A lungful of hydrogen sulfide almost killed John Burba a couple of months into his first job within the West Texas oil patch. He’d grown up within the area, the place his dad labored for Gulf Oil as a drilling superintendent. The encounter with the poisonous fuel left him with complications for the higher a part of a yr. Afterward, despite the fact that he’d beforehand been an uninspired scholar, he concluded, “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to go to college after all.”
He headed to Waco, leaving Baylor College 9 years later with a doctorate in chemistry and a nascent household. His new spouse, Carol, who’d additionally studied chemistry at Baylor, was pregnant, so he dropped his plans for additional research and went to work for a world chemical firm. Dozens of patents adopted.
Almost 5 a long time later, the 73-year-old Burba has amassed the trimmings of a profitable life. He and Carol reside on 2 hundred acres in East Texas with a donkey, three horses, 5 cows, and a one-ton bull named Max. However Dr. Burba—everybody calls him physician, seemingly due to his professorial demeanor—isn’t able to decelerate. Certainly one of his innovations appears to be like poised to develop into as essential to the twenty-first century because the rotary drilling rig was to the 20th.
To know the burgeoning want his innovation is serving, simply peek inside Burba’s storage. He owns a Porsche Taycan powered by a lithium-ion battery, the identical variety that retains all electrical automobiles operating, to not point out iPhones and chainsaws and army drones and pacemakers and so forth. Demand for batteries is rising exponentially. By 2040 almost three quarters of latest passenger automobiles purchased globally are anticipated to depend on them. The income from the lithium-ion battery business is projected to quintuple by the start of the following decade, to greater than $400 billion a yr.
John Burba and his spouse, Carol, on their East Texas ranch.Courtesy of John Burba
That received’t be doable with out the mining of tons of of hundreds of tons of lithium. The Porsche’s battery alone comprises about twenty kilos of the smooth silvery metallic. The component is devilishly exhausting to get your fingers on as a result of it’s usually present in extraordinarily low concentrations, buried deep in briny underground reservoirs. Few locations on earth supply massive deposits of it.
One exception is Western Australia, the place hydraulic excavators gouge huge craters to get on the lithium-rich mineral spodumene. Elsewhere—significantly within the excessive desert the place Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile converge—salt water is pumped out of the earth and left to evaporate, in swimming pools that may be a half-mile lengthy and a 3rd of a mile broad, so huge that they’re seen from house. It’s a gradual and environmentally damaging course of that leaves behind a lithium-rich aqueous combination.
Burba developed a 3rd means, referred to as direct lithium extraction, in 1995. In DLE, brine is pumped by way of cylinders manufactured from a fiber-reinforced polymer and crammed with crystalline granules barely bigger than grains of sand. Lithium ions get caught, very similar to contaminants in an unusual water filter, however the granules launch the prized metallic when the cylinder is flushed with contemporary water. The method takes lower than an hour to extract lithium that might in any other case take months or years to mine or to pay attention by way of evaporation, and it doesn’t destroy massive stretches of land or pollute tens of millions of gallons of water.
Within the nineties, Burba designed and constructed the primary DLE plant, in a spot ominously referred to as Hombre Muerto, in Argentina. The plant stays in operation in the present day, though DLE didn’t instantly take off as a result of world lithium demand on the time was happy by current mines and evaporation ponds. However as the necessity for batteries has soared, so has curiosity in new lithium sources. Final yr the monetary big Goldman Sachs referred to as DLE “a potential game changing technology.”
Through the years, to check his invention, Burba has evaluated brine samples from fifty areas world wide. “Most are crap,” he says, enjoyable in denims and black alligator boots in a big home with vaulted ceilings exterior Atlanta, a small city a thirty-minute drive south of Texarkana. The brine containing probably the most lithium he’s present in North America, rivaling the perfect on this planet, lies beneath a one-hundred-mile swath of northeast Texas and southern Arkansas. It’s a largely rural space of hovering pines and muddy bayous. Burba’s dwelling, the place he and Carol moved in 2021 to be nearer her getting old dad and mom, sits smack in the midst of it.
The race is on to show this space—dwelling to a subterranean limestone formation generally known as the Smackover, as soon as a productive oil discipline—right into a globally important lithium producer.
