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