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Permalink Reply by Rock Man on June 6, 2024 at 10:42

First I have seen info on DLE vs acreage allocation. Basically 10 square miles per DLE

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Permalink Reply by Skip Peel - Mineral Consultant on June 6, 2024 at 12:00

Yes.  I found a number of interesting facts in the news releases.

• The increased acreage continues to drive PFE towards a scalable project with the

Company’s conceptual estimate of one DLE production pad for every 6,500 acres based

on projects in development elsewhere, indicating the Company’s conceptual

production profile of up to four modules each producing 2,000-4,000 tpa of Lithium

Carbonate.

 

Pantera is obviously eschewing the permanent plant with pipeline system approach being promoted by the bigger players.

 

• Sub-Surface program fully underway with SLB with first expected results due in four

weeks to identify optimal initial re-entry well. 2D Seismic data has been acquired.

 

Pantera is targeting existing wells to the SMK depth as opposed to drilling new supply wells.  Re-entry of existing wells is much cheaper than drilling new wells but raises questions about the life span of the casings in those existing wells and the volume flow of brine based on the smaller diameter.

Commenting on the new leased acres, Executive Chairman Barnaby Egerton-Warburton said:

“This is an outstanding result as we continue to lease in the United States New Lithium Heartland, the Smackover Play Arkansas. Our exclusive abstract agreement continues to allow us to lease with little to no competition as our focus moves towards drilling, exploration and resource definition. I also note the further validation of the Smackover Lithium Brine Play with the entry of Norway’s Equinor, a world class leading energy company”.

“Exclusive abstract agreement”?  Allows leasing with little to no competition?  I don’t understand this.

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Permalink Reply by Rock Man on June 11, 2024 at 12:14

One day I hope to see a theoretical "plan" presented showing a "DLE Unit"

Including the actual DLE plus water supply wells plus pipelines and re-injection facilities 

Plus details on per day volumes of water being produced and processed.

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Permalink Reply by Hale Yayuh on June 12, 2024 at 3:04

I caught "exclusive abstract agreement" as well, and the thought that popped into my mind was to wonder if it was the same thing as how Chesapeake bought several abstract plants (title) during the early Haynesville in order to give them speed in title research to secure leases. They, literally, bought the abstract companies. They'd walk in with a stupid high amount of money and just buy it. I also have wondered if those abstract companies' records were 'lost' forever to Chesapeake. I assume that it is.

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Permalink Reply by Skip Peel - Mineral Consultant on June 12, 2024 at 8:35

A number of early Haynesville Shale operators bought abstract businesses not only to facilitate their title due diligence but to box out competitors.  A windfall for the abstract company owners but a detriment to mineral owners as it reduced competition.  You're right, this could be the same or something similar.

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Permalink Reply by Skip Peel - Mineral Consultant on July 1, 2024 at 5:15

Lithium pilot plant will be built at Albemarle's Magnolia West site

• Mike McNeill, publisher and editor July 1, 2024 Updated

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Albemarle Corporation will construct a pilot facility for the production of lithium at its West Plant on U.S. 371, west of Magnolia.

The announcement came in a letter mailed late last week to thousands of people who own brine royalty rights within the company’s West Production Area in Columbia County.

The company has previously announced that it planned to build a pilot plant but until the letter, had made no formal statement as to where it would be located.

Albemarle built a pilot facility at its South Plant a decade ago, but did not go ahead with lithium production at that time. Since then, Albemarle has become a world leader in lithium production – not in South Arkansas, but in Australia and Chile. Lithium is a key component used in batteries for electric vehicles.

Standard Lithium has a lithium pilot plant in Union County and plans a commercial-scale site south of El Dorado. It has also purchased land for a production site south of Lewisville. Tetra Technologies will start construction later this year on a bromine plant southeast of Stamps, and it is working with ExxonMobil to produce lithium at the same location. ExxonMobil has also said it plans to produce enough lithium for more than 1 million electric vehicle batteries annually by 2030 from a South Arkansas site, the location of which has not been announced.

The letter sent to Columbia County property owners notes that Albemarle and its predecessors had removed salt water from the Smackover Formation for more than 50 years. The company’s two Columbia County sites remove bromine from the brine and return the salt water back into the formation through the use of injection wells.

“As you likely have heard, there has been recent interest in possibly removing a lithium component from that same bring before putting it back into the ground. Tests indicate that the concentrations of the lithium company contained within the brine are quite small, and we are hopeful that it might still be profitably produced if direct lithium extraction (DLE) techniques are perfected. Perfecting the process will require trial and error experimentation,” the letter said.

