AlkaLi Labs is working on a biological platform for the extraction of valuable minerals from unconventional water sources such as oilfield brine waste streams. A typical oil well can discard up to $40 worth of lithium-rich brine for every $100 of crude oil it produces. This represents 250k tons of Lithium that goes unexploited per year – because current extraction methods cannot work on these low-concentration oil-rich brines. AlkaLi’s approach can tap brines with ore grade as low as 50+ ppm, which most direct lithium extraction approaches (400+ ppm) cannot exploit. AlkaLi engineers microbes that thrive in the real brines from oil well disposal sites and supercharges their ability to bio-accumulate metals of interest.