The element lithium is emerging as a strategic commodity because of its role as a battery material in electric vehicles and renewable energy. China, with over 9 million tons of reserves, has been a major supplier.
With tensions rising between China and U.S.-allied nations, the U.S. has been looking for other lithium sources, which can be either ores or brine. Pure lithium doesn’t exist in nature because of its chemically reactive nature, so it isn’t found in ore form like, say, iron or gold, although it has been extracted from rock.
Nowadays, though, brines are the major source of commercially viable lithium deposits. Chile, with lithium reserves of 9 million tons, uses brine extraction extensively.
In October 2024, federal and state researchers published a study that concluded Arkansas’s geologic Smackover Formation could hold 5 to 19 million tons of lithium, potentially the world’s largest known reserves, and more than enough to satisfy world demand. Read story here.
Lithium independence, especially from China, reduces that country’s leverage on issues like Taiwan and control of the South China Sea. It also removes an obstacle to development of green energy technologies that rely on battery storage; and, of course, it keeps extraction and production jobs in the U.S., although not without environmental impacts (details here), but that’s true of any resource extraction activity.
Lithium is a fairly rare element that’s found in low concentrations, and there aren’t many commercially feasible sites. China, Australia, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina and most of them. It turns out the U.S. has its own sources, and that’s both an economic and strategic bonanza.