Environment & Energy

The area’s fortunes began to look up late last year, when ExxonMobil, alongside a couple of other companies, announced its intention to begin producing lithium in the region by 2027. It opened a test site on the Smackover formation, which spans three states, and is planning an operation that could process as much as 100,000 metric tons of the material annually. That’s about 15 percent of what the world produced in 2022, something that’s got folks in Lewisville cautiously hopeful that the change could turn things around.

“We are just very excited, trying to get all our ducks in a row and be able to take advantage of what’s coming,” said Dunbar-Jones, who has served on the city council for seven years.

ExxonMobil joins a growing rush to supply the natural resources needed to drive the green transition. Oil producers and coal companies like Ramaco Resources are looking to collaborate with the Department of Energy to uncover them and, in some cases, wring more money from land they already own.

Critical minerals extraction is subject to a relatively loose framework of regulations, and it can be quite destructive, said Marco Tedesco, a climate scientist at Columbia University who has researched its extraction worldwide. To exploit the Smackover formation, Exxon plans to tap the lithium-rich brine 10,000 feet below ground using a process called deep lithium extraction. “They pump lithium from the bottom—similar to fracking,” Tedesco said, adding that the process requires an immense amount of water. The brine evaporates, leaving lithium salts and other byproducts, some valuable and some toxic. “People living by a mine, they have a right to exploit this economic opportunity,” he said, but in practice, Tedesco sees most of the benefits leaving the communities where extraction happens.

Unfortunately, history is scattered with a
systematic disregard for transparency and a lack of accountability by corporations,” Tedesco said.

Water scarcity is a big topic in Wyoming, a cold, dry state with expansive strip mines, intensive fracking, and a growing industry in critical minerals. Coal has been tied to the identity of Gillette, a small town in the northeast corner of the state, for over 100 years. The Powder River Basin holds most of the nation’s recoverable reserves. Coal company Ramaco Resources, with the help of a Department of Energy national laboratory, discovered what may be the nation’s largest deposit of rare-earth metals on land it bought for $2 million in 2011. Rather than dig for coal, Ramaco will tap what it says will be a $37 billion bonanza in critical minerals.

Shannon Anderson, the staff attorney for the environmental organization Powder River Basin Resource Council, doesn’t see anything unusual in what Ramaco is doing. “Companies are really good at reinventing themselves when there’s a market opportunity to do that, ” she said, and the mining industry has been eager to join the clean energy supply chain. Research has shown that mine tailings, acid mine drainage, and other toxic coal waste may in fact be a decent source of critical minerals.

Despite his opposition to many of President Joe Biden’s clean energy policies, Senate Democrat Joe Manchin, who represents the coal-producing state of West Virginia, had little trouble pushing to bolster domestic critical minerals supplies, in hopes that might make mine waste profitable for coal companies. What has changed in Anderson’s 16 years of work are “the astronomical level of subsidies that are driving these decisions.”