How Parker’s LithPRO Transforms Lithium Extraction to Make Clean Energy Cleaner

Gustavo Garcia has always been drawn to water. It’s what brought him to Parker in the first place—the opportunity to design filtration systems that provide clean drinking water during critical disaster relief efforts and in water-scarce communities around the world. But a few years ago, when a distributor approached Parker’s Filtration Group with a challenge related to energy, the Business Development Manager found himself looking at water in an entirely new way.

“It started as a question,” Garcia recalls. “Could we take the same reverse osmosis (RO) technology we’ve been using for years to make clean water and flip the equation? Could we use it to separate lithium from brine efficiently and sustainably instead?”

It was an intriguing problem—and one with global implications. Lithium batteries are critical in the transition to a clean energy future, powering everything from electric vehicles to the smartphones in our pockets. But extracting it? That’s another story.

Lithium is a finite resource extracted from below the Earth’s surface either by hard rock mining or separated from underground brine solutions. Traditional methods, like hard rock mining, are energy-intensive and environmentally disruptive. Solar evaporation ponds that produce usable lithium from a brine require vast amounts of land and water and take up to two years. With global demand for lithium skyrocketing, a better solution wasn’t just needed—it was urgent.

That’s where Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) comes in.

Garcia, engineering manager Drew Messick and their team began exploring how Parker’s decades of expertise in water filtration could be adapted to improve Direct Lithium Extraction. Reverse osmosis membranes are typically used to remove contaminants from water to make it drinkable. But their goal wasn’t clean water—it was to separate and concentrate precious lithium.

“This was an entirely new way to think about RO technology,” Messick explains. “Since we were no longer focusing on the clean water output, we had to push the limits of the membrane’s capabilities.”

It wasn’t easy. The team spent five years refining the technology—testing prototypes, running real-world simulations, and even developing their own mathematical models since no existing software could accurately predict how lithium would behave in the system.

The result? LithPRO. A modular, plug-and-play system that is simple to operate and can be deployed anywhere in the world—and separate lithium not over multiple years but in a matter of days, with no massive evaporation ponds required.

“LithPRO takes what used to be a slow, resource-intensive process and compresses it into a single containerized unit,” Garcia explains. “It’s faster, more efficient, and recovers almost all of the water it uses —solving one of the biggest environmental concerns in lithium extraction.”

“Our job isn’t just to develop new products or technologies,” explains Jennifer Kirallah, Demand Generation Manager for the Filtration Group. “Leading with purpose means creating solutions that truly make the world a better place.”

And the stakes are high. As electric vehicle adoption accelerates and energy storage becomes more critical, demand for lithium is expected to quadruple by 2030. But without sustainable extraction methods, the environmental toll could be significant.

“The world is moving toward electrification,” Garcia says. “But if we’re not mindful about how we extract the materials that power it, are we really making progress?”

LithPRO helps close that gap—offering a cleaner, faster, solution to meet the world’s growing need for lithium.

For Garcia, it’s a full-circle moment.

“I started at Parker working on clean water,” he says. “Now, we’re using that same technology to power more sustainable future. It’s still about water—just in a completely new way.”