Energy
Sunday, August 21st, 2022 11:27 am EDT
One of the biggest elements of the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is a requirement that electric vehicles start using batteries that contain minerals from “friendly” countries, with a special emphasis on battery minerals from the USA. Interestingly, a month before the monumental bill was passed, Oklahoma-based Galvanic Energy announce some large lithium potential in Utah.
According to the company, a recent third-party resource report “validated Galvanic Energy’s Smackover Formation prospect as one of the largest lithium brine resources in North America, with sufficient lithium to produce enough batteries for 50 million electric vehicles.” 50 million EVs! The Smackover prospect is located in southern Arkansas.
Naturally, it has to be commercially competitive for Galvanic Energy to get to work extracting that lithium in order to move towards such an ambitious opportunity. The IRA will certainly help stimulate such competitiveness and extraction, though.
“Over the past year the company has completed well testing and detailed reservoir modeling to significantly advance its 120,000-acre lithium prospect in southern Arkansas,” Galvanic Energy writes. The company bills itself as “a geoscience-driven resource exploration company that employs innovative, proprietary discovery methods to identify natural resources essential to the US renewable energy sector.”
The aforementioned third-party tests, which were conducted by APEX Geoscience Ltd., found 290 mg/L to 520 mg/L of lithium concentrations in the Arkansas prospect after drilling test wells that penetrated the Smackover Formation. Galvanic Energy calls those results “some of the highest reported values in North American brines.” The tests also found bromine concentrations of 3,700-6,000 mg/L.
Overall, the analysis estimated 4 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) and 10 million tons of elemental bromine in Galvanic Energy’s Smackover prospect.
A search for “Galvanic Energy” on our site comes up empty. However, we’ll surely be keeping an eye out for news from the company in the coming years. It could become a big name in US lithium. Or not. We’ll see.
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