A Lithium Mom LodeThe briny water discovered throughout the Smackover formation comprises comparatively excessive concentrations of lithium. Quantities of the metallic—measured in milligrams per liter—rise going westward from southern Arkansas into northeast Texas.Supply: Cameron Manche (Texas A&M College) and lithium firms
Fueled by a number of cups of espresso, an effusive Burba spoke almost uninterrupted for 3 straight hours after I visited him in mid-July. The day earlier than, the corporate he based, Houston-based Worldwide Battery Metals, had introduced the primary business DLE lithium mine in america, in Utah, was operational. It had overwhelmed a dozen firms—some, corresponding to ExxonMobil, fairly a bit bigger—to this milestone.
Burba’s profitable launch adopted years of battle to get a sustained DLE operation up and operating in North America. In 2012, after simply fifteen days of retirement, he obtained bored and joined an try and extract lithium from the scalding water that fed a geothermal energy plant in California. 4 years later he seemed into the prospect of constructing a big DLE facility within the Canadian province of Alberta, however the plan sputtered as a result of the prices concerned had been too excessive.
That setback led him to puzzle out a modular extraction system that might be transported on skids and assembled on the mining website. Daniel Layton, a longtime Houston power investor, backed him, and the primary such plant was in-built Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 2022.
By then, drillers had been searching for lithium within the Smackover. Galvanic Power, an Oklahoma Metropolis firm, acquired 120,000 acres of leases in Arkansas. Its CEO publicly anxious: Might the lithium “be brought to market without destroying the pristine landscape of this beautiful, forested land?” To reveal that it may get to the metallic with minimal disruption to the setting, Galvanic teamed with Burba in 2022. It was a chance to showcase his modular expertise.
“Obviously, the first time you run anything through it, you’re a little nervous,” Layton informed me. “I never doubted for one minute it was going to work. I just wasn’t one hundred percent sure how well it was going to work.” The outcomes exceeded everybody’s expectations. An unbiased check later confirmed that Burba’s system recovered 97 p.c of the lithium from the brine.
Exxon acquired mineral leases to Galvanic’s 120,000 acres for about $100 million, and Reuters has reported that the oil big is contemplating utilizing Burba’s DLE on the coronary heart of its operations. (Burba’s firm plans to offer its extraction expertise to miners.) Houston-based SLB is trying to get into lithium extraction, as are Saudi Arabia’s Aramco and the Abu Dhabi Nationwide Oil Firm. A half dozen lithium-mining outfits are leasing land in northeast Texas’s Bowie, Cass, Franklin, Morris, and Titus counties.
Whereas the brine in south-central Arkansas comprises between 200 and 250 milligrams of lithium per liter, testing means that concentrations rise to the west and attain a lot increased ranges within the Texas portion of the Smackover. In March 2023, Normal Lithium, a Canadian firm, introduced it had drilled a effectively that examined at 634 milligrams per liter, reportedly in Cass County. In a single day, leasing exercise within the space exploded.
Cass County has welcomed the brand new business—albeit warily. The resistance isn’t to extractive industries, which have lengthy offered jobs and financial alternatives. It’s not unusual to see a flatbed truck piled excessive with lately reduce bushes rumbling previous on county roads, and oil drilling has been ticking up lately. However Craig Bohuslav, a neighborhood petroleum landman, informed me that in 2022 he started receiving calls from involved neighbors who had been getting solicited to signal brine leases.
These early proposals had been awful: $10 to $25 an acre for a onetime signing bonus and not one of the royalty funds typical for fossil gas exploration. (Oil leases frequently fetch $300 an acre, plus a 20 p.c royalty.) He endorsed his neighbors to attend, and the gives have since improved markedly. “I’m not against leasing,” Bohuslav stated. “All I’m trying to do is get a fair deal.”
The county’s highest elected official likewise is taking a wait-and-see strategy. “We had an oil boom in the thirties—that’s what brought my grandfather here,” stated Travis Ransom, the boyish-looking county decide. “Immense wealth was generated, but it didn’t stay here. This is an opportunity, and I want to make sure we don’t squander it.”
