How LibertyStream (TSX-V: LIB) Makes Battery-Grade Lithium From Oil
One of the company's largest outside shareholders explains why a small technology company pulling battery-grade lithium out of Permian Basin oilfield brine may be the best-positioned lithium play on the market — and what could go wrong.
OpinionBull CaseVLTLF
By Alex Koyfman·June 12, 2026·16 min read
▌The Data Behind the Take
LibertyStream Infrastructure PartnersVLTLF
Contracted Capacity Target
4,000 t/yr
The number we're watching
Disclosure: The author holds a long position in LibertyStream Infrastructure Partners (TSX-V: LIB / OTC: VLTLF). This article is the author's opinion and is not investment advice.
Let me get it off my chest before I say another word: I own this stock. I own a lot of it. In fact, I'm fairly certain that I'm one of the 5 biggest non-insider shareholders — possibly the biggest.
There's a reason behind all that outside of my own personal appetite for risk — a reason that's been the thesis from the very start, and it can be summarized like this: Lithium is absolutely critical for consumer, commercial and industrial technology; it's undervalued; and it's under-produced.
It's also an element that occurs in abundance in the natural geology of North America.
Proving it's undervalued is relatively easy.
Just look at the market price history for lithium carbonate over the last 5 years.
What you'll see is pretty mind blowing: the world's single most important energy metal losing 70% of its value, from November 2022.
Lithium Price 5-Year History (Trading Economics)
And that 70% figure is taking into account a tripling in price over the last 12 months. At its deepest lows, lithium carbonate was trading at a 90% discount to historic highs.
Lithium, the metal at the heart of between 80 and 90% of the world's rechargeable batteries — a metal without which no smartphone, tablet, or laptop could operate; a metal that powers almost every one of the 58 million electric vehicles on the world's roads today, losing almost 9/10 of its value.
All the while, demand is soaring.
The five biggest product classes/sectors that are predominantly or entirely powered by lithium are: electric vehicles, grid energy storage, e-bikes, power tools and consumer electronics.
By 2031, these markets' annual earnings are projected to grow by 130%, 350%, 60%, 80% and 30% respectively.
Grid energy storage, whose growth is being supercharged by the exploding demand for data centers, is a force unto itself and likely to become the single biggest consumer of lithium batteries by the middle of the next decade.
But here's the scary part, and it's the part that speaks to the second part of the thesis. As much as we need it, and as much as our need for it is growing, we don't really produce… any at all.
The CCP Has Been Planning For This For 30 Years
Since the days of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist Party has been planning for it — the lithium takeover of the rechargeable battery market.
Thirty years later this ongoing investment in technology, infrastructure and foreign land holdings is paying off: Chinese dominance in all fields related to rechargeable battery production is without rival.
The Chinese control the market, accounting for more than ⅔ of global refining. This is why Chinese battery giants like CATL are keeping American giants, like Tesla, alive.
It's a strategic disadvantage that only gets more terrifying the more you think about it.
If push really came to shove, if American geopolitical interests really came to be at odds with the interests and ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party, there would not even have to be a war to decide who got the upper hand.
They could simply cut off our supply of this, and other essential elements, and watch the world's most powerful economy suffocate under its own weight.
Sound like a corny Hollywood scenario? It's not.
The Chinese have a history of using their strategic mineral positions as leverage.
They cut rare-earth exports to Japan during a diplomatic dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in 2010.
In July 2023, they imposed export controls requiring licenses for gallium and germanium exports, and in December 2024, announced an outright ban on exports of gallium, germanium, antimony, and certain other materials to the United States.
In 2025, in their most brazen move yet, they put bans on the export of defense-tech-critical rare-earths including dysprosium, terbium, samarium, yttrium, and scandium.
A similar tourniquet on the flow of lithium shouldn't be viewed as theoretical.
But the problem runs deeper than that. Even with Chinese lithium streaming into American shores, industry forecast calculations estimate the U.S. could face a domestic lithium supply shortfall exceeding 600,000 tonnes annually by 2034, even after accounting for all planned North American projects.
