East Texas is no stranger to mining booms. After all, Spindletop, an oil field near Beaumont, gave birth to the country’s modern oil and gas industry.
But now the region may be on the verge of a rush for one of this century’s most valuable resources: lithium, a key ingredient in the batteries that power so many of our phones, cars and other devices.
A company called GeoFrame Energy announced that it would partner with Houston’s Halliburton to extract and refine lithium on about 8,000 acres in northeast Texas. But what does lithium mining entail, exactly?
For details, Texas Standard spoke to Michael McKibben, research professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Riverside. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: I think of where lithium is abundant. Chile, Argentina, Bolivia… East Texas? Really?
Michael McKibben: Well, it overlies the Smackover Formation, which is this large formation of rock that extends from East Texas through Arkansas and into parts of Louisiana, and there’s a lot of interest in the brine contained within those rocks and the lithium in those brines.
How much of this is about not just getting to the lithium but actually the extraction process itself that makes it possible to reach that lithium?
Well, so a lot of companies are going after what’s called direct lithium extraction, which means you have an absorbent that selectively pulls lithium out of the brine. So all you have to do is if you’re not already pumping the brines out onto the surface to process it, you have drill wells and do that.
But the advantage of direct lithium is you don’t have to dig open pit mines like they do in Australia and blast rock and soak it in sulfuric acid. And you don’t have to dump brine out onto the surface as evaporation ponds like they do in Chile, in Argentina, and soon in Bolivia, which is extremely wasteful of water and is disturbing the ecology of some of their tourist attractions.
So DLE is a very effective and resource-conservative way of producing lithium compared to how it’s produced around the world.
Would this be disruptive to have on your property or live nearby? I mean, because of the way that this is sort of mopped out of the water, if I understand your description, how much damage could this do?
Well it shouldn’t do any damage at all because you’re gonna pump the brine out from the subsurface, run it through some extraction plumbing on the surface, and then re-inject the brine back into the formation. So pretty much a closed system.
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Well, given your experience then, from a safety standpoint, we’ve discussed on our program stories about the challenges of putting out fires from lithium-ion batteries and that kind of thing.
Is this sort of lithium extraction especially dangerous or more dangerous than other kinds of mining? I just wonder about fighting a blaze at a facility in an area where there aren’t many firefighting resources, for example.
No, because they’re not going to be producing batteries directly, as far as I understand.
They’re just going to produce the resource of lithium, and usually that’s produced as a lithium chloride solution, which is not dangerous. And then they will convert that lithium chloride into solid materials called lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide monohydrate, and that’s what the battery manufacturers use to make their batteries.
So the only danger you run into with lithium is on the battery end of it, not on resource end of it.
The companies involved in this project say that there’s enough lithium concentrated in this formation that you were describing in East Texas to meet domestic demand in the U.S. Does that sound feasible or plausible to you?
Well, to prove that, they’d have to provide some more information than I’ve seen in articles online.
So, you need to know the brine flow rate out of the wells. You need to know the concentration of the lithium in those brines. And then you need know the recovery efficiency of the DLE method.
If they provide that information, then one could assess how significant the resources are. But I haven’t seen that provided yet.
What about economic opportunities that might be adjacent for the broader community? Are there such opportunities?
Well, sure, you’ve got staff to run the plant and produce the product and then it depends on what they add on in terms of manufacturing to the production of the resource.
So if they do decide they want to make batteries near that site, or even if they decide they want to recycle batteries in the future on that site, then you’ve sort of got these cascading effects on the job production.
So it really depends on how involved they’re going to be in the entire supply chain – from the raw resource itself to the end product, which is the battery.