“As we have previously shared publicly, Albemarle is developing direct lithium extraction technology for testing in Magnolia. For that reason, we are ready to build a small pilot plant, solely for the purpose of improving our methods of lithium extraction. The pilot plant will not be a commercial operation, which means we will not sell any lithium extracted from this pilot. Experiments within the pilot plant will simply help us identify the best ways to remove lithium from the brine before we determine if we want to invest in future facilities designated to produce lithium products for the marketplace.

“If and when those future commercial operations occur, you will begin receiving additional royalty for the extracted lithium in amounts determined by the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission. Currently, the pilot plant is solely focused on understanding the quantity and quality of lithium in the Smackover brine,” the letter said.

There are three methods used worldwide for lithium production. The direct lithium extraction method that Albemarle, Standard Lithium and ExxonMobil plan to use in South Arkansas involves running saltwater brine through a series of processes. The processes use chemicals or water to strip lithium ions from the brine. The extracted lithium is treated to remove impurities, and the lithium is dried. The process – from the receipt of brine from production fields to finished product – takes a few hours.

Production methods used by Albemarle in Chile and Australia are far different. In Chile, brine from beneath the Salar de Atacama desert is pumped into vast evaporation ponds which, over a course of several months, yield higher and higher concentrations of lithium-bearing salt for processing. In Western Australia, lithium-bearing spodumene is mined from open pits. The ore is crushed, roasted at a high temperature and crushed again to a fine powder. Sulfuric acid is used to leach lithium from the crushed rock. The process takes several days.

The lithium pilot plant is separate from a half-billion-dollar, five-year project that Albemarle announced in November 2022 to expand its Columbia County bromine plants. The company committed $380 million for the South Plant at 2270 U.S. 79, and $160 million for the West Plant, 1550 U.S. 371. Work will include new buildings, acquisition and installation of various machinery, equipment and other property, and for paying for the expense of issuing bonds for the improvements. The bromine expansion is expected to create 100 new permanent jobs.

Albemarle Corporation also said in its letter last week that it has filed an application with the Oil and Gas Commission requesting an order confirming that the pilot plant won’t be used for commercial lithium production.

Albemarle’s application will be heard by the commission during its next meeting, which will start at 9 a.m. Tuesday, July 23, 2024 at the Oil and Gas Commission office in El Dorado.

The commission has yet to establish royalty rates that will be paid to South Arkansas landowners. No commercial production may begin until royalties are established.

In previous statements, potential lithium producers have said that they want different royalty rates set for brine production fields based on the fields’ individual concentrations of lithium in the brine.

news@magnoliareporter.com

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Permalink Reply by Skip Peel - Mineral Consultant on July 1, 2024 at 5:16

Is a low-key company a game changer for lithium in Louisiana and beyond?

BY LIZ SWAINE | Staff writer  Jun 28, 2024 www.shreveportbossieradvocate.com

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The world's largest producer of lithium and a player in the north Louisiana/Arkansas Smackover Formation says that current lithium prices — which have fallen to a low not seen since 2021 — are "unsustainable" and cannot support spending on new plants, Bloomberg reported this week.

Officials with Albemarle Corp., which has a plant in Magnolia, Arkansas that is focused on the lithium play, made the comments at an industry conference in Las Vegas. But though current prices are down, Albemarle CEO Kent Masters said that long term growth for the "limited supply" of lithium — used in batteries that power the growing electric vehicle market worldwide

The timing of lower lithium prices and concern over the costs of traditional lithium plants could be a jump start for International Battery Metals, or IBAT, based in Houston, Texas.

Physical chemist Dr. John Burba is the founder and chief technology officer for IBAT. His life has been a study of how and why chemical reactions work, and his focus for 40 years has been on lithium and salt water brine — a drilling by product that contains minerals and other far more environmentally hazardous contaminants such as salts, oil, and drilling injection water. Lithium has been found in quantity in Arkansas and Texas, and the same geological formation — called Smackover — extends into north Louisiana. Mineral consultant Skip Peel tells The Shreveport-Bossier City Advocate that the brine in the north Louisiana Smackover is not only caustic but also contains dangerous hydrogen sulfide.

It is somewhat ironic that lithium, now one of the world's most highly sought after minerals, is now being found in brine, a product once considered mostly worthless that is generally injected back into the ground to make it "go away."

