Standard Lithium claims North America’s ‘highest grade brine’ in east Texas

Standard Lithium (TSXV: SLI; NYSE-AM: SLI) announced Tuesday the discovery of a significant lithium brine resource from the sampling of a newly drilled well during its resource expansion work in the east Texas Smackover region.

The company reports that brine samples taken from two wells, in addition to samples taken from other closely adjacent wells completed in the Smackover Formation in east Texas, all returned grades exceeding the average reported lithium analyses from other North American brine projects. The best result came from the new borehole well at a grade of 634 mg per litre lithium, leading to what the company believes is the discovery of the “highest confirmed lithium grade brine” on the continent.

“We’re excited to discover this outstanding resource and to add it to our expanding portfolio of select projects in the Smackover Formation. We have built a large and technically diverse team of Smackover specialists who have been working for almost three years to understand the most prospective areas to secure the highest-quality brine resources in East Texas,” Andy Robinson, president and COO of Standard Lithium, commented in a news release.

Robinson added that “these very high-quality lithium brine resources, located in the heart of the Gulf Coast region, are close to, and highly complementary to, Standard Lithium’s existing lithium projects and have the potential to play a key role in future lithium production as part of the company’s development and commercialization program.”

Over the past three years, Standard Lithium says its team has been developing a thorough understanding of the Smackover Formation in Texas, via analysis of existing petro-physical logs, 2-D seismic data and existing core sample analysis (retained from previous drilling activity). This understanding has been supplemented by sampling and analytical testing of produced water from existing oil and gas production wells from the Smackover Formation in the east Texas area.

As a result of this data gathering and interpretive work, the company identified a number of highly prospective lithium brine project areas in the Smackover Formation in east Texas and began an extensive brine leasing program. The greatest level of effort to date, and the company’s principal brine leasing focus, has been in the region close to the Arkansas and Louisiana state lines.

As the company has been securing brine rights in the key project areas over the last 18 months, it also secured access to a pre-existing oil and gas production well and drilled a new exploration borehole. The pre-existing well was re-entered using a workover rig and the existing production casing was perforated at various depth intervals to gather new brine samples from different levels in the Smackover Formation. The new exploration borehole was advanced and cased using a drill rig, and subsequently sampled using a workover rig.

DLE process

Standard Lithium has developed a fully integrated, start-to-finish, direct lithium extraction (DLE) process to selectively extract lithium from Smackover brine and produce battery-quality lithium compounds.

The company says the grade of lithium in brine used for DLE has a meaningful impact on both capital expenditures and operating costs in connection with the extraction process, with a higher grade typically resulting in lower overall costs.

Meanwhile, Standard Lithium recently started a drilling program at its South West Arkansas project to support the forthcoming preliminary feasibility study. This drill program is expected to inform the resource definition and de-risk the project’s resource estimate, provide additional porosity and permeability data through the entire thickness of the productive zones in the Smackover Formation, and optimize production-wellfield design.

Standard Lithium’s stock soared 14.5% as of 10:30 a.m. in Toronto. The company has a market capitalization of $871 million.