More northwest Louisiana Smackover wells needed to test for lithium, researcher says

BY LIZ SWAINE | Staff writer Feb. 20, 2026 shreveportbossieradvocate.com/business

In May 2025, Ipsita Gupta, a Ph.D. and associate professor at the LSU Craft & Hawkins Department of Petroleum Engineering, was awarded a $261,000 grant from the Idaho National Laboratory/Battelle Energy Alliance, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Geothermal Technologies Office.

Gupta's goal is to determine concentrations of lithium in produced waters from oil and gas fields in Louisiana's Smackover geologic formation that includes much of north and northwest Louisiana.  

Operators who participate in the study will also find out what other of a total of 22 different elements and ions are in their brine water.

"It'll be chlorine, bromine, lithium, magnesium, calcium bicarbonate, the total dissolved salts, so to speak, that you find in formation waters, subsurface formation waters, or produce waters from oil and gas fields, brines," Gupta told The Shreveport-Bossier City Advocate in 2025.

During the summer and into fall of 2025, Dr. Gupta and her student volunteers fanned out to collect samples and, in the fall, conducted geochemical analysis.

"When we analyze the samples, we analyze in triplicate," Gupta said. By the time the grant period ends, she hopes to have collected and tested samples from 30 wells.

She needs more locations in Caddo, Bossier and the rest of northwest Louisiana. Gupta urges anyone willing to allow her team to gather produced water samples from their Smackover Formation wells in Louisiana to contact her directly.

"Ideally," she said, "we would like to have samples all the way from Caddo to Richland. Even if we expect not to find lithium, it is important to know where we are finding lithium to be able to predict under what kind of geologic conditions lithium can occur."

Initial samples from Claiborne Parish show concentrations in milligrams per liter ranging from 37 to 95. These test sites are just miles away from Arkansas lithium finds in the 400 mg/L and higher found in Lafayette, Union and Columbia counties.

Standard Lithium has said that its joint venture with Equinor on 30,000 acres of brine lease near the junction of Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas has found an average of 442 mg/L.

Gupta said the lower numbers her testing is showing are not surprising considering the area's "tricky" carbonate formation. But she is still intrigued by the much higher concentrations just over the Arkansas state line and wants to understand why the variation is occurring.

March is her testing deadline

Gupta wants to see if she and her students can find higher concentrations of lithium, but she said they have only through March to do it. If they spend much longer in the field, they will run out of time to conduct the brine analysis.

She said the free testing will give a producer a complete analysis of their formation water.

Whether producers believe they have lithium or not, Gupta said the testing will help scientists and engineers understand more about the Smackover.

"And that is very important because it helps us predict elsewhere in the Smackover or other similar carbonate formations anywhere else where lithium can be found. So even if we don't find it, it's scientifically important and even from an economic perspective, it can be important."

Email Liz Swaine at Liz.Swaine@theadvocate.com.