Wall Street analysts are set to be in El Dorado today to get a closer look at a still-developing project to extract battery-grade lithium from the brine under south Arkansas more efficiently, less expensively and in a more environmentally friendly way than any current procedure.
Standard Lithium Ltd., based in Vancouver, British Columbia, plans to have its lithium-extraction demonstration plant ready for testing this fall, Robert Mintak, the company's chief executive officer, said Wednesday while in Little Rock awaiting the arrival of Wall Street analysts and Andy Robinson, the company's president and chief operating officer.
The publicly traded Standard Lithium in late 2018 signed a joint-venture agreement with Lanxess Corp. to extract lithium from bromine that's already being mined by Lanxess in its decades-long operations in south Arkansas' oil-and-brine Smackover Formation.
The lithium would be mined to feed a growing demand for batteries for an array of products including cellphones, tools, scooters and cars.
Mintak said that the agreement helped free Standard Lithium from the pressure of having to raise tens of millions of dollars and allowed it to operate under state permits already obtained by Lanxess. The agreement with Lanxess also provided Standard Lithium with immediate access to the expertise of hundreds of chemical engineers and other workers with decades of experience.
Under an earlier agreement with Tetra Technologies, Standard Lithium also gained access to some 1,200 lease agreements across some 30,000 acres of brine production, with those royalties to be determined. "That would have taken us years and millions of dollars to put together," Mintak said.
Mintak said that the El Dorado project will involve no evaporation ponds or open-pit mining used in current lithium-extraction methods. After lithium is extracted, brine would be re-injected into the Smackover aquifer.
"It's not magic to taking the lithium out," Mintak said. "But it is a process to get the most effective recovery, the lowest cost and where you can take it from shaking it in a test tube and say, 'yeah, it works,' to going into commercial production and meeting the environmental rules and project constraints."
Standard Lithium broke ground on the project in late June. Over the next several weeks, a demonstration plant that was built and tested in Canada will be broken down into modules and shipped by rail to one of Lanxess' plants in El Dorado. Cement was being poured Wednesday morning for a slab that eventually will be the base for a pilot plant three stories high, Mintak said.
A Preliminary Economic Assessment of the project, released in June by Standard Lithium and conducted by a consulting arm of the WorleyParsons engineering firm, reported an investment of some $437 million with the completion of three proposed extraction plants producing 20,900 tons of lithium carbonate a year for 25 years. The assessment projected annual revenue of $283.1 million and annual operating costs of $90.2 million.
Excluding construction workers, total employment at the three plants would come to about 90 positions, many of them for chemical engineers, Mintak said.
A timeline for the project places the first half of 2022 for the first phase of commercial production of battery-quality lithium.
President Donald Trump in December 2017 signed an executive order to increase U.S. production of critical minerals, including lithium.
Business on 08/15/2019