Midlanders’ faith in a significant lithium prospect in southern Arkansas appears to be justified.
Galvanic Energy announced this week certified third-party analyses of brine drawn from test wells in the Smackover formation validated the prospect as one of the largest lithium brine resources in North America. It contains enough lithium to produce enough batteries for 50 million electric vehicles. That’s not to mention batteries for portable electronics and power storage systems.
“This has been a milestone we’ve been working on since last year,” Brent Wilson, Galvanic’s president and chief executive officer, told the Reporter-Telegram by telephone.
Wilson had relied on connections he had made in the Permian Basin during his time at Chesapeake Energy to gain backing for his start-up company. In fact, he has so much local support he held a shareholders meeting in Midland last fall and plans another meeting next month.
“(Permian Basin) investors understand the things we do are similar; the only thing we plug in is chemical extraction,” he said.
The company performed tests in the Permian Basin but found it had the wrong geology to develop lithium. Instead, he turned to a 120,000-acre prospect in the Smackover play that contains enriched concentrations of lithium dissolved in brine. The analyses performed on behalf of Galvanic found the prospect yielded lithium concentrations ranging from 290 to 520 milligrams of lithium, some of the highest reported values in North American brines. A separate evaluation estimates the prospect has an inferred resource estimate of 4 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent.
That compares to the US Geological Survey’s current estimate that the US lithium reserve is 750,000 tons and a total inferred resource of 9.1 million tons, including oilfield brines such as the Smackover.
Wilson noted that the Smackover has its roots in the oil and gas industry, serving as the world’s largest producing field in the 1910s and 1920s.
Not only is he pleased with the results of the analyses, but Wilson said he’s pleased to be able to “get back to work” after the COVID pandemic.
Coming out of the pandemic complicated the certification process, he added.
“It requires deep test wells and like in the Permian Basin it was difficult to find rigs, crews, pipe. All the same supply chain issues, but we overcame,” he said.
Not only is the company working to develop its acreage but is evaluating low environmental footprint ion technology to extract lithium, something Wilson said Galvanic has been doing for the last six months and has gone well.
Then, he said, the company will move forward with a pilot plant that will give it the ability to see what the extraction process looks like, what the economics look like and fine-tune the technology. That should take a year or so, he said. But he and his team plan to use the know-how gained from their time in the oil and gas industry to move the process forward.
“Oil and gas producers know how to move at speed,” he said. “They can solve problems quickly.”
They also know how to do things right, he added.
“The public doesn’t appreciate that the oil and gas industry does its work not only within regulatory requirements but safely – their standards are high, compliance is high,” he said.
Developing the lithium potential in the Smackover would not only greatly reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign supplies, but its proximity to newly built or planned electric vehicle and battery manufacturing plants further reduces its environmental footprint, he said.
Strategically located in the south-central U.S. near newly built or planned EV and battery manufacturing plants, Galvanic Energy’s lithium prospect could greatly reduce America’s reliance on foreign supply chains. Additionally, the prospect can be developed using a low-environmental footprint ion extraction process.
“Given the regulatory and environmental challenges facing conventional mining operations, ESG responsibility is critical to moving American raw material resource production forward,” Wilson said.