The good news is that the solution is clear: We need domestic production of all strategic elements, with lithium arguably occupying the number one spot.
Critical Materials Production Is At The Top Of Trump's List
This is, of course, no secret. It's become a major policy catalyst in Washington, with President Trump taking numerous measures to start to remedy this quiet crisis.
Perhaps the most substantial of these measures came on March 20 of 2025, when the POTUS invoked the Defense Production Act — a wartime authority — to accelerate domestic mineral production.
“It is imperative for our national security,” he stated, “that the United States take immediate action to facilitate domestic mineral production to the maximum possible extent.”
The Department of Energy followed with nearly $1 billion in critical mineral supply chain funding.
Trump added to his commitment to domestic mineral production with the advent of Project Vault, a strategic-reserve system featuring a financing prong with $12B in purchasing power to assist American producers in matching Chinese producers in price.
Put all of those elements together — market recovery, political backing, expanding demand from consumers, commerce and industry — and an inevitable conclusion begins to emerge.
A Unique Opportunity
I do not believe I have ever encountered a company that was better timed, or positioned, to take advantage of emerging market forces than the one I'm about to tell you about.
While there are a number of lithium operations currently working towards active production, LibertyStream Infrastructure Partners (OTC: VLTLF / TSX-V: LIB) is different.
LibertyStream is not a lithium miner. That is not how the company thinks of itself, nor is it how I imagined it when I was buying my shares.
LibertyStream is a technology company. It's a company with a proprietary process for extracting lithium, which exists in known concentrations, in brine ponds across the American west.
They do not need to search for lithium. They do not need to drill holes.
They do not need to explore, sometimes for years on end, before arriving at a plan on how to mine.
LibertyStream's process is as simple as showing up at an existing brine pool — one of thousands used by oil and gas companies to extract fossil fuels from ancient sedimentary layers — installing a filtration plant, and letting it run.
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The Road to Full Production — Three Stages, Eighteen Months
First things first: This may be a penny stock, but we're not banking on hopes and dreams here. As of this year, the build-out plan is contractual.
Under the definitive agreement signed with Select Water Solutions in February 2026, LibertyStream's commercial deployment unfolds in three defined stages across the Permian's Midland Basin.
Midland Basin (www.rrc.state.tx.us)
Stage 1: Already underway at the Howard County facility — targets nameplate capacity of 1,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year, with full commissioning slated for December 2026. That facility is not a proof of concept. It is already producing. Already shipping.
Stage 2: Adds a second facility of equivalent capacity — another 1,000 tonnes per year — commissioned by June 2027, bringing total contracted production capacity to 2,000 tonnes annually within twelve months of Stage 1 completion.
Stage 3: Beginning July 2027, adds a minimum of two additional facilities across Howard, Martin, Midland, Upton, and Glasscock Counties — pushing contracted capacity to at least 4,000 tonnes per year by the middle of 2027.
Each stage replicates a proven template across infrastructure that Select already owns and operates. No new permitting. No greenfield construction. Just systematic deployment of a working system across an expanding partner network — at a pace that no conventional lithium project anywhere in the world can match.
The Numbers Behind The Technology
The current Gen 6 platform represents the culmination of a multi-year engineering process.
During the first six months of operations, LibertyStream scaled its system three times, culminating in the Gen 5 platform commissioned in February 2025 — designed to process up to 10,000 barrels of oilfield brine per day.
That system then ran continuously, accumulating more than 400,000 barrels of processed brine and over 2,500 individual operating tests before a single line of Gen 6 specification was written.
The result of that data is a continuous-flow platform that integrates direct lithium extraction, rinse, and acid-recovery operations into a single streamlined sequence — reducing cycle time from approximately 60 minutes under Gen 5 to approximately 20 minutes under Gen 6.
