SW Arkansas' Standard Lithium to make billion dollar decision on moving forward

BY LIZ SWAINE | Staff writer  April 24, 2026  The Shreveport-Bossier Advocate

Standard Lithium has reached a milestone after nine years as a player in southwest Arkansas lithium.

The company's lithium demonstration plant, part of an existing bromine production facility south of El Dorado, has processed 42 million gallons of water, achieving more than 95% lithium recovery.

The work there, they say, has validated the Direct Lithium Extraction technology they will use to produce lithium commercially. They are also proud of six years of operations at the plant- 340,000 worker hours- with no safety incidents.

An expensive decision is coming

The company is working toward a Final Investment Decision on commercial operations at its South West Arkansas (SWA) plant to be built in Lafayette County.  The decision will be made this year.

Andy Robinson, Standard Lithium’s President, Director and Chief Operating Officer, told The Shreveport Bossier City Advocate the decision is a “heavy lift.”

“So there's over a billion dollars of project finance that will be placed on the project, which is a fancy way of saying debt, and then we pay it back during the first several years of operation.”

Robinson said that their two principal contractors had already been chosen, one for the central process facility — or “refinery.” The other will handle the well field, which is all the production wells, the pipeline system and the disposal wells.

Off-take agreements with those customers buying the lithium will need to be in place as will other agreements for plant construction, which will take roughly three years to build and commission. If all goes according to schedule, SLI expects to be in commercial production by 2029. Projected initial production capacity is 22,500 metric tons per year. 

“Our team right now — everyone's just working flat out towards that at the moment. It's a full-court press to get to that point,” Robinson said.

SLI staff are already talking about planning community events to introduce their contractors and talk about the “nitty-gritty mechanics” of the construction project and the jobs it will bring — 100 for operations and 300-500 for construction.

How to make a profit

Robinson said the break-even number on lithium varies depending on the region, developer and project, but “you need lithium prices to be broadly in the kind of the high teens (thousands) to sort of low 20s range (per metric ton) which starts to incent, I think, a lot of projects to think seriously about moving towards realistic project development.”

In April, spot pricing was reported as high as $28,000 per metric ton for battery-quality lithium carbonate.

Lithium for the long term?

“The rationale for us making a positive Final Investment Decision is that we have a counterparty on the other side who's prepared to sign up and make a commercial commitment to buy our product for multiyear commercial binding contracts. Those companies don't do so because they think lithium is going to be somehow magically supplanted,” explained Robinson.

“Lithium is number three in the periodic table. You've got hydrogen, helium, and then you've got lithium. Lithium is the lightest element that loves to swap electrons backward and forward to make batteries and anything else that you ever use instead will be inferior— just chemistry, physics and the periodic table, you can't get away from that. No one is inventing new elements.”

Lots of land, but not all is lithium-rich

Robinson said SLI's land acquisition was based on their knowledge of where lithium is the most plentiful. 

“We were looking for porosity, permeability and grade,” said Robinson. “And that's kind of the holy triptych for lithium brine production. We were very fortunate that back in 2017 we were able to piggyback off of the existing bromine relationship with Lanxess. That was good luck.”

“There are lots of areas we purposefully did not go. And some other developers are now claiming that those are prospective areas for them, fair enough. But we very purposefully did not choose to go there.”

The company began studying the Smackover formation in Arkansas in 2017 and in Texas in 2020, giving them, critical minerals geologist and SLI government relations specialist Jesse Edmondson said, a “first mover advantage, which has really been key for us, because we've always let the geology drive the process of figuring out where we kind of put our stakes in the ground.”

SLI followed the Smackover all the way to the Florida Panhandle, adding to their knowledge about the geologic formation.

Learning through mistakes

Robinson said the company now knows the right way to do things because they learned from mistakes. One is that brine must be tested immediately and the lithium removed. “Real brine pumped in real time” he said.

“This is learned the hard way, when we spent a lot of time in 2018, 2019 doing all this work at the classic pilot scale.”

“We built the plant at one of the Lanxess facilities. We were like, we're just gonna prove what we already know, like we've got this figured out, right? We plugged it in, turned it on. We spent, at the time, millions of dollars that we barely had, and built that demonstration facility, turned it on with real brine, and in the space of 20 minutes, we completely f***ed the whole plan.”

“We've been refining now for six years, and like I say, a million barrels later, we've got it figured out, but that's what it takes.”

Let the investor beware

 In 2024, SLI partnered in southwest Arkansas and east Texas with the Norwegian national company Equinor, a company Robinson said is conservative and not prone to “lofty claims.”

This, he said, does not apply to some startups and others that are aggressively advertising for investors.

“I think that same measure of conservatism and realism does not apply to many fellow developers in the region. Let's just say I don't think they really plan to actually build anything, whereas we're actually going to build several plants in the region with a global energy major as a partner and a determination to do so.”

The flip from a “bearish” sentiment on lithium pricing to something more bullish has Robinson seeing “the development community start to reawaken their marketing efforts accordingly. You see developers come and go all the time. It doesn’t matter whether it’s oil, copper, gas, uranium, cannabis, you see the same cycle always.”

To those just starting out, he warns, “You just, you don't know what you don't know. And that's the reality.”