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Arkansas May Have Vast Lithium Reserves, Researchers Say (nytimes.com) 86

Researchers at the United States Geological Survey and the Arkansas government announced on Monday that they had found a trove of lithium, a critical raw material for electric vehicle batteries, in an underground brine reservoir in Arkansas. From a report: With the help of water testing and machine learning, the researchers determined that there might be five million to 19 million tons of lithium -- more than enough to meet all of the world's demand for the metal -- in a geological area known as the Smackover Formation. Several companies, including Exxon Mobil, are developing projects in Arkansas to produce lithium, which is dissolved in underground brine.

Energy and mining companies have long produced oil, gas and other natural resources in the Smackover, which extends from Texas to Florida. And the federal and state researchers said lithium could be extracted from the waste stream of the brines from which companies extracted other forms of energy and elements. The energy industry, with the Biden administration's encouragement, has been increasingly working to produce the raw materials needed for the lithium-ion batteries in the United States. A few projects have started recently, and many more are in various stages of study and development across the country.

Most of the world's lithium is produced in Australia and South America. A large majority of it is then processed in China, which also dominates the manufacturing of electric vehicle batteries. "The potential for increased U.S. production to replace imports has implications for employment, manufacturing and supply chain resilience," David Applegate, the director of the United States Geological Survey, said in a statement announcing the study. "This study illustrates the value of science in addressing economically important issues."

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Arkansas May Have Vast Lithium Reserves, Researchers Say

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    FEMA's about to shoot you a CAT-6 HERHIMACANE! (hurrdurricane?)
  • Is it economical? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Monday October 21, 2024 @04:44PM (#64882521)

    Problem with brines is that to get lithium out of them, you must evaporate a lot of water. A LOT of water. That means a lot of energy.

    South America solves this problem through solar power. Specifically direct solar heating of massive pools of brine in a very dry desert region, where Sun evaporates water from the brine.

    AK is not that, so they'll either have to have mass transportation of the stuff to a hot desert, or evaporate it through some other industrial means. So it's unlikely to be competitive with South American brines.

    • Re:Is it economical? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday October 21, 2024 @04:51PM (#64882555)

      Problem with brines is that to get lithium out of them, you must evaporate a lot of water.

      Nope. There is no need to evaporate the water.

      Just dump sodium carbonate into the brine. It will dissolve and disassociate into ions. The -CO3 ion will then react with the lithium ions. Lithium carbonate is insoluble in water and will precipitate out.

      Lithium carbonate is a commodity product that can be sold directly to battery manufacturers.

      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        Why do South Americans evaporate instead of doing this?

        • Re:Is it economical? (Score:5, Informative)

          by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday October 21, 2024 @05:20PM (#64882631)

          The process is more efficient if the brine is concentrated.

          So, if you've got plenty of sunshine, why not use it?

          You can also concentrate the brine with osmotic membranes instead of evaporation.

          • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

            How much more efficient? If this is uncompetitive with evaporation, is this so inefficient as to make it uncompetitive even with mining?

            • Re:Is it economical? (Score:5, Informative)

              by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday October 21, 2024 @06:27PM (#64882797)

              If this is uncompetitive with evaporation, is this so inefficient as to make it uncompetitive even with mining?

              Lithium from hard rock mining has historically been cheaper, but new techniques, such as selective osmotic membranes, are making brine more cost-effective.

              Other products from brine can be co-produced, such as magnesium, potassium, rubidium, gallium, bromine, iodine, etc.

              There may also be revenue from sequestration. After all the good stuff is extracted, you need to dispose of the brine. There are two options:

              1. Dump it into the Mississippi River
              2. Pump it back down the hole

              The greenies will object to #1, so #2 is it. But as long as you're pumping it back "down-hole," you can saturate it with CO2 and pump that down with it. The CO2 makes the pumping easier by increasing the density. Then you sell the carbon credits.

              • Everyone on the Earth - at least anyone who doesn't have a second home on a distant planet - should be a "greenie" and concern themselves with polluting the waters.
                • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                  This is called "environmentalism". It's what many normal people used to be before green ideology took over the movement, making it anti-reality nutbaggery that it is today.

              • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                So not competitive right now, as even lithium mining is considered borderline by the mining giants like Rio Tinto. That's unfortunate.

                I suppose it would address the need should there ever be a massive problem with Australia or those nations around that specific desert in South America, and if refining ever actually moves out of PRC.

              • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                The point I'm making is that lithium mining has been mostly utterly uncompetitive because just how much more expensive it is than South American evaporation is.

                This is fundamentally working with similar materials to South America, and yet being more expensive than mining. This is not a good thing. It will function as an emergency supply for far future, but probably not for current supply issues.

              • As far as I understand it, carbon credits are dubious at best. Many seem to have been scams [theguardian.com]. There is really no good oversight from my understanding, so it seems to mostly be greenwashing.
            • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              What do you mean by uncompetitive? In the Slashdot meta of "OMG we're running out of lithium and China!" no way. Where the price was in 2023 (~ $80 / kg)? Unlikely. At today's spot price, which is reasonably close to historical prices ($10 / kg), maybe.

        • Maybe?

          Just plucking it from the air here...

          The sun is free?

          • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

            Go and look at satellite pictures of the evaporation pools. Those are as "free" as all the work and materials that went to into building them and maintaining them as well as the processes necessary for them to work in an environment that is very hostile to both machinery and humans.

            As for Sun being free, all energy on this planet come from the Sun. Does that mean that all energy on the planet is free?

            • by jabuzz ( 182671 )

              Nope any energy coming from a nuclear reactor is not derived from the sun.

              • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                Nuclear works by splitting U238 atoms. Where did uranium come from?
                It came as a result of formation process of the planet's crust. Where did planet come from?

                Congratulations, you now understand why all energy on this planet that we're harnessing comes from Sun.

                Notably, there's one exception in total. Some of our radio stations are technically receiving tiny amounts of energy from outer space.

      • > Nope. There is no need to evaporate the water

        Good, we could try and avoid filling the air with the heat trapping water vapour

    • AK is not that, so they'll either have to have mass transportation of the stuff to a hot desert, or evaporate it through some other industrial means. So it's unlikely to be competitive with South American brines.

      Oklahoma receives an average of 3,000 hours of sunshine per year, making it one of the sunniest states in the United States.......

      They share a border... The panhandle gets the bulk of the sunshine... If only we had technology like pipelines...

      West Texas also has vast areas of arid land not being used for much of anything.. I can totally see how it'd be cheaper to ship that shit all the way from South America versus a pipeline..

      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        Pumping isn't cheap. Pumping salt water is holy shit the corrosion level of not cheap. Warm and wet isn't the same as hot and dry.

    • by Revek ( 133289 )
      Why would we ship it to Alaska? I live about forty minutes from Smackover ,AR. The high lithium content in the brine extracted from oil wells has been known since I was a child. They already process a lot of it for bromine so I feel like they will just tack a process on to that production.
      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        This misses forest for the trees. We already desalinate a lot of water, why don't we mine it for gold as we do it?

        Because processes to do so are so incredibly expensive, that they make end product utterly uncompetitive. You'd be burning money doing it.

        Same likely applies here, as one poster below noted that processes are apparently not competitive even with mining, which itself isn't competitive with evaporating.

    • No one cares about efficiency when national security is at stake. America is so behind on securing key earth minerals that itâ(TM)s a national security issue.

      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        This is fundamentally wrong. US has excellent access to South America and Australia, much better than primary competitor that is PRC. The problem is that almost all refining in the world is in PRC. That is the part of supply chain that is not under control and a natsec issue.

