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At one end of the range of players looking at DLE, if a producer drills into the earth’s crust and extracts a valuable fluid, this feels like familiar territory for big oil producers such as Exxon.

“It requires a good understanding of the subsurface, requires a good understanding of reservoir management, it requires drilling and injections,” said ExxonMibil CEO Darren Woods. “Processing the brine and extracting the lithium is very consistent with a lot of the things that we do in our refineries and chemical plants.”

But Exxon doesn’t want to get into lithium to just make up the numbers. Woods hinted to investors that his company wanted to bring a new approach that would dramatically reduce the cost of extracting lithium from underground.

“We believe that by applying our advantages in this space we can bring on a much-needed resource ... we can bring it on at much lower cost and I think importantly, with much less environmental impact versus say the open mining that they’re doing in other parts of the world,” he said, in reference to the more carbon intensive method done in Australia, where hard rock lithium is mined with trucks and shovels.

“This to us feels like a win-win-win opportunity; a win using our capabilities, a win from an environmental impact standpoint and a win in terms of supplying markets with a crucial component to electrification. “We are actively exploring that opportunity set, and like what we’re seeing so far.”