Second Arkansas Lithium Innovation Summit announced for October

The second Arkansas Lithium Innovation Summit will be held in Little Rock at the Statehouse Convention Center. The event is organized by the Arkansas Lithium Innovation Hub, which aims to provide assessment and analysis of lithium development in the state.

Registration and other details are forthcoming. The first Arkansas Lithium Summit was held in February 2024, and apparently drew around 700 attendees, including energy sector executives, policymakers, and other stakeholders.

Since then, enthusiasm about the industry’s future in the state has only grown, with a handful of new and old companies racing to develop the resource. The U.S. Geological Survey announced last fall that there may be enough lithium-rich brine beneath south Arkansas to meet global demand in 2030 several times over. But companies seeking to develop those resources have clashed with landowners about establishing royalty rates.

On April 24, Standard Lithium —one of the multinational companies aiming to extract lithium rich brine from the Smackover Formation in south Arkansas — announced that the state Oil and Gas Commission had approved a proposed 20,000-acre brine production unit, the first step in moving toward commercial extraction of the mineral. A subsidiary of energy giant ExxonMobil, called Saltwerx, also persuaded the Oil and Gas Commission to let them develop a 56,000- acre lithium brine production unit.

Both companies seek to use a technique called “direct lithium extraction” to remove lithium from the brine and produce lithium carbonate to sell to markets. Lithium is used in the production of batteries used in electric vehicles, phones, solar panel systems and other technologies.