For the past several months, Dr. Burba has been on and off in Salt Lake City, Utah at US Magnesium with 35 trucks driven from The Shaw Group's fabrication yard in Lake Charles. The Shaw Group and Burner Fire Control in Lafayette built a prototype that IBAT is now testing in Utah, a prototype that changes almost everything about the type of facility needed to extract lithium as well as the way it is extracted.

With all the competing press releases dropping on a weekly basis about "New!" "Better!" "Best!" lithium technology, being heard above that fray is a challenge. "We're a startup company, we're small, our balance sheet is pretty skimpy. It's new, and you get this 'How do I know this is really going to work?' I think what we're demonstrating with US Magnesium is going to be a giant lift for us." Burba believes it is the proverbial better mousetrap.

Direct Lithium Extraction — or DLE — is not new or unique. It's the process of capturing lithium ions and separating those ions from the other — often nasty and dangerous stuff — they are in. Because brine is so toxic and so corrosive, the plants that distill the lithium are built near the source of the brine so it will not have to be transported. Remember that brine is so highly corrosive it is normally kept out of trucks and pipelines.

IBAT has developed a modular, transportable plant that can be set up on under two acres of stable soil, with no concrete foundations or dozens of construction workers or days off for bad weather. "A traditional plant will typically take 4 to 6 years to build," Burba said. "We built this plant in 10 months. If you roll engineering and procurement into it, you're probably 16 to 18 months, all in. Once we're really locked down on all our basic engineering, it will be less than a year. That is a huge time to market advantage."

The plant at US Magnesium took a couple of months to set up. "Now we're in testing, we've commissioned it and are just entering startup. I'm anticipating it going full out in another 4 to 6 weeks. From the time we set the equipment down to having it up and operational was less than 6 months." Burba said the transportable plant is a fraction of the price of a traditional plant, and it can be moved afterward.

Next comes the Direct Lithium Extraction, and IBAT's patented processes. This is where it gets complicated and Burba's inner physical chemist professor comes out. The process is an absorption system "that uses a crystalline material that has very tiny holes within the structure of the compound and lithium can go into the holes — when you wash it in the water, it comes out in the water," Burba said. Lithium, which is the smallest metal ion in the periodic table, is the only thing that will fit in the holes.

Burba touts two big benefits to the IBAT process. First is that no acid-based chemicals or solvents of any kind must be used. Second is that very little water is used. Of the water that is used, Burba says roughly 98% is recycled to use again. "When the water goes through the system it is clean water like drinking water and the solution that comes out is this high concentration lithium chloride solution with some impurities. The water is just recycled right back into our loop. We'll get about 10% to 14% lithium chloride solution. We would use a small evaporator to get the water out of it, boost it up to about 36% for shipment and then condense that water."

More traditional modes of lithium extraction — hard rock mining and evaporative mining — use "astronomical" amounts of water, and the water that is left over, Burba said, is filled with contaminants.

A transportable plant would be especially beneficial for the large fields in the Smackover formation in Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas, said Burba, because it would negate the need to construct expensive pipelines to handle the brine. Because of the lower cost of the facility, lithium in the 200 to 350 parts per million range could make a good return on the investment, versus the 600 ppm more traditional companies are seeking.

What about required permits? Like the lithium royalty structure, they are still unknown. However, Burba confirms a discussion in Texas was very hopeful. "We've been talking to several different groups interested in working with us. Because we are not putting foundations in, we're not burying pipe, it's all transportable, the Railroad Commission in Texas has indicated that it's essentially the same thing as drilling equipment. It's kind of a non-event."

Burba said  the numbers from US Magnesium should be coming in over the next two to three months. "Once we're through startup phase, and it's run for a reasonable amount of time, we'll start waving the victory flags."

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Permalink Reply by Rock Man on July 1, 2024 at 8:07

An issue that everyone needs to keep in mind when considering DLE or any other rare mineral extraction from formation waters is the pipeline grid needed to move this water from source wells to the plant and then back to injection wells.

The attachment / link below shows the Albemarle West Magnolia plant - note the scale in the lower left corner.

Plant is in the center of the image with wells shown in the area. Pipeline ROW's are highly visible in this heavily wooded area.

Albemarle%20West%20Magnolia%20Plant.jpg

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Permalink Reply by Skip Peel - Mineral Consultant on July 1, 2024 at 16:09

Good considerations.  Makes the IBAT system sound like a significant alternative for DLE lithium production.

