Southwest New Mexico’s playa lakes could play a key role in the energy transition as a source of Lithium.

Lancaster Resources, a company based in Canada, is hoping to cash in on that opportunity and has acquired the Alkali Flat lithium brine project located in Hidalgo County near Lordsburg.

In September, the company submitted applications to the state’s Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management for a permit to drill three wells.

Andrew Watson, Lancaster Resources’ vice president of operations and engineering, said the company is focused on developing critical mineral resources to support the energy transition. The company is developing two potential lithium projects—the one in the Lordsburg area and another in Canada that he described as a hardrock pegmatite lithium deposit. 

Lithium is a key component in batteries needed for energy storage and electric vehicles. 

Geologist Rodney Blakestad was the one who brought the Alkali Flat lithium brine project to Lancaster.

Blakestad said that there are different types of lithium deposits in the world. In Australia and Canada, the lithium is primarily within a type of volcanic rock called pegmatite.

“Pegmatite is the last liquid in a magma to solidify,” he said. 

Pegmatite often includes elements that don’t usually occur in silicate mineral. Silicates makes up 95 percent of the earth’s crust. 

The pegmatite can contain lithium, uranium, fluorine, tungsten, tin and other elements.

“So pegmatites are good for a lot of these battery metals, as they call them. And lithium is one of them,” Blakestad said.

Another place that lithium can be found is in brine deposits such as the one near Lordsburg.

He said the same type of elements that are found in pegmatite are found in the dry lake beds, or playas. 

This type of lithium extraction is common in places like Argentina, Chile and Bolivia, which are part of an area of South America dubbed the lithium triangle. Those three countries have more than 75 percent of the world’s known lithium supplies beneath their salt flats.

When it comes to domestic lithium production in the United States, Clayton Valley, Nevada, is the only place with production, currently. In Nevada, the lithium is extracted from clays and volcanic ash. 

While lithium production is limited in the United States, there are vast reserves of lithium that could be tapped into, including the one in Hidalgo County.

“A lot of these brine deposits are derived by the leaching of lithium from the volcanic rock that you have over the surface of the area around a volcano,” Blakestad said. “And then over time that lithium is leached, it gets down into the groundwater or gets into the surface water goes out into these playa lakes like occur outside of Lordsburg.”

As the water evaporates from the playa, the lithium and other minerals become concentrated.

Blakestad said that the playa is usually a dry lake, though it will become wet during the monsoons. However, it takes only days after a monsoon rain for the playa to dry out once again.

Lancaster is far from the only company to be looking at developing some of the lithium reserves in the United States, which has the largest lithium reserves outside of the lithium triangle.

Some of those projects have encountered opposition from environmental and Indigenous activists. The most high profile of those is the Thacker Pass project in Nevada. Thacker Pass is a sacred location for the Native American tribes that call northern Nevada their home. It is also the sight of a massacre of Indigenous people by the U.S. government. And it has the largest known lithium reserves in the country.

Nearby ranchers are also concerned about the water used to extract lithium at Thacker Pass. The mine is expected to use 1.7 billion gallons of water each year. Documents indicate that the Thacker Pass mine in Nevada will also emit 152,713 tons of carbon dioxide annually.

Lancaster hopes to assuage such concerns at its Alkali Flats project near Lordsburg by committing to practices that Blakestad says are more environmentally conscious.

“One of the key factors that we’re looking at doing is doing this in a much more environmentally sound and safe way,” he said.

He explained that lithium is often extracted by pumping groundwater onto the surface of an evaporation pond.

“The evaporation ponds can easily be five or six times the size of a football field and they tend to have dozens of those evaporation ponds,” he said. “And what they do is they evaporate the water with natural sunlight and heat. And that concentrates the lithium and other metals that water flows into another evaporation pond and it evaporates even more and goes similarly into a third pond where it evaporates more.”

Once collected and converted into lithium carbonate, Blakestad said it is often sent to China to be converted into battery grade material.

Lancaster has some different plans for the Lordsburg area.

The first step is to determine how much potential the playas near Lordsburg have for lithium extraction.

“This is an early stage project,” Blakestad said. “So we haven’t drilled any holes.”

Lancaster doesn’t know what grade of lithium is in the playas or how deep to drill the holes to access that lithium.

“But our plan is to drill holes into the aquifer, extract water, pump the water to the surface, but we’re not going to use evaporation,” he said.

Instead, Lancaster wants to run the water through a process that is known as direct lithium extraction, or DLE. 

While DLE has potential for boosting the extraction of lithium, it is still in its infancy and critics have raised some questions and concerns over the method’s environmental impacts.

Blakestad said it is possible that other elements that are also found in the water below the playa could be extracted at the same time.

Once those elements are extracted, Blakestad said the water will be pumped down into the same aquifer that it was pulled out of originally. By pumping it back into the aquifer, Blakestad said it will prevent subsidence such as sinkholes. Furthermore, he said there is less water wasted.

Watson said three are a handful of different types of DLE and that Lancaster has not settled on which type it will use.

“It’s a relatively new aspect of the industry that focuses strictly on the brine-type production,” he said.

Depending on the DLE technology that is selected, there may be some chemicals needed to extract the lithium, but Watson said they would not be injected into the aquifer. Some of the DLE methods would not require any chemicals.

“We know that New Mexico is obviously an arid state, freshwater is extremely valuable. And so we’re going to look at doing everything we can to sort of minimize any freshwater requirements by using that produced water that carries this brine,” Watson said.

The water that carries the brine is not potable and can’t even be used for livestock, Blakestad said. It’s water that will even kill crops.

“We’re not looking to utilize any potable water or water that could be used for other commercial purposes,” he said. “We’re looking for these certain highly concentrated brines and have these minerals at depth.”

While Lancaster is still in the exploratory phase, it has done geochemical surveys of the surface of the playas and Blakestad said those appear promising.

“We’ve done several forms of geophysical exploration to try to determine where the conductive bodies of water or minerals might be in this sediment themselves,” he said. “And we’ve gotten very good responses from that. So it’s a matter of building more and more information over time.”

He said Lancaster essentially got started on that work this year and the process tends to be long and drawn out and expensive.

“But the reward from doing this work is what we’re looking for, is a long-term lithium producer that may exceed our lifetime,” he said.

Should Lancaster get the permits needed to drill the exploratory wells, Watson said the company could begin the drilling process by the end of the year.

The company has two target subsurface areas and Watson said Lancaster hopes to take samples every five meters in those target areas should it receive the permits to drill.

That will allow the company to learn how much lithium is in the brine at various depths.

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