One of the World’s Biggest Clean-tech Hubs in … Arkansas?!

One nascent clean-tech hub is ballooning in an unexpected corner of the United States. And ironically, the decidedly 20th century brown industries that used to flourish there are providing lift again to the area’s phoenix-like rise – fossil-fuel extraction and paper milling.

The place? Southwestern Arkansas. The natural resources now fueling clean-tech industries? Subterranean salt water in the Smackover formation with some of the highest concentrations of lithium (Li) in the United States, and forest and agricultural (“ag”) waste that’s being dried, bundled, bricked and buried to sequester carbon.

What’s happening in Arkansas is also magnetizing household-name investors and companies to grow these technologies and resources – Bill Gates, ExxonMobil and the Koch Brothers.

These stories caught my eye because I have some Arkansas skin in the game. My maternal grandfather, Raiford Harold Burton (“Burt”), was born in Magnolia, Ark., and our family owns a tiny farm there. Burt was in the oil-and-gas business as a petroleum geophysicist for Amerada Petroleum Corp., and then his own small exploration company in the Permian Basin of West Texas. In his fossil-fuel quest, he had mule teams haul geophysical equipment across West Texas sand dunes, and he used dynamite to blast geologic formations so he could read their sound signatures. The Petroleum Museum inducted him into its hall of fame in 1969 – a West Texas oil-and-gas hero in the 20th century born in what could become a 21st century clean-tech mecca.

Trees to Bricks

Through Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bill Gates invests in a company called Graphyte based in Pine Bluff, and Graphyte relies on nature to do the heavy lifting in sequestering carbon through photosynthesis. Plants and trees absorb carbon from the atmosphere. The company collects the material from paper mills, dries it out, mashes it into bricks, covers it with an impermeable membrane to keep water out and buries the bricks in underground chambers. All this to keep the plant material from decomposing and releasing carbon back into the atmosphere. Graphyte says that their bricks hold onto almost all the carbon for over 1,000 years. At that point, it’s someone else’s problem.

Their carbon-casting process stacks up financially to other carbon-sequestering tech like Occidental Petroleum’s (Oxy) $1.1 billion direct air-capture plant near Notrees, Texas. (Yes, ‘a real place.) Oxy hopes that its plant will hoover up 500,000 tons of carbon per year, and the company charges clients $500 per ton to buy that removal. Graphyte’s Loblolly plant (named after the loblolly pine tree) in Pine Bluff, Ark., cost $10 million to build, and the company charges $100 per ton for carbon removal. And the company also says it takes one-tenth of the energy needed to run its carbon casting compared to other carbon-removal technologies.

Graphyte inked its first customer, American Airlines, in 2023 to remove 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide for the airline. One stat shows that American emitted 48.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2022 (during the pandemic so this number is no doubt small). While this is a neon deal for Graphyte, it’s a nice start for American.

Lithium to Batteries

This somnolent, little corner of Arkansas is re-awakening because of the Smackover formation, a major subterranean geologic formation of brine (salt water) with a heavy concentration of lithium. Southwestern Arkansas was also once a bustling place for oil-and-gas (“O&G”) production, and activity petered out in the 1980s oil bust.

O&G majors, especially Exxon Mobil (“Exxon”) are reactivating the area’s O&G infrastructure in their current quest for lithium, a key element in battery technology (like electric vehicles (EVs) and utility-scale storage). Exxon is planning to build the world’s largest lithium plant near Magnolia, Ark., with the intent to produce 75,000 to 100,000 metric tons per year, or approximately 15 percent of the world’s processed supply (2022). In 2023, Exxon bought up 120,000 gross acres for $100 million, and the area could yield enough lithium to outfit 50 million EVs.

Backed by the Koch brothers, Standard Lithium is also on the hunt in southwestern Arkansas, and CEO Robert Mintak says that the Smackover could be to lithium what the Permian Basin has been to oil. Standard Lithium plans on building a lithium plant west of Magnolia where lithium concentrations are twice as high as those farther east.

Experts estimate the planet has 100 million tons of lithium, but a lot of it is hard and expensive to get, needing to be blasted out of rock and heated to 2,000°F or evaporated from already water-stressed places like the high Andes. China has already produced 70 percent of the world’s lithium batteries, but that could change. The Smackover allows for direct lithium extraction (DLE) where the element is separated from briny water without evaporation. Not only is Smackover DLE a cheaper process than other lithium processing, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provides an up-to 10 percent tax credit for producing it domestically.

In this century, lithium refining and carbon sequestration are proving to be what O&G was in the last century – critical platforms for power generation and economic growth. If my grandfather were alive, I think he’d love that he had a place in both.

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