Benzinga - by Stjepan Kalinic, Benzinga Staff Writer.
Alex Wylie is the driving force behind Volt Lithium (OTC:VLTLF). The company specializes in sourcing a key metal for the green energy transition.
"I always thought I'd like to be the CEO of an international company,” Wyle tells Benzinga. “That's why I got my CPA. You need to understand finance as an entrepreneur. You don't want to get tricked by the balance sheet," he noted, praising the entrepreneurial culture of Alberta, Canada.
"My dad was an entrepreneur, though not very good at it. I learned that it takes years to develop the skill set. You have to be comfortable leading an organization, handling risks, and staying calm under pressure," Wylie noted about his previous career at KPMG.
Seven Successful Exits: A methodical approach gradually led Wylie to take on more responsibility.
"I moved from being an employee to leading a team in oil and gas, and eventually to starting my own company."
Yet, looking back at a career spanning over 30 years, he recalls 2009 — the aftermath of the Great Recession.
"I had a choice between sticking with a small business model or joining a much bigger startup, which turned into a multi-billion dollar company. I chose the former and sold multiple businesses," he stated.
Wylie had three exits as an employee, and four as a founder.
A Contrarian Opportunity: Over the last 15 years, Wylie worked with engineering and science teams. He grew comfortable as a leader before taking over Allied Copper Corp and renaming it Volt Lithium.
"The transition from CFO to CEO was a major change,” he said. “It is a different experience when the buck actually stops with you."
As CEO, Wylie draws on his investment banking expertise to figure out how to run a high-risk, high-reward venture.
"We had the choice of private equity or going public. I chose the latter because I didn't want to be just an employee of a private equity company."
This strategy allowed him to maintain control and independence while working on technology that aimed to figure out how to extract lithium from oilfield brine.
"The market didn't believe in our results, and our stock dropped. However, industry insiders saw the potential, and we went under NDA with several large oil and gas companies in the U.S.,” he said. “I took them on a six-to-seven-month journey to show them our process and results. Despite market skepticism, industry validation was crucial."
Changing The Paradigm: As an insider of the oil and gas industry, Wylie noted that his peers are typically “extremely risk-averse engineers.”
“They take lots of risks in drilling wells but won't take risks in anything else,” he adds. “So, if one group figures out how to do lithium extraction, they won't take a chance on someone who hasn't done it yet.”
Extracting lithium is a two-step process:
- First, Volt takes the brine water and purifies it.
- Second, it extracts the lithium itself. The company has successfully extracted battery-grade 99.5% lithium.
“We've evolved so much,” Wylie said. “One of the things we do is fail a lot. We build a pilot plant, we fail all the time, and there's nothing like failing to succeed. Each failure allows us to change a step and improve."
A Legacy In Green Transition: Volt recently secured an investment to deploy a field unit in the Delaware Basin in West Texas.
"The group that invested in us last month, we're going to the field with them in the summer and then scaling up. They have completely battle-tested us. We started discussions with them around this time last year and didn't disclose until May," he noted, pointing out the importance of Texas as an ideal testing ground.
The Southern state produces 19 million barrels of brine water per day. Yet, lithium extraction turns that water from a liability into an asset.
"Ultimately, you get very clean water that can be used for irrigation, manufacturing, and the power industry. The manufacturing industry in Texas alone consumes 900 million gallons of water daily, and the power industry consumes 500 million gallons daily," Wylie remarked.
"In the oil and gas industry, there are three major products: oil, associated natural gas, and water. In Texas, they're flaring the gas—it's like Christmas trees all over the place at night. We will use natural gas gen-sets for our power needs, which we can get at two and a half cents per kilowatt. That gas they're flaring will power our systems."
This situation gives the U.S. an advantage over leading lithium producers that traditionally operate in arid regions like the Lithium triangle in South America, where neither water nor power comes cheap.
Scaling Up: With oil and gas infrastructure in place, Volt doesn’t need significant capex, as lithium extraction happens before the water is disposed of in the reservoir.
"Our upfront cost to go full-scale commercial is $20 million for phase one production plans. To scale up, you just build more. Our footprint this summer will be 50 feet by 50 feet. The full-scale commercial might be 100 feet by 150 feet," he clarified.
According to current test results, Volt can produce lithium even from a low-concentration brine at about $2,900 per ton.
"It is a $6 billion cash flow opportunity within the next three to five years, and we’re a $20 million company. We’ve had to stay quiet for a long time, but now we’re starting to talk about our results from scaling up,” Wylie said. “We’re going to have a lot of deliverables in short order.”
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