170 million Americans alive today grew up with elevated lead in their blood from decades of breathing leaded gasoline exhaust. In 1923, General Motors and Standard Oil created a company to sell tetraethyl lead, the additive that went into virtually every gallon of gasoline on Earth for 70 years. The company survived by pivoting to bromine extraction from deep brine wells in southern Arkansas, pumping the Smackover Formation. That same brine chemistry turned out to be the extraction method for battery-grade lithium. The company is now called Albemarle, the world's largest lithium producer at $9.6 billion in peak revenue.