It seemed to happen overnight. A few years ago, sleepy south Arkansas woke up to a growing buzz — with a lithium boom on the horizon, the region is set to strike it rich once again.
According to a study released by the U.S. Geological Survey and Arkansas Department of Energy and Environment in October, there is enough lithium beneath south Arkansas to meet the projected 2030 world demand for lithium in car batteries nine times over, somewhere between 5 million and 19 million tons.
“It will be bigger than the oil boom was in the ’20s here,” said Bill Luther, president and CEO of the El Dorado-Union County Chamber of Commerce.
Bill Luther
When asked how much the lithium industry would impact the local economy, Erik Pollock, director of the University of Arkansas Stable Isotope Lab and Trace Element and Radiogenic Isotope Lab in Fayetteville simply said, “A lot.”
“Let me put it this way — I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the amount of lithium that was in the land under lease eight or 10 months ago and what, at the time, was a pretty crummy price for lithium, and I came up with, like, $150 billion worth of lithium,” he said. “We could be looking at something that’s going to put $2 or $3 billion a year into the Arkansas economy.”
Erik Pollock
WHY NOW?
Obviously, the substance did not simply show up one day, so why the sudden interest in Arkansas lithium?
“We’ve actually been drilling oil wells in Smackover for about 100 years, so we knew the Smackover [Formation] was there,” Pollock said. “Some of the earlier lithium data was back into the ’80s, I believe. It didn’t become a big deal because nobody needed lithium in the ’80s, and we didn’t have the technology to extract it, so we needed a need, and we needed technology.”
The Smackover Formation, which includes south Arkansas, has an abundance of lithium-rich brine, and that could spell riches for the state.
Technology converged with need about five years ago. From a technological standpoint, researchers developed direct lithium extraction, a method capable of extracting lithium from the brine reservoirs in south Arkansas. As far as need, not only are lithium batteries for electronic vehicles increasing in demand, but the U.S. has become interested in finding sources of lithium close to home.
“There’s been an increasing shift toward finding domestic or, at least, more friendly productions of both lithium and other critical minerals, and so we’ve begun to look at our own resources much more closely,” Pollock said.
Today, almost all lithium is produced in South America, although there is some production in Australia, and refined in China for battery production there, Pollock said.
“They have sort of a chokehold on the market, and so they can manipulate their economy to our disadvantage,” he added. “This crops up in the news every once in a while. You’ll see a little bit of saber rattling here and there, but the threat became real enough that the Department of Defense and the administration said, ‘We’ve got to see if we can find better sources so we don’t have to work with these people.’”
In 2021, Kathleen Hicks, deputy secretary of defense, mentioned lithium-ion batteries as part of a speech about climate change and national security at Wayne State University in Michigan. Since then, the Department of Defense has taken additional steps to shore up the domestic lithium supply chain.
“Battery technology and lithium-ion batteries, specifically, are the lifeblood of electrification and the future auto industry, but batteries are also essential to thousands of military systems, from hand-held radios to unmanned submersibles and to future capabilities like lasers, directed energy weapons and hybrid electric tactical vehicles,” she said in her speech. “A healthy battery supply chain is essential to the military. When it comes to batteries, America needs to lead the world.”
In addition to electric vehicles and defense manufacturing, lithium is a component of batteries that store renewable energy produced by wind and solar power, and lithium-ion batteries can be found in an increasing number of household goods, Pollock said.
“It creeps around sort of everywhere. It’s in my phone. It’s in my cordless drill,” he added. “We are going to see the electrification of everything.”
In February, the Arkansas Lithium Innovation Summit in Little Rock brought together the myriad of stakeholders interested in the lithium boom. Pollock, who participated as a panelist, said the summit helped tell the story of Arkansas to visitors from as far away as Europe and Canada.
“I think that that was a wonderful way to sort of plant an open sign for Arkansas,” he said. “I think that the panelists and the speakers did a really good job of reinforcing what we know to be a good place to do business and to have a life.”
