On the cusp of an electric vehicle revolution that could expand the market for lithium fivefold over the next 10 years, CEO Robert Mintak of Standard Lithium Ltd. is right where he wants to be.
That is, figuratively. He’s just not where he wants to be physically.
Mintak has been locked down for a year in Vancouver, where his lithium extraction startup is headquartered.
Where he’d like to be, and soon, is back in El Dorado, where his company’s test plant has been extracting lithium chloride from south Arkansas’ underground salt waters for more than a year.
Standard had planned to send Mintak and his team south to El Dorado last year along with components for another test plant to convert the lithium chloride into lithium carbonate, a key ingredient in battery-making. The COVID-19 pandemic made shipping the test plant modules to Arkansas impractical since the team of experts faced a closed Canadian border. The site in El Dorado is ready, Mintak told Arkansas Business this month in an interview from Vancouver.
“We’re ready for the eventual shipping down of our other pilot plant, which uses selective ion filtration technology, which we’ve been running for months up here,” Mintak said. “It was supposed to be shipped to Arkansas last year. But COVID slowed us down. Hopefully by the end of this quarter we’ll be able to share when that will be sent down. We’re very active on the site and we’ve been building out our team.
“So we’re all looking forward to being back in Arkansas; it’s long overdue,” Mintak added. “But I think I’m comfortable saying I’ll be able to get to Arkansas by the end of the summer, hopefully sooner, and the rest of our team as well.”
Standard Lithium’s test plants are coming together as competition in the lithium space gets fierce, and gets more attention. A recent feature in The New York Times looked at the race for environmentally sensitive ways to produce lithium. And while Standard Lithium’s project commanded just a paragraph in the long article, the company has a head start, piggybacking on the brine infrastructure Lanxess has used for decades to mine bromine from the Smackover Formation’s underground brine. It is the only company already producing lithium battery products, even in test batches, from geothermal brines.
Standard’s proprietary technology draws the lithium directly from brines piped in from old south Arkansas oil wells through Lanxess’ network, skipping the long and environmentally taxing process of letting lithium-rich brine dry for months in evaporation pools. “I wouldn’t say there’s more competition; it’s that the broader media are paying attention,” Mintak said. “I’ve been in this space for a decade and I’ve gone through a couple of boom-and-bust cycles.”
He said environmental concerns were at the heart of the Times article, and pioneering a greener way to make batteries was always key to Standard’s project. “We have been working under the radar even though I’ve been banging the drum, and I would argue we have the most advanced project in the United States.
“Arkansas has a unique, extremely exciting opportunity,” Mintak added. “And the little paragraph that we got included in that article did drive a lot of phone calls. I think if someone digs, they’ll see that we should have been the highlight of the article, an example of how project innovation can be applied to build a sustainable project in an area where this type of industry is embraced.”
Mintak praises Gov. Asa Hutchinson, the state’s economic development team and local allies for embracing the idea of a new lithium industry in south Arkansas. Others are catching on, too.
Albemarle, which has bromine production facilities in south Arkansas, is already the world’s largest lithium producer and is looking at direct lithium extraction from its bromine brine flows in Magnolia. Ten years ago, Albemarle announced it planned to test direct extraction, but the project never took off.
In a June 1 commentary in Mining Magazine, Alex Grant of Jade Cove Partners wrote that Albemarle should pursue south Arkansas lithium projects, citing the rich brine, the industrial workforce and the area’s plentitude of water.
By the time these projects mature, the market could be ripe.
Grant’s reasoning was much the same as Mintak’s. “The regulatory environment is well established, and the site offers access to all other elements needed in building a project,” Mintak said.
“You’ve defined a resource in a geography where the elements to build it exist. But you also have the other key aspects, a trained workforce, raw inputs, the chemicals required, all produced within the region, some of them in the same ZIP code.”