Permalink Reply by Rock Man on July 1, 2024 at 16:12

Forgot to include comments about the probable H2S content of the Smackover water and subsequent surface environmental issues (ranging from smell to physical danger)

Potential for water spills also a consideration that should not be ignored

Permalink Reply by Skip Peel - Mineral Consultant on July 12, 2024 at 6:03

Lithium industry hits a major milestone for the clean-energy transi...

 https://www.fastcompany.com/91154708/lithium-batteries-evs-direct-e...

BY Reuters  07-11-2024

At a site in rural Utah controlled by privately-held US Magnesium, IBAT started producing this week commercial volumes of lithium at a rate of nearly 5,000 metric tons per year using its version of a direct lithium extraction (DLE) technology.

A portable and fully automated direct lithium extraction plant owned by International Battery Metals is seen in Lake Charles, Louisiana, U.S., May 23, 2023. [Photo: Ernest Scheyder/File Photo]

In a milestone for the global clean-energy transition, International Battery Metals has become the first company to commercially produce lithium with a novel type of filtration technology, a step expected to usher in cheaper and faster supplies of the electric-vehicle battery metal.

At a site in rural Utah controlled by privately-held US Magnesium, IBAT started producing this week commercial volumes of lithium at a rate of nearly 5,000 metric tons per year using its version of a direct lithium extraction (DLE) technology.

The breakthrough has not been previously reported.

The company, which developed its DLE plant to be portable, has essentially beaten Standard Lithium, SLB, Rio Tinto, Eramet and others to be first to that mark. Industry investors, analysts and customers have waited years for commercial level output.

With DLE now proven on a commercial scale, it is expected to grow within a decade into an industry with $10 billion in annual revenue by transforming the speed and efficiency of lithium production for EV manufacturers and others, analysts said, much the way that fracking and horizontal drilling helped boost U.S. oil production.

IBAT’s method is based in part on technology developed by IBAT’s chairman, John Burba, at Dow Chemical in the 1980s. “This is all about boosting the global supply of lithium,” said Burba. “We feel like we’ve hit at a critical time for this industry.”

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that salty brine deposits across Europe, Asia, North America and elsewhere are filled with roughly 70% of the world’s reserves of the ultralight metal.

Lithium has historically been produced with evaporation ponds, which are used to extract the metal from those brines, or open-pit mines, which are used to remove it from hard rock deposits. The intensive water use and physical footprint of those methods, as well as their long development and production times, sparked the hunt for a third option.

While DLE technologies vary, they are comparable to common household water softeners and aim to extract about 90% or more of the lithium from brines, compared to about 50% using ponds.

Arcadium Lithium and some others use DLE processes in tandem with ponds, but no DLE technology had previously reached commercial production without them, sparking competition to expand output to the many parts of the world where occasional rainfall makes evaporation ponds impractical.

Many brine deposits have varied chemical compositions, meaning it is unlikely that any single DLE technology – including IBAT’s – will emerge as a global standard, analysts have said. Many Chinese deposits have high concentrations of magnesium, for example, and Bolivian deposits – among the largest in the world – have high potassium levels.

Lithium has repeatedly proven difficult to separate from those and other metals often co-mingled with it in brines. That has confounded many scientists working on DLE technologies for years. Lithium is also technically a salt, and can prove corrosive.

The breakthrough for IBAT coincides with a more than 80% drop in lithium prices in the past year, fuelling layoffs at industry leader Albemarle, DLE upstart Lake Resources and others. Still, IBAT plans to build more of its plants and market them for use across the globe.

Strategy

IBAT said the company succeeded with hitting commercial-scale production partly due to its relatively small plants.

While rivals have tried for more than a decade to commercialize DLE, their plans involved production volumes of 20,000 tons per year or more at permanent facilities often in remote regions where labor and supplies are difficult to procure.

Houston-based IBAT designed and built a 450-foot-long (137 meter) portable plant in Louisiana that it moved in 13 parts to the US Magnesium site, which draws brine from the Great Salt Lake.

Additional plants can be added and stacked like Lego bricks to boost production in 5,000-ton-per-year increments. It takes 18 months to build an IBAT plant and reach production, the company said.

Each plant, which is smaller than three acres (1.2 hectares), is designed to move in the future to a new deposit for reuse, saving construction costs. IBAT’s plant costs $50 million to $60 million each, depending on several factors.

Paris-based Eramet spent nearly $900 million on its own DLE project that aims to come online this year in Argentina after more than a decade of development.

Ron Thayer, president of US Magnesium, said he chose IBAT’s process because of its portability as well as the type of adsorption material that IBAT’s process uses to filter lithium from brine, which Burba developed.

