Oak Ridge National Laboratory has won six Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) awards in one year, a haul that includes the consortium's top honor — the 2026 Excellence in Technology Transfer Award — for a process that extracts lithium from oil and gas wastewater.

The winning technology is already commercialized. Element3, a private company, carries the extraction process into the market, and the lab frames the deployment against a concrete procurement problem: securing a domestic lithium supply for advanced manufacturing and national defense applications.

"Winning six highly prestigious FLC awards in a single year is a testament to both the quality of the innovations that the ORNL staff produce and the commitment to excellence of our technology transfer team," said Shaun Gleason, director of ORNL's Partnerships Office.

For R&D managers who track lab-to-market performance, the FLC awards serve as one external benchmark of how effectively a federal laboratory moves intellectual property into commercial channels. The consortium recognizes achievements in transferring technology from laboratory to industry. Six awards in a single cycle is an unusually strong showing for one institution, though the FLC did not publish comparative award counts across labs in this announcement.

A second honored project reflects a long-running security collaboration. An ORNL team earned recognition for its partnership with Geospace Technologies, which has deployed heartbeat detection technology in more than a dozen countries across four continents. That deployment footprint — the broadest geographic reach among the recognized projects — indicates the partnership has moved well past pilot stage.

The largest financial figure attached to any honoree belongs to Vlastimil Kunc, an ORNL Corporate Fellow who received the Outstanding Researcher award. ORNL ties his work to an estimated $5.5 billion in follow-on funding for partners of the lab's Manufacturing Demonstration Facility. That estimate is the lab's own attribution, not an independently audited figure, and it aggregates funding across multiple partners over the facility's history. Still, it signals the scale of industry engagement that ORNL's manufacturing programs generate — relevant context for corporate R&D groups weighing cooperative research arrangements at the MDF.

One award has a distinctly regional dimension. The FLC recognized a collaboration between founders from Innovation Crossroads, ORNL's entrepreneur program, and marketing students from the University of Tennessee's Haslam College of Business. The pairing put business-school talent alongside lab-embedded startup founders — a model other national laboratories and research universities could replicate at low cost, since it draws on existing academic programs rather than new funding lines.

The FLC will recognize all honorees at its National Meeting in Seattle on May 13, 2026. The ceremony offers lab partnership offices and prospective industry collaborators a single venue for meeting the teams behind the recognized transfers, and ORNL has published additional detail on each winning project on its news site.