Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Tuesday, October 21st.

Today on Forbes, a $250 million plan to pull lithium for batteries from the Great Salt Lake.

The U.S. could become a major supplier of lithium for batteries in the next few years after the Trump administration took a stake in the developer of a massive mine in Nevada.

But Silicon Valley startup Lilac Solutions thinks it's got a better idea that avoids the higher costs

and environmental harms of traditional mining. Extract the pricey mineral from briny water at oil fields

and sites like the Great Salt Lake in Utah,

instead of digging it out of the ground.

Oakland-based lilac, which has been refining its patented ion exchange technology for lithium extraction

since its founding nearly a decade ago, is raising $250 million to build its first commercial

processing facility at the Great Salt Lake that could produce 5,000 metric tons of lithium

per year by 2028. If all goes well, that's just the start, as the company looks to help

energy companies pull lithium out of massive underground brine deposits

that are often a byproduct of active oil and gas fields across the U.S., such as the smackover

formation, the remnant of an ancient sea that stretches from Texas to Florida, according to CEO

Rafe Sully.

Sully told Forbes that compared to the amount of lithium that can be pulled

from conventional mines, quote, brine is probably orders of magnitude larger. Brian projects in the

smackover region that companies such as standard lithium, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron are developing,

promised to yield hundreds of thousands of tons of lithium annually.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimated in a study last year, there could be up to 19 million

tons of lithium in the smackover in Arkansas alone.

USGS hydrologist Catherine Neeram, the study's principal researcher, said, quote,

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