        Problem is that it's also a field that's very difficult to get going due to it's high technical complexity (cannot hire any average or below that people for production, as their mistakes will destroy weeks of work at a time for everyone

  • by zawarski ( 1381571 ) on Monday October 21, 2024 @04:50PM (#64882553)
    Jed move away from here!
  • by fabioalcor ( 1663783 ) on Monday October 21, 2024 @05:05PM (#64882585)

    > A large majority of it is then processed in China

    It's was never hard to find lithium. The main problem is processing it. It's a very nasty and expensive process. China dominates it because they don't care about their environment, and they have dirty cheap labor and huge scale.
    Are western countries willing to do it? No? Then nothing will change.
    You can find enough raw lithium to supply 100x the world needs, if you're not willing to process it, China will. And you'll still keep depending on them.

    • by shilly ( 142940 )

      Have you got some links to a description of lithium processing?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Smidge204 ( 605297 )

        Lithium carbonate is the main feedstock, and how you get that material from the natural ore/brine depends on what you're dealing with. If we're dealing with a brine then you likely have sodium, magnesium and boron contaminants. Magnesium and boron can be removed using calcium hydroxide to convert them into low solubility salts, and the remaining lithium brine separately reacted with sodium carbonate to make insoluble lithium carbonate.

        The lithium carbonate filtered out and converted to lithium chloride by r

    • The children of Arkansas are filling out the job applications already (as best they can).
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The Chinese government has been pushing hard to clean up lithium mining. There is now capture for the toxic byproducts, it isn't allowed to be done near rivers or other areas where it could run off, and of course a lot of the energy is renewable.

      If they can do it then so can anyone else, if the will is there.

  • If they can extract sufficient minerals from the brine then ideally the leftover would be potable water. That would be a win-win situation for everybody.
  • There is probably lots of lithium from old laptop batteries, and neodymium from hold hard drives. Apparently we have enough to waste.
  • Doesn't Lithium OD cause mental illness? No wonder MAGA hats sell well there.

  • by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Tuesday October 22, 2024 @07:05AM (#64883669) Journal

    It's nice to have domestic reserves, but barring some cataclysmic development in refining tech (or an equally significant abandonment of ecological rules), I can't see economically significant quantities being produced in the US.

  • more than enough to meet all of the world's demand for the metal

    I read the paywalled article, and it is pretty much verbatim of the summary above. Meet the demand for how long? A day? A month? FOREVER? Surely that can't meet the entire global demand forever?

    • It's recyclable, so while I doubt it really is enough to last forever, it isn't beyond the realm of possibility. There's only so many humans you can cram on here, and many don't have much need of lithium.
  • WE SHOULD BOMB THEM!

    Oh, they're inside our country? THEN WE SHOULD BOMB THEM TWICE!

    And if they complain, we should probably bomb them again, just to be sure. Those resources belong to the corporations. Fuck anybody living there. BOMB THEM INTO COMPLIANCE! YOU WILL GIVE YOUR DUE TO THE MIGHTY CORPORATE MASTERS!

    /Typical American reaction to discovery of resources we want.

  • ...federal and state researchers said lithium could be extracted from the waste stream of the brines from which companies extracted other forms of energy and elements.

    I feel compelled to point out this is the story of capitalism and resource extraction writ small. I encourage Malthusuans to pay attention.

    What used to be a waste product (and probably a toxic mess to boot) turns out to be a valuable input. Petroleum was a nuisance until we figured out how to refine it. I'm (unreasonably) optimistic nuclear waste will too. Lots of other items are considered waste until some bright spark figured out how to make a profit from them.

    Any time you feel all doom and gloomy about

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      You don't need to be optimistic nuclear waste is valuable. The techniques for reprocessing it into fuel are half a century old.

  • We've always known that lithium is very abundant and is distributed widely.
    It's only the fear mongers who have been beating the anti-EV drum screaming that we don't have enough lithium.
    So this is not surprising. Lithium is really everywhere so we can pick and choose the most efficient sources.

  • "more than enough to meet all of the world's demand for the metal" Because it doesn't mention time scales, is this a hollow statement?
  • Before he turned...weird, Bryan Lunduke gave a funny talk [youtube.com] at Linux Fest Northwest 2018, and spoke about Arkansas.

I THINK THEY SHOULD CONTINUE the policy of not giving a Nobel Prize for paneling. -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.

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