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At final I peeled back the bedclothes and shimmied into a proverbial trench coat and trilby, magnifying glass in hand. Akin’s project, developed beneath the supervision of College of Engineering professors Xiangyang Zhou and Hongtan Liu, is a semifinalist in the U.S. Department of Energy’s American-Produced Geothermal Lithium Extraction Prize. “Our process extracts 90 percent purer lithium, and the expense for extracting that lithium is drastically lowered, from $five per kilogram of lithium to about $1 per kilogram,” Akin said. EnergySource says that by the finish of this year it will also deploy pilot projects employing its proprietary technology outdoors...