Albemarle Corporation building lithium pilot plants in Columbia County

Mike McNeill, publisher and editor  Aug 3, 2023

Pilot plants for the potential production of lithium are being built in Columbia County by Albemarle Corporation.

Kent Masters, chairman, president and CEO of Albemarle, addressed Thursday recent press reports about a potential lithium boom during the company’s second quarter “earnings call” with members of the financial industry.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that energy giant ExxonMobil paid Galvanic Energy $100 million for its mineral leases of brine in Columbia and Lafayette counties. Lithium, a light metal element, can be extracted from the brine for use in batteries. The element is highly sought by the automotive industry for the production of electric vehicles.

Tetra Technologies has announced plans to build a $500 million bromine production facility along the Columbia-Lafayette line by the end of 2026. It acknowledges that it may also produce lithium from the same brine used to make bromine, but has no immediate plans to do that.

Last year, Albemarle laid out plans for a five-year, $540 million expansion of its two bromine plants in Columbia County. About 250 contractors will be involved and the company will add about 100 new employees to its current workforce of about 500.

Dru Manuel, Albemarle Corporation’s vice president for Bromine Manufacturing, said last November that the bromine expansion construction would include the basic infrastructure allowing for follow-on construction of lithium plants at Magnolia South, Magnolia West, or both.

“There’s going to be some capped off pipes and (concrete) foundations. There will be some space designated for some future development of lithium,” Manuel said last year.

But according to Albemarle’s CEO, lithium production in Columbia County may come sooner than later.

This morning, Deutsche Bank analyst David Begleiter asked Masters for his current thoughts on producing lithium in Columbia County.

“We have plans to exploit that. So we have access to the lithium in the Smackover (formation) and Magnolia. So basically, everything we pump for bromine today, we would kind of -- an easy answer is that we process that for lithium.

“It requires different technology, DLE (direct lithium extraction) based, absorption-based which we have been working on. We have proprietary technology around that. We're doing -- we're building pilot plants at the moment, and we'll be able -- and we plan to execute projects around that, but we want to run pilot plant.

“It is a new technology, and we're going to make sure that we do it right, but we have access to the brines. We’ve got the infrastructure at Magnolia. We’re well-positioned to take advantage of that,” he said.

Absorption, in a basic chemical engineering sense, is the process of turning a liquid into a solid. The solid residue produced from the absorption of brine can be further refined into lithium.

Albemarle mines lithium around the world. This includes extracting lithium from hard rock mines in western Australia, to evaporating brine on the salt flats of Chile’s Atacama Desert and refining the residue into lithium.

The excitement over lithium production from South Arkansas brine is that the process takes a matter of hours, after which the source brine is injected back into the Smackover formation. The formation has been a source of wealth for South Arkansas for almost 100 years through oil and gas production. For half that time, saltwater also produced in the process was considered an annoying by-product until Albemarle and its predecessors began bromine production in the 1960s.

Hard rock refining in Australia requires open pit mining for lithium-bearing spodumene. The mineral is crushed, baked and finally treated with acid to free the lithium. In Chile, saltwater is pumped from underground reservoirs into vast, shallow pits in the desert and allowed to evaporate. The residue is refined into lithium. Both of these processes take months.

About 10 years ago, Albemarle developed a method to extract lithium from the same brine that Albemarle uses to produce bromine in Columbia County. The company did not move forward with lithium production at that time.

Since then, the demand for lithium has soared and many companies are racing to improve refining technology and possibly deploy production facilities across their mineral leases in Union, Columbia and Lafayette counties.

Standard Lithium of Vancouver, British Columbia has advanced beyond a pilot plant at a Lanxess bromine plant near El Dorado. It is now building a small-scale plant there for the commercial production of lithium. In November 2021, Koch Investment Group announced a $100 million investment in Standard Lithium to help it accelerate lithium production in the region.