EL DORADO, Ark. — Oil powered the last century, with some of it pulled from the ground in Arkansas, but in today's cleaner and greener times, batteries are going to power our lives.
There is a global push to find the chemicals that go into those batteries, mainly lithium. The mineral for the most part is mined from distant parts of the world and refined into devices in China.
That creates a future threat to energy independence, similar to what the U.S. faced for years with Middle Eastern oil.
Enter Standard Lithium, Ltd. and its plan to pump it from the ground right here in Arkansas.
"There's not a better place to build a lithium business than south Arkansas," said Robert Mintak, the CEO of the Canada-based company staking claims in El Dorado. "Arkansas sits on one of the world's largest lithium resources."
Civic leaders in this city named for mythical golden roads know boomtown days are long gone as the liquid gold beneath it dries up.
"With the oil industry being what it is and the chemical industry, we've done that for so many years, diversity is great," said Union County Judge Mike Loftin, who knows the diversity of industry is more like a necessity.
Standard Lithium knows necessity is the mother of invention. The company has invented a process that solves two problems: one local and one global.
To power all of the batteries in our future we're going to need millions of tons of lithium, but right now, we make less than 5,000 tons in the U.S.
Just like the discovery of oil 100 years ago, the solution to that shortfall might be a couple of miles below the ground in Arkansas. The trick is getting it out.
"The Smackover formation that sits underneath us, 6,000, 7,000 feet deep goes across a 1,000 mile strike range," said Mintak, referring to the porous layers of limestone that hold mineral-rich liquid brine.
The strike range stretches from north Texas in an arch across five states to the Florida Panhandle. The area is bigger than the west Texas oil patch known as the Permian Basin, which saw new life as fracking technology unlocked more petroleum.
A similar use of technology will be necessary here.
Right now, major producers in Australia or South America get lithium through mining, but open-pit digging isn't politically or environmentally feasible in America.
Good thing Mintak isn't a miner. His partner Dr. Andy Robinson has a Ph.D. in geoscience, and they're using chemistry and tapping into a petrochemical resource that has been in El Dorado for 60 years by partnering with a German company called Lanxess.
"We take the brine, the mineral-rich solution that we get after they take the bromine out," Mintak said, while touring through his company's 10,000 square foot facility in a back corner of the Lanxess plant that has wrung bromine from the Smackover range for 60 years.
"We've developed a process that selectively plucks the lithium ions from the brine," he said.
The ability to pluck ions sounds like rocket science, and something that often requires a demonstration showing it actually works. At this stage, that's what SLI is doing. So far, so good.
"We have in the final tank an extremely high purity lithium chloride solution all in less than 8 hours to get to this point," said Mintak pointing at a large white tank with green liquid churning inside.
It almost feels like you could hold a cell phone next to it and wish the ions into the device to charge it up.
While Mintak said we're only in the first inning when it comes to brining this kind of lithium production up to scale, it's the stuff of dreams for local leaders looking for a clean new chapter for this region.
"Anytime industry is coming, I think that's amazing not only for our city but definitely for our citizens," said El Dorado Mayor Veronica Smith Creer.
"I hope it goes great guns," said Judge Loftin. "I'm looking forward to it. I hope it goes well enough that maybe a battery manufacturer relocates closer to the source because we need the jobs here in Union County."
Battery makers are already eyeing places in Texas and Tennessee because the former has a big workforce and the latter has established car plants that will need to produce electric vehicles soon.
Mintak smiles when he points to where El Dorado sits geographically in relation to those two places, and with a few more innings under their belt, Loftin and Mintak's battery boomtown dream might not be too far-fetched.
"We can find a way to extract lithium from that brine in a sustainable 21st-century approach in a region where you can actually build a project," said Mintak.