Where can I learn if lithium is mined in Oklahoma during drilling and production of petroleum?
If so, it would most likely be over in the eastern counties near the Arkansas border where the Smackover is found. I am attending an AAPG webinar on the subject next week. I will let you know what I hear.
In the meantime, here is a link you might enjoy that gives the basics.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.9b00779
And another specifically on oil & gas produced water.
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I sat through an AAPG (American Association of Petroleum Geologists) webinar today on lithium. My takeaway from the speakers is that there is no commercial plant at the moment. The experts that gave the presentations were speaking in future terms and were mostly talking about using salt water disposal waters and recycling them for lithium and other products. Very expensive and would require drilling new wells that had the larger size production stream casings specially treated to resist the corrosion that those waters could do in damage. They did not think that current oil and gas wells had large enough casing or protective coatings on the pipe that would give a high enough fluid flow to be economic. In many states, the operator owns the salt water that comes out of an oil and gas well and the surface owner owns water in acquifers. So no benefit to the mineral owner of oil and gas at this point.
The maps that they showed were highlighting the Smackover in East Texas, but mostly in Arkansas where Exxon has a pilot project going. Again, south of OK, so not much on the horizon for OK at the moment.
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Thank You very much for this informative information. This was very helpful. Anne Heaton