Driving by way of city in Ransom’s purple Chevy Avalanche with 152,000 miles on the odometer, we handed a line of sixty vehicles extending out onto the road from the car parking zone of a Methodist church. They had been ready their turns to simply accept containers of contemporary produce from a once-a-month meals pantry. “We’re not a wealthy county,” Ransom stated. “We have a lot of generational poverty.”
He likes that DLE doesn’t require tearing up the earth because the lignite coal mines in close by Harrison County as soon as did. And he’s proud that it may facilitate home manufacturing of a component very important to the U.S. financial system, at a time when congressional leaders have expressed issues about China’s potential dominance in world lithium provides. Extracting the metallic, he figures, may make Cass County related within the twenty-first century. “The future is batteries and bandwidth.”
Our lunch of hamburgers on the Rabbit Patch, a well-liked native restaurant, was frequently interrupted by buddies of Ransom’s coming over to say howdy, together with a mortgage officer from the native financial institution. He informed us his dad and mom and two of their neighbors had lately signed brine-mining leases. The bonus funds had been greater than $250 an acre, and so they had been to obtain 10 p.c royalties. Ransom appeared happy.
An aerial view of Worldwide Battery’s modular DLE system in Lake Charles, Louisiana.Courtesy of Worldwide Battery Metals
Burba could have invented DLE, however others have developed their very own types of the expertise—utilizing proprietary resins or different absorbent supplies to filter the brine. A few of these rivals boast deep pockets. Houston-based oil big Occidental Petroleum, as an illustration, owns a subsidiary with a patented DLE system and plans to reveal its expertise at a California facility.
Additional alongside is Normal Lithium. A ninety-minute drive east of Atlanta—south of El Dorado, Arkansas—the corporate introduced in March that it had began mining. Its eight-foot cylinder hangs from a metallic construction painted vibrant blue and yellow, like an IKEA erector set. As much as ninety gallons of salt water per minute run by way of the cylinder, which is stuffed with a resin, developed by a subsidiary of Koch Industries, that resembles sesame seeds. “It is very quiet, very contained, highly automated,” stated Chad Martin, Normal’s vp of U.S. operations.
Normal plans to construct a $1.3 billion facility in Arkansas, referred to as the South West Arkansas Challenge, and is aggressively leasing in East Texas. In Could, Norwegian oil big Equinor agreed to take a position as much as $160 million in these efforts. The El Dorado pilot may have been the primary business DLE facility within the U.S., however till Arkansas finalizes guidelines on lithium-mining royalties, the lithium is being extracted, separated, after which put again into salt water that’s pumped again into the bottom. Martin shrugged in a “what can you do” method after I requested him about it. “We’re just proving the technology,” he stated.
That opened the door for Burba and Worldwide Battery to be the primary to commercially mine lithium in North America utilizing DLE. The corporate disassembled its modular plant in Louisiana, and shipped it on vehicles to Cranium Valley, Utah, the place it was reassembled at a facility owned by U.S. Magnesium that has been producing magnesium from the Nice Salt Lake for greater than fifty years and has massive ponds of leftover salts. Burba struck a deal to strip the lithium out of that waste. Worldwide Battery says it ought to initially produce 4,500 tons of lithium per yr there, sufficient for greater than 10,000 Tesla Mannequin S batteries. The Utah alternative merely got here collectively sooner than any of the potential performs in Texas.
“I would have preferred the Smackover,” Burba stated, over barbecue beef sandwiches that Carol had ready. Texas has many benefits, he famous: increased concentrations of lithium, proximity to battery factories in Mississippi and Tennessee, and quick access to drilling rigs. Worldwide Battery is able to help as quickly as some consumer firm in Texas wants its companies.
Burba completed his lunch and scratched the ear of Ruger, an 85-pound Jack Russell and schnauzer combine. East Texas has lengthy been identified for its cotton, timber, and oil output. Subsequent might be lithium. It may rival South America’s so-called Lithium Triangle. “I believe it will,” Burba stated. “I believe it absolutely will.”
This text initially appeared within the October 2024 situation of Texas Month-to-month with the headline “The Lone Star Lithium Boom.” Subscribe in the present day.
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