spodamine with lots of acid.
Yeah, yeah, to get our lithium carbonate.
But you also made this bold claim saying well we can make carbon negative lithium, which you're going to have to explain. So a, what is the carbon cost of lithium? Why is there a carbon cost to lithium, and how is it that you're going to negated?
Yes, so in terms of that, well, we're currently doing able to work on confirming whether we can truly be carbon negative. Well, that's definitely our goal. Given that way use COO too. You know, there's a really good chance of us us achieving that goal. And so in terms of I guess the relative carbon intensity, right, if you look at the conventional process, you find that the vast majority of CO two is emitted in that middle piece, so the chemical refining piece.
Yeah, it's interesting. People would think mining it, which requires a lot of energy and moving it then putting it either on trains or ships, would be the biggest carbon cost. But actually it's the chemicals. It's the treatment of the ore that is really the carbon intensive.
Definitely, and it's the productions of the chemicals. So in the production of the softior acid you need for your process, you're producing a ton of CO two. And so when we compare novelist technology to the conventional, you know, and the conventional sitting between say fifteen and two tons of CO two putun of lithium chemical and it is jurisdic and specific. We were less than half of that, and it's already you know, well on the way to being carbon neutral, carbon negative.
Yeah, still ways of the carbon negative. Part of Novolid's claim is still just theory. Carbonic acid can be made by mixing water with CO two that has been captured from the atmosphere. The acid can be combined with waste metals from the lithium or to form carbonates that can be stored underground, effectively locking the CO two out of the atmosphere forever. This is something that is already being done by carbon removal companies climb Works and carb Fix
in Iceland at a small scale. So the theory does work, but to make carbon negative lithium novolith will have to store away more carbon dioxide than produced by the rest of the process. And I'll remain skeptical till I see the results.
So for SPoD, you mean the way we can reduce the carbon intensities by using grhinoisols the power grenoil electricity. At the moment, everything is coal diesel. I mean it's really dirty in terms of the power. Looking forward, we can significantly decrease the carbon intensity by using greener sources
of energy. And then further that if we do have these carbonatable materials right, so effectively the spent or the stuff that goes to waste, if we can add value to that by carbonating that using either COO two emitted by the power plant that the mine is they're currently
using to powers operations. There's a lot of conventional industry that needs a place to put its coe too, and we can help them store that zo too, infects that too whilst producing a very very important and high value lithium chemical product.
And you should acknowledge that while lithium has a carbon cost and it's substantial, the amount of carbonate avoids through the use of batteries and electric vehicles is much much greater. But if you're going to scale green technologies, we ought to be much more careful about the carbon cost of building those technologies.
I completely agree, and that's what we need lithium, right if you're looking through relative carbon reduction or the gatement if you like, of transitioning towards an extory future. I mean it is gigatons, several gig times. It is tremendous, and we need to get there.
You know.
Our thesis is we need lithium, We need now, well yesterday, to be honest, and we need to cost effectively, but it has to be environmently friendly. There's no point in using technologies which really kind of use the bones of old dinosaurs right to kind of prop up the screen future. And so that's what we have to try and make it sustainable as possible, so you know, really be part of that same ethos that we're kind of pushing towards.
And so we've got a tour of your facility and you've done this at a lab scale that you're making kilograms of this on a day to day basis, but of course we're talking tons here, and so how many years before we have thousands of tons in production using this method.
So we're sitting at kind of like keylot scale, right. We've done our lab and bench stop testing and that's taken us two years to get to the stage where we're not confident in scaling up to our pilot plants. And so this year we while we're currently building our pilot plant facility in Alexandria and City in Australia, and we'll have multiple pilot plants on side seeing tens of
kilos of lithium chemical per day. So if things go the way that we were planning them to, we will have our first facility, our commercial administration plant operating by twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven, and then scale of that'll be between you know, one and five thousand tons pernum.
And where will it be based?
Very good question. So if you're looking at where lithium is primarily based, a Western Australia has a tremendous amount of spodyman but the US, right, the US is pushing very very hard into on shoring it's critical mineral supply and really supporting this battery production in our electric future.
And at this stage it's looking like either US. There's a lot of local quality lithum resources and tons of lithium in general, which the need to find a better way to process a Western Australia, which is where the vast majority of kind of the hard rockithum comes from at the moment. There's a lot of support from the government in the US, which is very attractive for not
only US but anybody looking to hasten that transition. And so if we can get support from the US, and given the credituality of lithium in general, think we will be able to it makes a lot of sense for us.
Well, thank you and good luck scaling up.
No, thanks very much for having me. It was great.
Thank you for listening to Zero. If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate or review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Share this episode with a friend or with someone who is scared of sharks. Get in touch at zero pod at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine Driskell. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly Special thanks to Kirra Bindrim and Luke Mills. I'm Akshatrati back next week.