US Magnesium, which has started selling lithium produced with IBAT’s technology and paying IBAT a royalty, considered several rival processes including one from Breakthrough Energy Ventures-backed Lilac Solutions before settling on IBAT, he added.

“I consider (IBAT) a commercial lithium producer,” Thayer said

Exxon Mobil, which is developing a lithium project in Arkansas, has considered using IBAT’s technology, Reuters has reported.

IBAT’s facility aims to recycle more than 98% of the water it uses. Burba has repeatedly flagged the lithium industry’s high water use as a structural impediment to DLE commercialization.

That recyclability is key especially in Utah, where officials last year tightened regulations on water extraction from the Great Salt Lake that forced Compass Minerals to abandon its lithium plans.

—Ernest Scheyder, Reuters

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Permalink Reply by Skip Peel - Mineral Consultant on July 17, 2024 at 6:36

Big Oil is Quietly Investing in the Lithium Revolution

By Haley Zaremba - Jul 11, 2024, 4:00 PM CDT

• Big Oil companies are investing heavily in lithium production in response to soaring demand for the mineral in clean energy technologies.
• China currently dominates the global lithium market, but the West is looking to break its monopoly.
• The U.S. government is supporting domestic lithium production to reduce reliance on China and secure its clean energy future.

Big Oil is quietly investing in the renewable revolution – not through solar and wind power, but through lithium. The ‘white gold’ is an essential ingredient in a laundry list of clean energy technology components, most notably the lithium-ion batteries used in electrical vehicles and for short-term energy storage – an essential stop-gap for variable renewable energy production. 

Just last month, ExxonMobil inked a preliminary deal to provide lithium to South Korean electric vehicle battery manufacturer sk On. Just months before that, the firm began drilling for lithium extraction in Arkansas. And according to Exxon insiders, this is just the beginning. ExxonMobil’s Dan Holton recently told the Economist that a “material” part of the $20 billion that the oil supermajor has earmarked for low-carbon investments between 2022 and 2027 will go directly to the lithium sector. “By 2030 the company hopes to produce enough lithium to supply 1m electric vehicles a year,” the Economist reports.

Though lithium prices have stumbled lately, this dip hasn’t seemed to spook investors, as lithium is expected to generate high rates of return for its investors as clean energy manufacturing giants around the world scramble to shore up supply chains while the green energy transition heats up. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates that lithium demand for battery-making alone is expected to increase by a factor of ten over the decade between 2020 and 2030. A 2023 report from Popular Mechanics calculated that “an electrified economy in 2030 will likely need anywhere from 250,000 to 450,000 tonnes of lithium.” To put that sum in perspective, “In 2021, the world produced only 105—not 105,000—tonnes.” 

Politics aside – money talks. And whether or not Big Oil is ready to give up the ghost of fossil fuels, they are ready to jump into the deep end of lithium production. "What we're seeing right now in lithium is the sentiment is bearish," Exxon's Lithium Global Business Manager, Patrick Howarth, told Bloomberg in an interview on the sidelines of the Fastmarkets Lithium Supply and Battery Raw Materials Conference in Las Vegas. "We know the world urgently needs significantly more lithium than it's producing today."  

As such, companies are looking to get into lithium from a number of angles, including opening up new mines, extracting the valuable element from the oil and gas industry’s wastewater, and squeezing more revenue out of lands already owned by these firms where oil and gas have long since run dry. 

Putting the formidable weight of Big Oil behind lithium production in the West could have major implications for global clean energy markets. Currently, the market is all-but monopolized by China. Beijing alone controlled nearly ten percent of global lithium reserves and a whopping 72% of lithium refining capacity as of 2022. And Xi Jinping’s government is hard at work inking more and more lithium supply deals in emerging countries around the world, and in South America’s so-called ‘lithium triangle’ in particular. 

The United States has been trying to break into the South American lithium market for years now, but has hit significant hurdles posed by China’s already considerable presence and mistrust of dealmaking with the United States. The United States government has also put considerable funds into ramping up domestic lithium production, notably in Utah. Indeed, the Biden administration has offered more than $407 million for domestic exploration and production of lithium through the Inflation Reduction Act. But there is still only one functioning lithium mine in the country, and other prospective projects are still fledgling and woefully inadequate to stand up to China any time soon.

But if oil supermajors, with all of their bargaining power, deep pockets, and long arms of corporate influence, get increasingly involved in lithium production in the United States, this could provide the West with a much more even playing field in the clean energy competition with China. 

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

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