Arkansas has enough lithium for the world's EVs — but getting it is a problem

According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), Arkansas sits on lithium reserves that could be vast enough to meet the entire world's demand for EV batteries.

It estimates that there may be 5 to 19 million tons of lithium under southwest Arkansas. That would be enough to supply nine times the key material needed globally for car batteries in 2030, the USGS says.

Lithium is a key material for rechargeable batteries used in EVs and all kinds of devices. As the United States seeks to limit greenhouse gas emissions from climate change by encouraging the adoption of electric vehicles, the Biden administration has prioritized building domestic supply chains for key minerals, including lithium. The U.S. may already have all the lithium it needs, and then some, a recent study shows, if companies can develop new technologies to tap it.

“Lithium is an important mineral for the energy transition, and the potential for increased US production to replace imports has implications for employment, manufacturing and supply-chain resilience,” David Applegate, USGS director, said in a press release yesterday.

Lithium laces saline brines from the Smackover Formation, a geological formation made of permeable limestone that spans parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. The formation is the result of an ancient sea, and is also a historical site for oil and gas production.

Until recently, that lithium-rich brine was treated as oil and wastewater from operations. Now, companies are trying to develop technology to extract lithium in a cost-effective way.

ExxonMobil is said to be ready to push. The company plans to start production in 2027 and has already drilled exploratory wells in Arkansas, D New York Times Reports The fossil fuel giant last year announced its ambitions to become a “leading” supplier of lithium for electric vehicles after buying drilling rights covering 120,000 acres in Arkansas' Smackover Formation.

“We know we have an attractive asset. We're working to understand that cost equation, to understand the demand and supply picture,” said Dan Ammann, president of ExxonMobil's Low Carbon Solutions business. D New York Times.

The company can use traditional oil and gas drilling techniques to reach lithium-rich brine trapped 10,000 feet underground. But to separate lithium from water using chemical solvents or filters, a new technology called Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) has to be developed.

This is believed to be a much faster method of extracting lithium than the old school method of leaving brine in a pond until the water evaporates. Another potential advantage of DLE is that it will be less energy-intensive than conventional hard rock mining for lithium. To be sure, there are still concerns about the environmental impact of all these methods, from how much land and water they use to what toxic waste is left behind.

Moving lithium production to the US would also be a global game-changer. Most lithium today comes from Australia and South America. US lithium producers met only 5 percent of global demand in 2021 California's Salton Sea also contains large amounts of lithium-rich brine

Arkansas' prospects still depend on whether the lithium reserves will be commercially recoverable, the USGS says. The agency used machine learning to make the first estimate of the amount of lithium available in brine from the Smackover Formation in southern Arkansas, working with the Arkansas Department of Energy and Environment's Office of the State Geologist. They analyzed new brine samples in a lab and compared them with data from historical samples of water from oil and gas production from the USGS produced water database. A machine learning model used that data to predict lithium concentrations across the region.

“We did not anticipate what could be recovered technologically based on the new method for extracting lithium from brine,” Catherine Nierim, a hydrologist and lead researcher on the study, said in the press release.