Mariana Minerals, led by former Tesla engineer Turner Caldwell, has created a separate space for itself in the start-up domain by becoming a software-first, vertically integrated minerals company. Caldwell formed the company in 2024 with one goal: a modern mining (and refining) operation that will promote industry growth by bringing more refined metal into the ecosystem.

 

In today’s “Start-up of the Week,” International Finance will talk about Mariana Minerals, which has also embraced automation more aggressively than its mining industry players. To level things up further, the venture has entered into a partnership with Pronto, another start-up that has developed self-driving systems for haulage trucks and other off-road vehicles used at construction and mining sites.

 

A Game-Changing Deal

 

Pronto’s autonomous haulage trucks will begin operating at Copper One, a formerly idled copper mine in Utah that Mariana purchased in 2025. While interacting with TechCrunch, Caldwell said that Pronto’s autonomy system will be directly integrated into the software Mariana has developed to run operations at the mine, which it calls “MineOS.”

 

As per Caldwell, mines of the future should use multiple operating systems, embedding reinforcement learning to automate and coordinate operations across the entire extraction and production ecosystem. For him, Mariana Minerals’ software-first approach should be the tailored system to initiate the revolution.

 

Talking about Mariana going Guang Ho on technology to redefine the “mines of the future,” let’s talk about “Mariana Lithium One,” the world’s first GWh-scale facility for producing lithium from oil and gas produced water. Lithium is the modern workhorse for the 21st century electrochemical energy storage.

 

“While electric vehicles and stationary storage are the primary drivers of demand, lithium is a critical component across defence, industrial applications, and portable electronics. Without lithium, we do not have high-strength glass, we do not have high-performing lubricants, and we do not have the energy-dense batteries that enable the mobile devices that power our everyday lives,” the start-up said, while mentioning that in the 1990s, the United States accounted for more than 35% of global lithium supply.

 

As of April 2026, US production accounts for just 1% of global supply, heavily dependent on external sources for raw material supply. In Mariana Minerals’ opinion, although the industry faces near-term headwinds, with prices recently falling from all-time highs to near all-time lows, long-term demand growth calls for a more than three times increase in lithium production capacity over the next 15 years. To address this, the start-up has pitched “Mariana Lithium One” as a viable mining model.

 

Redefining Lithium Extraction Method

 

Scaling lithium’s production capacity can be a herculean task, as bringing an additional 3,000,000 metric tons of production capacity to the American market means erecting over 100 world-scale lithium mines and refineries, investing more than worth USD 150 billion and most importantly, deploying 50,000 skilled workers at operating sites.

 

According to Mariana Minerals, with lithium prices being depressed due to oversupply driven by aggressive capacity expansion in China, Western capital markets are shying away from investing aggressively to deploy the production capacity the world needs to build today in order to supply the needs of tomorrow.

 

“Who is training thousands of workers per year to meet the needs of the lithium industry? While lithium production facilities have similarities with oil & gas, water treatment, and other minerals infrastructure, lithium processing is nuanced and achieving high throughput of high-quality end products (suitable for batteries and other applications) is HARD. This is apparent in the string of recent challenges as companies have attempted to stand up lithium refining capacity in Western Australia. A large talent pool is effectively non-existent outside of China,” the start-up commented further.

 

Instead of solving this supply gap with a single class of lithium resource (hard rock, continental brine, geothermal brines, clays), Mariana Minerals advocates for every potential source of lithium coming online at full speed.

 

“When oil and gas are brought to the surface from shale operations, extensive amounts of wastewater must be separated and disposed of — typically pumped back underground via saltwater disposal wells. Growing US fossil energy dominance has led to a surge in the co-production of wastewater from oil and gas operations across the country. While this has historically been viewed as a liability, this waste stream opens the door to a new pathway to begin building a robust supply chain for lithium. This wastewater contains lithium, and in no small quantity. In the US alone, we estimate that the equivalent of 20% of 2024 global lithium demand, close to 250,000 tons of lithium, is currently flowing to the surface alongside natural gas and crude oil before being pumped back underground, leaving the lithium untouched,” it noted.

 

When successfully unlocked, this untapped resource will act as the new source of lithium for the world, with substantial environmental benefits in comparison to today’s primary sources of lithium chemicals. Extracting lithium from produced water already at the surface, in the start-up’s opinion, also presents a meaningful schedule and capex reduction opportunity, piggybacking off existing wastewater extraction, collection, and disposal infrastructure that would otherwise represent more than 30% of project capex.

 

However, extracting lithium from produced water comes with challenges like disaggregated volumes (less water and lithium concentrated in a single location), making it challenging to capture the economies of scale that are critical to making the 21st century’s lithium projects economically viable.

 

“Lithium concentrations in produced water are considerably lower than those in commercially producing brine operations in South America, meaning significant volumes of water need to be processed in order to extract commercial quantities of lithium. Impurity profiles are complex, including organics that must be separated to ensure resilient performance of processing equipment and successful production of high-purity end products,” Mariana Minerals said.

 

In order to unlock this resource, there is a massive need for productised plants, along with highly capital-efficient project execution to offset the smaller scale of these facilities. Also, these extraction facilities need to adapt to the variability of the feedstock, apart from possessing the capability of selectively separating lithium from wastewater, while rejecting impurities that would be detrimental to process equipment health and end product quality

 

There is a class of technology called Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) that exactly addresses these challenges. On a global level, some 13 projects are in operation, taking care of 10% of global lithium production as of 2024.

 

While the technology enabling lithium extraction from oil and gas wastewater has already been demonstrated at scale and a rich ecosystem of technology companies is aggressively innovating in the space, with projects successfully deployed outside the United States, inside the world’s largest economy, the domestic mining industry has failed to replicate the model.

 

And the reason? Limitations in assembling the experienced team capable of designing, constructing, commissioning, and operating the proven infrastructure. To address this, Mariana Minerals has internally developed an extraction and purification process to manage the complex impurity profile and relatively low lithium concentrations inherent to produced water. The start-up’s internal lab and pilot facilities are currently producing battery-grade lithium salts from real wastewater from oil and gas operations.

 

In addition to cost-effectively integrating a robust process to produce battery-grade lithium from oil and gas wastewater, Mariana’s PlantOS, the venture’s internal reinforcement learning platform that enables autonomous, short-interval control of minerals refining circuits, has emerged as the key solution.

 

“Leveraging the same tool kit in use today for self-driving vehicles, humanoid robots, and other applications of physical-AI, PlantOS is aimed at accelerating project commissioning and ramp-up timelines in addition to optimising steady-state process operations. The ultimate goal is to compress start-up timelines by 50% and reduce steady-state operating costs by more than 25%. These improvements greatly enhance project returns, allowing Mariana to build more projects, faster, to bolster Western energy minerals production,” Mariana Minerals concluded.