Lithium Boom: The Prospects for Arkansas

Todd Price: Welcome to Short Talks from The Hill, a research and economic development podcast of the University of Arkansas.

My name is Todd Price.

We all rely on lithium. Lithium-ion batteries power our phones. They keep our laptops running. And if you drive a hybrid or electric car, a lithium-ion battery is inside your vehicle.

Where do we get lithium? Soon it may be coming from Arkansas. Last fall, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that an estimated 5 to 19 million tons of lithium are located in southwestern Arkansas. That is enough lithium to meet the world’s estimated 2030 demand for lithium nine times over.

The lithium is located in the Smackover Formation, a geological formation created by an ancient sea that extends across southwest Arkansas and several neighboring states. Back in the 1920s, oil was discovered in the Smackover Formation, setting off a boom in southern Arkansas.

Today, geoscientist Erik Pollock joins us to explain why lithium is valuable, what it will take to get the lithium out of the ground in Arkansas, and what lithium could mean for our state’s future.

Erik Pollock, welcome to Short Talks.

Erik Pollock: Thank you.

TP: I wanted to start with a basic question, which is, what is lithium? If we had some here in the studio, what would it look like?

EP: Pure lithium is probably just a white metal. It’s going to be very reactive. Probably burns in the air. Most of the time when we think about lithium in our batteries, we’re thinking about lithium carbonate or lithium phosphates.

TP: Today, lithium is in demand for rechargeable batteries in our phones, our laptop computers and our hybrid and electric cars. A few years ago, I think the only use that I heard for lithium was treating bipolar disorder. Were there other common uses for lithium before batteries were developed? These lithium-ion batteries?

EP: It wasn’t a commodity that was in that much demand prior to the advent of the lithium-ion battery.

TP: So why does lithium-ion make such a good battery?

EP: Lithium-ion batteries have a number of advantages. One, they have a high energy density, so you need a relatively small battery to charge. They also have fairly long life in terms of charging and discharging. Your phone lasts for a couple of years basically daily charging. So that’s an important attribute. We don’t have to replace these batteries like double A’s in a flashlight or anything.

TP: What is it about lithium as an element that lends itself so well to making these batteries that you can recharge and use frequently?

EP: Some of that has to do with its relatively small size on an atomic scale, and with that imparts some electronegativity characteristics that make it desirable. We can do similar batteries with sodium, but they have much lower energy densities. Hence they need to be much, much larger.

TP: Where today do we get lithium for all these batteries? And are there certain places, certain things we should be looking for that often signal that lithium would be there?

EP: Most of the lithium production now is in what we call the Golden Triangle, which is Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. They have high salt plains where they extract brine and simply evaporate it at the surface. That is where most of the lithium comes from. I believe Australia may have some modest production, as well as one place in Southeast Asia.

TP: This Smackover Formation has an enormous amount of lithium it seems. More than enough, it’s estimated to meet the world’s annual demand. Is that amount of lithium unique, or have we just not been looking as much for lithium because it wasn’t so valuable before? And could there be other deposits around the world if we now have ways of getting at them and we’re now looking for them?

EP: The Smackover is sort of the right time, the right place, and the right geology combined. There are other brine deposits that are being looked at for commercial extraction, both in the States and Europe and in the Middle East. There is a lot of lithium out there, but getting that lithium into a battery is really a long process, starting with getting it out of the ground. And that’s sort of where the right time comes for and the right place for Arkansas. As you mentioned previously, the Smackover has a long history of oil and gas production. So we really understand the subsurface there fairly well. There’s also sort of an acceptance of this more locally, of infrastructure coming in. And then Arkansas, we can’t just evaporate it like they do down in Bolivia. It’s just too hot and humid here. So the technology that’s going to allow us to extract that, it’s called direct lithium extraction, it’s a host of processes that can pull that out. But the neat thing there is that the waste generated from this is very close to zero. So there’s a lot of advantages beyond just the geology to getting to develop the Smackover in Arkansas.

TP: Because I’ve read there’s a lot of concerns in other places where they’re mining lithium about environmental impacts, but it sounds like maybe that won’t be an issue in the Smackover Formation?

EP: I don’t think we could have asked for a cleaner, large-scale mining process to happen. There’s going to be very little surface expression of this. There’s no open pits. There’s no waste piles generated. If you look at our bromine industry, they’ve operated very similarly for 50 years. And so sure, there’s going to be pipes and buildings and trucks on the ground, but not open pit. We’re not going to be dumping waste down into the gully behind the factory either.

