Posted on 10/22/2024 6:26:16 AM PDT by Red Badger
Researchers said in a recent article that Arkansas may have 19 million tons of lithium, which is used in rechargeable batteries for important products like phones and electric cars.
The researchers said in their article released last month in the journal Science Advances they had “calculated that there are 5.1 to 19 million tons of lithium in Smackover Formation brines in southern Arkansas,” making up “35 to 136% of the current US lithium resource estimate.”
According to a Monday release from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), “the Smackover Formation is a relic of an ancient sea that left an extensive, porous, and permeable limestone geologic unit that extends under parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida.”
Lithium, which has been labeled by the USGS as a critical mineral, has been often obtained from brines or salt flats they evaporate into. According to a projection from the International Energy Agency, demand for lithium could increase by more than 40 times by 2040.
According to the article, the researchers utilized a machine-learning model trained on “published and newly collected brine lithium concentration data,” making “a map of predicted lithium concentrations in Smackover Formation brines across southern Arkansas.”
The article’s findings come from the work of both the USGS and the Arkansas Department of Energy and Environment’s Office of the State Geologist, according to the USGS release.
“Lithium is a critical mineral for the energy transition, and the potential for increased U.S. production to replace imports has implications for employment, manufacturing and supply-chain resilience. This study illustrates the value of science in addressing economically important issues,” USGS Director David Applegate said in the release.
> IMHO, most of them are scared to be the one to break the narrative. <
That is a very important point. And I think it explains most of the woke lunacy we see around us today.
Here’s an example. My suspicion: One lunatic at a Budweiser meeting proposes putting a transsexual on their beer cans. Everyone else knows that’s a bad idea, but they are afraid to speak up.
So a transsexual is put on Bud Light beer cans, and sales collapse.
Since I’m in a typing mood:
My response to climate change alarmists is this: You are only hearing one side of the story. No one is allowed to present an argument against man-made climate change. What does mean when one side of an argument is silenced? It means we’re not talking science. We’re talking politics.
And if they ask for a counter-argument, I just mention how flawed climate change measurements are. For example, such measurements never contain a +/- estimate like we see in polling results.
Any measurement without a +/- estimate is worthless.
“... 5.1 to 19 million tons of lithium...”
Okay, but how much dirt is gonna have to be moved to get this much lithium?
Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal ‘til the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man
John Prine, “Paradise”
Then in the 90's Al Gore as VP told climatologists that if they wanted the research money, they had to produce the "right" result. The first version of that kept the prior warming and cooling periods in place, but made the Modern Warm Period look like it was increasing at a steeper pitch. Nobody believed it, so after a few years the "research" had to change to make the prior warming and cooling periods disappear (thus the hockey stick).
...
I owe my soul to the gumt store.
There are lithium deposits all over the US. But, every time there is an attempt to harvest and drive down the cost of CCP imports, the politicos stop any further effort. Politicos’ relatives are heavily invested in CCP efforts, and such cannot withstand competition.
Lithium is solution mined in a lot of formations. Carbonates are porous it’s what caves are made from. You pump down fresher water and get back saltier brine. No need for pure fresh water just less salty than the formation fluids.
You use ion exchange resins to absorb lithium onto the beads then you swap lithium for another cation such as sodium or magnesium and send back down the sodium enriched brine for disposal. The lithium is then recovered from the beads via acid leaching then precipitated with a base. This is classic solution mining used for all sorts of metals. Uranium is the big one, buy magnesium, lithium and some of the REE are also solution mined. You don’t move dirt your drill well bores.
No worry, the EPA will never allow it out of the ground, especially after the checks from China clear in Congress.
Deep State is exporting record amounts of our energy.
If it stays in power it will export our lithium, too.
Sometime in the future, one will trend downward and not be reversed, only the decline periodically slowing until the temperature reaches its normal equilibrium, i.e., another Ice Age.
Exactly...
It’ll either turn out to be situated on Indigene burial grounds/holy sites or they’ll never get EPA clearance because snail darter/clean water/CARB certified as causing cancer/some other nonsense...
1) We're in the upside of the more frequent cycle that happens every thousand or so years:
2) While we're in the downside of a cycle that happens every 100,000 or so years:
3) We're in the upside of the largest cycle that happens every 100 million years or so:
Yes... I know.
None of which has anything to do with the price of lithium in Arkansas...
“normal equilibrium, i.e., another Ice Age”
That’s want most people do not understand. We are fortunate to be living in an Interglacial Optimum, but this is not the normal climate. Where I’m sitting right now was under a MILE of ice only 400 human generations ago.
Environmentalist whackos will stop any attemps to access this resource. Ditto for the critical rare earth and helium deposits recently found in Minnesota.
What Lithium batteries do not burn and why are they not used?
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