Lithium might be a new product?
That would be something!
Ralph
Ralpr,
I've never seen an oil/gas lease that would include minerals other than oil/gas... sometimes uranium. How would this work in a standard/normal lease? And wouldn't the surface owner be greatly affected if there are evaporation ponds? Thanks for posting the article... very interesting.
jh
Hi JH,
You’re most welcome! There has to be just incredible amounts of engineering and good old fashioned ingenuity and hard work to process the lithium. From the sounds of it, oil and gas wells are already permitted, and large amounts of infrastructure are in-place with known costs and better estimates are available for the costs of production, it seems very compelling! With the estimated demand for lithium batteries and other products that use lithium for a very long time in the foreseeable future, it looks like we have a leg up? Maybe after water is reinjected into the oil bearing rock formations it might be enriched more with lithium and other salts - certainly one would could hypothesize that the TDS (Total Dissolved Solids of which salt in general is a major contributor) percentages in produced water would get higher?
Can’t say how it would affect the surface landscape, probably in so many ways we can’t grasp right now? I can say that salinization of water and soils is a huge problem world-wide with major implications on soil fertility, crop production, and land use and water supplies (incl. irrigation) so if we can use lithium and other salts and potash - it’s probably a very good concept in theory anyways, in my opinion.
Leases could state that the “other minerals” - not oil, and not NG/NGLs - are not included in the oil/gas lease - to keep your options open?
RS
Very good, thanks. will send article on to family. might be helpful one day.
jh
You’re welcome!
RS
I did a search on lithium and shale oil and the only thing that I saw was something about lithium content as a contaminant/component of water in the Marcellus Shale. I did not find anything about lithium as a recoverable asset.
Sorry about that, Ralph. Try oil wells and lithium (seems the proof of concept is aimed at old vertical oil/NG wells).
Ralph
Thanks. I will file lithium from brine sources away for future reference. Not much substance from the cursory review of links.
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Warren-Buffett-And-Elon-Musk-To-Spark-A-Lithium-Boom.html