Arkansas has enough lithium to power the world’s electric vehicles, but access is the issue

Arkansas sits atop lithium reserves that could be large enough to meet the entire global demand for electric vehicle batteries, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

It estimates there could be between 5 and 19 million tons of lithium beneath southwest Arkansas. The US Geological Survey says that would be enough to provide nine times the amount of base materials needed globally for car batteries in 2030.

Lithium is a key component of rechargeable batteries used in electric vehicles and all types of devices. As the United States tries to limit greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change by encouraging the adoption of electric vehicles, the Biden administration has made it imperative Priority is building local supply chains For important minerals including lithium. The United States may already have all the lithium it needs, and then some recently He studies It shows, whether companies can develop new technologies to take advantage of them.

“Lithium is a critical mineral in the energy transition, and the potential for increased U.S. production to displace imports has implications for employment, manufacturing, and supply chain resilience,” David Applegate, director of the US Geological Survey, said in a report. Press release yesterday.

Lithium binds brine from the Smackover Formation, a geological formation made of permeable limestone that extends across parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. This formation is the result of an ancient sea, and is also a historic site of oil and gas production.

Until recently, this lithium-rich brine was thought to be wastewater from oil and operations. Now, companies are trying to develop technologies to extract lithium in a cost-effective way.

ExxonMobil is reportedly ready to pounce. The company plans to Production begins in 2027 It has already been done Drilling exploratory wells in arkansas, the New York Times Reports. The fossil fuel giant has announced its ambitions to become “LeadingThe lithium supplier for electric vehicles last year after purchasing drilling rights across 120,000 acres of land within the Smackover Formation in Arkansas.

“We know we have an attractive supplier. We’re working to understand that cost equation, understand the supply and demand picture,” said Dan Ammann, president of ExxonMobil’s low-carbon solutions business. the New York Times.

The company can use traditional oil and gas exploration techniques to access lithium-rich saltwater trapped 10,000 feet underground. But it has to develop a new technology called direct lithium extraction (DLE) to separate lithium from water using chemical solvents or filters.

This should be a lot Faster way To extract lithium from the old method of leaving the brine in ponds until the water evaporates. Another potential advantage of DLE is that it will be less energy intensive than traditional hard rock mining for lithium. To be sure, there are still concerns about the environmental impact that all of these methods have, from how much land and water they use to what to do with any remaining toxic waste.

Shifting lithium production to the United States would be a global game changer. Most lithium today comes from Australia and South America. only 5 percent Global demand was met by US lithium producers in 2021. California’s Salton Sea also contains a lot of lithium-rich salt water.

The potential in Arkansas still hinges on whether lithium reserves become commercially recoverable, the USGS says. The agency used machine learning to produce 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 Bureau of Geology. They analyzed new brine samples in the laboratory and compared them with data from historical samples of water from the world’s oil and gas production. The USGS produced a water database. A machine learning model used that data to predict lithium concentrations across the region.

“We did not estimate what is technically recoverable based on newer methods of extracting lithium from brines,” Katherine Knierim, a hydrologist and lead researcher for the study, said in the press release.