Direct lithium extraction in the U.S. in key states such as Arkansas could help break U.S. reliance on China, which dominates the supply chain on many critical minerals, Standard Lithium CEO David Park said during an appearance on Breitbart News Daily.
The Trump administration, he said, is focused on critical minerals, and his company is zeroing in on lithium extraction in Arkansas — the home of the Smackover Formation, home to North America’s highest grade lithium brine resource.
“There’s no reason to go to the moon… [Arkansas is] home to North America’s highest grade lithium brine resource, and we’re developing a southwest Arkansas project together with our partner, Equinor, using a new technology called direct lithium extraction, or DLE, to unlock this truly competitive world class resource,” he said, explaining that this form of extraction is not an “open pit mining operation.”
“Or it would look a lot more like drilling oil and gas wells and but what we’re producing is brine or salt water, and then we’re selectively extracting lithium ions from that and putting that brine back down into the same resource,” he said, explaining that this technique, essentially, has a low environmental footprint, as it does not fracture the resource itself.
The Trump administration, Park emphasized, understands that lithium is an “essential, critical mineral for the U.S.” in a variety of ways — not just for batteries but AI data centers, electrical grid stability, and “autonomous warfare like drones” as well as unmanned tactical vehicles and robots.
Coinciding with this reality is the fact that China has supply chain dominance over lithium. But if the U.S. can up its production, it would weaken China’s impact and influence globally. The communist country has spent decades strategically investing billions of dollars to gain control over the world’s critical mineral supply chains.
This, Park said, fundamentally poses a major national security risk to the U.S. He put this in further perspective, noting that the U.S. currently produces around 5,000 tons per year of lithium in a global market of about 1.5 million tons per year.
“Incredibly low percentage,” he said. “China controls 70 percent of the supply chain today, and this is a direct result of their overbuilding capacity and investing many billions of dollars to make sure they have the capacity and keeping prices at a level to try and deter investment in the United States and throughout the West.”
However, Park believes this can shift if the U.S. takes it seriously, pointing to his company’s first project clocking in at half a billion dollars. Construction begins this year, and production in 2029, he said, “will be 22,500 tons of lithium by 2029 with the ability of doubling that a few years later.”
“Then we have a series of projects in on the Texas side of the Smackover Formation that in a decade can get us alone to about 150,000 tons per year of production,” he said.
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Park believes the U.S. can see 250,000 tons of production from the Smackover Formation alone in the next one to two decades.
“Exxon and Chevron, big companies, smart engineers, long but big balance sheets — I would say the Smackover alone can get us to 250,000 tons of production over the next 10 to 20 years,” he predicted.
Park added that the Trump administration has finalized a loan “to make sure Lithium Americas project happens.”
“Thacker Pass Nevada, that’s about 40,000 tons. There’s ability to grow there, and they’ve also been supportive by providing us a grant. All of this is in an effort to make sure that the two best lithium projects in North America are developed in a timely manner, and that we break our reliance on China,” he added.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