That threefold improvement in cycle speed translates directly into lower reagent consumption, reduced energy use, and lower labor cost per tonne of lithium carbonate produced.
The Gen 6 system soon to be installed at Select Water Solutions' Howard County facility in March 2026 is designed to process up to 120,000 barrels of oilfield brine per day — twelve times the capacity of the Gen 5 system it replaced — and produce up to 1,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year from a single installation.
The system's recovery rate is at an industry-leading 99%, and lithium purity is at a battery-grade 99.5%.
Over the eight months prior to the Howard County deployment, LibertyStream completed more than 200 Gen 6 field trials demonstrating the step-change in performance the new configuration delivers.
At Home In The Permian Basin
Though the technology could work well almost anywhere oil and gas are extracted, the company is currently focusing on the Permian Basin of the American southwest.
Lithium concentrations run relatively low here, but brine volumes are so enormous that LibertyStream's uniquely potent filtration system is ideally suited to create value where others cannot.
Enverus Intelligence Research — one of the most respected energy analytics firms in the world — estimates the Permian Basin alone could support approximately 225,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate production per year, representing a potential $19 billion industry in this single basin.
It's a process that once streamlined, can take a site from nothing, to full-scale lithium production, in weeks — not years.
And it also allows an almost poetic twist in the evolution of how we power our civilization — fossil fuel producers, whose energy took us from the industrial revolution to the 21st century, can now transition their own business models to carry onwards, towards the 22nd century.
It's Been A Rollercoaster Ride… But Volatility Is Outbound
Things are starting to fall in place today, on all fronts, both operational and in the eyes of investors, but just several months ago, things were very different.
Back in September of 2025, shares on the company's then home exchange were trading for a dirt low 17 cents (CAD).
I had been holding an already massive position for close to 2 years when that moment came, and instead of panicking — which believe me, I wanted to — I leaned into it and bought more.
6 months later, prices had grown 10x, topping out at $1.79/share in February.
There was a pullback after that as there often is, but even now, with shares trading right around $1.00 (CAD) / $0.75 (USD), upside potential is huge.
Lithium prices today, even after a substantial resurgence, sit at less than 30% of their 2022 peak. The supply response to the collapse has been brutal — project cancellations, delayed expansions, a dramatically thinned pipeline of new production that was supposed to flood the market.
Instead of the market flooding, it tightened.
At $30,000 per tonne — still well below half of 2022's peak pricing — the revenue picture from the company's planned Stage 3 build-out approaches $150 million annually.
The Valuation — How We Got to a Billion Dollars
The math is straightforward, which is part of what makes it compelling.
LibertyStream's Stage 3 build-out targets a minimum of four facilities at 1,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year each — call it 4,000 tonnes annually at full deployment.
At current depressed prices of approximately $24,000 per tonne that's $96 million in annual revenue.
At $30,000 per tonne — still less than 40% of the 2022 peak — that figure approaches $120 million.
Apply a 5x revenue multiple, the kind routinely assigned to proven, scaling critical mineral producers, and you arrive at a $380 million company at depressed prices and a $600 million to $1 billion company at moderate price recovery.
But LibertyStream is not a mineral producer in the traditional sense — it is a technology platform with a replicable, modular system that can be deployed across hundreds of existing brine sites without new permitting, new drilling, or new infrastructure.
Technology companies often trade at substantially higher revenue multiples than traditional resource companies.
Whether LibertyStream ultimately earns such treatment remains uncertain, but applying these higher multiples to the Stage 3 revenue picture at recovering lithium prices and the billion-dollar valuation is fairly academic.
The current market cap of $150 million prices LibertyStream as though none of that is real.
The first commercial shipment suggests otherwise.
But that is only part of the picture.