PREPARING FOR THE UNPRECEDENTED
Interest from Standard Lithium, Equinor, ExxonMobil and others has set off a flurry of activity as Arkansas works to accommodate its burgeoning lithium industry.
“We really haven’t seen this in this country,” Pollock said. “Probably the closest would be some of the work that’s gone on in the Salton Sea in California, which also has some brines. Technologically, they haven’t been quite as successful as the early results out of Arkansas have been for that, and so the boom hasn’t taken shape quite as dramatically as it looks like it’s poised to do in Arkansas.”
Alberta and the Oregon-Nevada border also have lithium deposits, but the Alberta deposits are of lower quality than those in Arkansas, Pollock said, and the Oregon-Nevada deposits pose mining challenges because they lack the water resources necessary for production.
The lithium industry in south Arkansas should not pose any environmental concerns, Pollock said, adding that the DLE process extracts the brine from the ground, removes the lithium from the brine and returns the brine to the reservoir with minimal surface disruption. He said bromine extraction, which has been done in the region for decades, uses a similar process.
“That’s similar for the bromine, which is also in this play, and we’ve been doing that for about 50 years fairly safely, so the environmental impacts for the magnitude of the resource we have are really going to be quite small,” he said.
The existing south Arkansas bromine production by companies such as Lanxess makes the area attractive to lithium producers, said Florence Meadors, Lithium Regional Innovation Cluster program manager.
Florence Meadors
“There’s already a framework in place, so that’s why a lot of these players are wanting to have a presence in Arkansas,” she said. “We already have frameworks set, and there’s a social buy-in, and that gives us a first-mover advantage.”
The U.S. Small Business Administration chose Fayetteville-based Startup Junkie to lead the Lithium Regional Innovation Cluster in October.
“I think the hope there is to really put Arkansas on the map within the lithium industry,” said Matthew Ward, senior executive consultant at Startup Junkie. “We have a really great asset in south Arkansas. We have a lot of great stakeholders being involved. Startup Junkie gets to have a seat at the table, be able to make an impact, whether it’s through jobs, whether it’s through helping bring more capital to the area or making the right connections for clients.”
Matthew Ward
THE BOOM BEGINS
A significant amount of land in south Arkansas is currently under lease and awaiting lithium production, Pollock said. Standard Lithium currently operates a demonstration plant in the area, and further commercial projects from Standard and others are set to follow.
However, lithium production is currently on hold until the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission approves the royalty rate at which landholders will be reimbursed.
“That is a difficult conversation that’s being had,” Pollock said. “We really need to make sure that we hit a sweet spot with that royalty figure in order to engage industry and not economically price them out while also honoring the land owners’ materials.”
Luther said the lithium companies may end up sharing their profit reports with the commission in order for a fair rate to be determined.
“The high end is 12.5 percent, what the royalty owners are looking for. The low end was 1.82 percent, which the commission declined, so I don’t know what the happy medium is,” he said. “Until the corporations open up their books somehow so the commission can determine what the profit actually is, that’s going to be the holdup.”
The need to prove profitability is one reason the lithium boom has not taken off as sharply as its 1920s predecessor, he added.
“Almost overnight, once the Busey [oil] well came in, the population of El Dorado doubled and everybody, tons of folks, came from Little Rock almost immediately,” he said. “It’s going to be a little slower in developing than the oil boom in the ’20s. One reason — the major corporations, they don’t jump in and invest until they’re pretty confident they’re going to get a return on what they’re investing in.”
The lithium boom is also set to be more long-lived than the oil boom, Pollock added.
“This is going to be a slow burn,” Pollock said. “We can’t take this lithium out like a gusher of oil. Some of these producers are looking at their reserves as 30- and 50-year production windows.”
MORE FOR THE MONEY
Pollock said that although he is not concerned about the environmental implications of the lithium industry, he worries that the state may sell itself short by simply producing lithium for export, rather than becoming involved in the downstream supply chain.