TP: So could you explain a little bit more about the process of extracting lithium and how it would be used in Smackover? It sounds like it’s a relatively new way of getting at lithium?

EP: So the term direct lithium extraction is really a blanket term that describes a handful of different processes that allow us to selectively remove lithium ions from a brine stream and concentrate it. Some of this is membrane technology. Some of this is sorbent, some of this solvent based. And often it’s a number of these processes in any one particular company’s direct lithium extraction.

TP: When you look at a map of the Smackover Formation, it extends into multiple states, including northeast Texas, Mississippi, coastal Alabama, even Florida Panhandle. Do we know how much of that lithium is in Arkansas? I mean, we’ve been talking about this as an Arkansas story, but is that just because we’re in Arkansas, or is this a regional story? And will other states also be extracting lithium?

EP: It’s somewhat of a regional story, but the quality of the brine and the concentration of the lithium increases as we move from east to west. Texas has actually got some of the highest reported concentrations just over the border. Whereas if you look at coastal Alabama, there’s really not much lithium in the Smackover there. Arkansas sits on top of a nice piece of real estate where the lithium concentrations are relatively high. Texas has another piece of this where they’re slightly higher, but there’s slightly less real estate.

TP: Well, I know you’re not an economist, but what kind of economic benefits are we looking at for the state of Arkansas from lithium mining?

EP: There are two parts of this. One, is that when we think about sort of minerals and oil and gas, we often talk about booms and busts. And if you look at the producer’s websites, they’re talking about production windows on the 40- and 50-year timescale. There’s certainly going to be a potential construction boom. But then after that, we’re sort of going to be in a very steady state, where we’re going to be dumping lithium into the economy, sustainably for a long time.

With that’s going to come a fair number of jobs. Direct lithium extraction is not an easy chore. It requires people and buildings to pull it off. It’s not an oil and gas kind of thing where you just put it in a can and put it in your car. And so the lithium itself has the possibility of being another leg on Arkansas’ economy. There’s a lot of wiggle room in how big this could be; given the price of lithium, the amount of extraction and so forth. But the other part of this is that we think we can use the lithium as an economic multiplier. Just because you have a handful of lithium doesn’t mean you have a battery. There’s significant supply chain that goes from lithium to your phone battery or to your car, including cell packaging, cathode and anode development and so forth. And that is one of the things that’s missing domestically here. We have lots of battery factories, but the piece between the lithium and the battery is missing. So another way that this will hopefully help the Arkansas economy is to build out that missing piece of the supply chain and create a multiplier effect, just because not only do we have lithium, we don’t want to just give it to Texas or whoever, but we can actually turn it into a bit more of an economy than just an extractive one.

TP: And is it to our advantage that a lot of electric vehicle construction happens in the South? In fact, people often talk about the battery belt through Tennessee and South Carolina. Does that help us in this situation? Or given supply chains, does it not really matter where these cars are being produced?

EP: I think there’s two ways to look at that. You know, one is sort of why don’t we have a battery plant? And then the other one is, now all these people are going to have to come to us for their raw material. Probably globally, it works a little bit more in our favor. We don’t have to ship the lithium from here to China to get turned into something. But given how we move around the world these days, I’m not sure how much of a holdup that is.

TP: Not that long ago, there wasn’t a lot of demand for lithium. Then lithium-ion batteries were created. Is there a risk that a new type of battery, one that does not use lithium, that uses some other technology, could come along? And once again, lithium is no longer in much demand?

EP: So the lithium-ion battery is actually about 35 years old, much older than I originally imagined. They’re characteristics of lithium that make it unique in the periodic table. We have lots and lots of other batteries, but they don’t perform quite as well as lithium-ion and then there is also several kinds of lithium-ion batteries. And so we can modify the chemistry a little bit and get a little bit more performance for what we need. Do we need high discharge? Do we need long storage? Do we need cold or heat protections? So there’s still places for the lithium to grow. And I doubt that there will be a ready replacement for that in the nearest future.

TP: Erik Pollock, thanks for coming to Short Talks. It’s been a great conversation.

EP: Thank you.

TP: Short Talks from The Hill is now available wherever you get your podcasts. For more information and additional podcasts, visit ArkansasResearch.uark.edu. The home of research and economic development news at the University of Arkansas. Music for short Talks from the Hill was written and performed by local musician Ben Harris.

Learn more about lithium in Arkansas and the U of A’s role supporting the industry at Lithium.Uark.edu.