Here are some more numbers you'll need for the full story:
10,000 tons/year — total demand, through 2029, that LibertyStream anticipates from groups already in receipt of produced Li₂CO₃ samples
03
$32,000/tonne — projected lithium carbonate market price by mid-2027 (up 33% from today)
Lithium Price (USD/t)
Revenue
3x Revenue
5x Revenue
10x Revenue
$24,000 (today's price)
$96M
$288M
$480M
$960M
$28,000
$112M
$336M
$560M
$1.12B
$32,000
$128M
$384M
$640M
$1.28B
$40,000
$160M
$480M
$800M
$1.60B
$50,000
$200M
$600M
$1.00B
$2.00B
These are big numbers, and management is planning for this sort of growth, with a path being laid out — right now — to get the stock Nasdaq (or possibly NYSE) listed as early as Q4 2026.
Such a move would substantially increase the company's reach, and similarly expand the pool of potential investors.
Couple that with what has been a pretty breakneck pace of shareholder turnover in the last several weeks, and timing now could be as good as it's ever going to get.
The Risks — What You Need To Understand
No investment thesis is complete without an accounting of what can go wrong.
LibertyStream carries the risks inherent to any junior resource company — limited operating history at commercial scale, dependence on a single commercial partner, a commodity price environment that remains depressed and unpredictable, and the execution risk of scaling a novel technology across multiple facilities simultaneously.
The Permian Basin's relatively low lithium concentrations — typically 15 to 40 parts per million — mean extraction economics are more sensitive to operating costs than higher-grade formations like the Smackover.
A sustained period of lithium prices below $10,000 per tonne would compress margins significantly — a possible scenario, but increasingly unlikely given current lithium carbonate market trend.
Though plans for the Nasdaq are in the works, the stock is still primarily traded on the TSX Venture Exchange, which means volatility is amplified in both directions.
And as with any early-stage company, dilution through future financing rounds remains a real possibility, but I do not view these as reasons to avoid the stock.
They are reasons to size your position intelligently and to understand that this is a long-duration thesis, not a short-term trade.
The Reasons Why
Wise investors won't buy LibertyStream simply because the company's flagship product is also one of the most important strategic minerals known to man today.
They won't buy it because lithium is climbing out of a years-long bear market.
Nor will they buy it because the US is spending billions looking for ways to domesticate lithium production and refinement, with speed being a key component.
Or because right now, our political rivals hold almost all of the cards in the lithium carbonate supply chain.
They won't buy it because this unique technology allows fossil fuel producers to diversify their holdings into a business model that could add decades to their lifespans.
Or because on June 8, the company announced its first ever off-take agreement with an American industrial client — a headline which drove share prices up 20% in a single session.
Or because as of the first week of June, 2026, LibertyStream is no longer just a startup working on an experimental process, but an active producer with its first industrial order delivered to an American client.
They will buy it for all of these reasons, because right now, and probably not for much longer, all of these roads intersect at just one point — LibertyStream Infrastructure Partners.
Now, I said it at the start of this thing, and it warrants repetition: I am a major shareholder, and I intend to stay a major shareholder until the plan has been executed.
I am not awaiting price points. I am awaiting milestones, press releases, and a steadily expanding role in our national infrastructure.
If management executes according to its stated deployment schedule over the next 18–24 months — then the exit window will be wide, enduring, and most of all, profitable.
Your Takeaway
This is a big story, with a lot of moving parts and a lot of major players — something which almost all lithium producers will have in common.
But if a lithium play is something you want to add to your portfolio this year, it pays to separate the wheat from the chaff.
And to do that, keep just these facts in mind: LibertyStream has now processed more than 400,000 barrels of produced water over 21 months of field operations, completed more than 2,500 operating tests, produced battery-grade lithium carbonate at 99.5% purity, delivered product to customers, secured its first commercial offtake agreement covering 60% of initial facility capacity, and is targeting 1,000 tonnes per year of commercial production before the end of 2026.
… And it's doing this as the lithium market quietly awakens from a 4-year nap.
Do your homework and make your own decisions.
Our take, not advice. This is opinion commentary — informational only, not personalized investment recommendations. Markets carry risk. Do your own research and consider your own situation before any trade.
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