“If we keep thinking as a state, we can turn this into a very positive piece of economic and community growth and workforce development,” Pollock said. “The environmental aspects don’t worry me considering the scale of these operations. What I would be sort of concerned about would be if Arkansas sort of becomes just a lithium producer, and then we end up sort of short-selling ourselves by selling the lithium to Texas or Louisiana as opposed to using it to grow more of the downstream economy in the lithium industry.”
The downstream end of the lithium-ion battery supply chain is overbuilt, and there are an abundance of battery factories in Kansas, Alabama and Texas that do not have a domestic lithium source, Pollock said. While he added that he does not expect Arkansas to develop a large battery manufacturing sector, he said each step of manufacturing battery components and putting together cells for batteries represents an opportunity for Arkansas industry.
Startup Junkie is among the organizations working to piece together the many entrepreneurial opportunities wrought by the lithium boom.
“We don’t want it to be just an export/import business,” Ward said. “We want it to be a value-add chain where it’s having advanced manufacturing, being able to help out, once the lithium’s out of the ground, with the processing, anode, cathode, attracting some of those other players into the region, and then, also, you know, if any of the industries have certain gaps, being able to help fill those with startups from around the nation to help make processes more efficient and really drive impact here.”
Ward said Startup Junkie will work to bring together various stakeholders, including lithium producers, institutes of higher education and chambers of commerce, to help drive development in south Arkansas.
“The mandate for the SBA is to create jobs and bring innovation, and how we’ll do that is through various services, such as the cost of mentoring and coaching, events that are educational, networking or related to showcasing, access to capital, access to subject matter experts,” he said. “That’s how we see ourselves in the area, and this will involve different stakeholders in the area, such as the enterprises.”
THE WORLD OF TOMORROW
No industry exists in a vacuum, and Luther said he expects the lithium industry to support various other sectors, including housing, health care and workforce development. One of the most positive things he has noticed are collaborations at local colleges and universities to apply for grants for programs that support lithium production.
South Arkansas College in El Dorado has already obtained a grant for a program that allows high school students to earn concurrent credit in a chemical technician program, he said.
“High school students can take courses concurrently beginning in their junior year, and then they take the courses out at South Arkansas East Campus,” he said. “After they graduate from high school, they attend another six months, and they have a certificate or an associate degree, and those young folks, six months out of high school, can be working for $85,000 plus.”
In addition to providing high-paying jobs, he said he expects the lithium boom to foster community development in south Arkansas by bringing additional housing, retail and amenities to the region.
“All of these major players have expressed interest in investing in the communities, and I foresee bike trails and things going on like in northwest Arkansas,” he said. “A lot of folks are going to be locating here from elsewhere, and they kind of expect that sort of amenity, so I think it will be beneficial for all.”
Meadors, who is based in Magnolia and previously worked as a business consultant at the Small Business and Technology Development Center at South Arkansas University, said the local stakeholders have already expressed interest in investing in the area to help retain students as workers who could help support the lithium industry.
“As far as the community development goes, I think this is just going to give all these areas a really good opportunity to grow and just enhance what’s already here,” she said. “Having worked directly in community development for several years, I mean, there’s ups and downs when the income levels go up, but I think it will make this a place where adding a lot more features is going to be attractive because it will help with that quality of life, and it will help to keep people here and to keep people coming.”
If northeast Arkansas has steel and northwest Arkansas has Walmart, lithium could be the catalyst that enhances both the economy and culture of south Arkansas, if not the entire state.
“Walmart got started, they started to attract a lot of those brands, and today, in northwest Arkansas, there’s over 1,400 vendors supporting Walmart,” Ward said. “It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but we can see [lithium] being a huge magnet to the state, which could indirectly have an increase with tax payments, the infrastructure … the uptick in mainstream businesses and some other things like that.”
