In rural areas of Lafayette County, Arkansas, a third of the population consists of people born in the 1930s, and they are now bracing for the impact of the global lithium mining boom, as the area is at the epicenter of the trend.
In Lafayette County, some towns have experienced booms and busts, turning into ghost towns, while others have slowly declined over decades, fading away until the once-prosperous areas are hardly recognizable.
Lewisville downtown is one of these desolate places. The county seat of Lafayette County, the only remaining traffic signal no longer works. Across three blocks housing the police station, fire department, and county courthouse, the once bustling commercial area now only bears traces of its history. Stores adorned with terra-cotta polished brick facades stand vacant, their under-hanging canopies now covering boarded-up storefronts, with deserted sidewalks.
On nearby Highway 82, Mack trucks haul timber on flatbed trailers speed through, their roar seems muted by the silence of the area.
Lafayette County Judge Valarie Clark mentioned, “Downtown has been getting quieter since the 1940s.” If someone wants a cup of coffee in the morning without driving five miles east to Stamps, the courthouse is the only option.
Clark, who used to be a circuit court clerk and is now serving her first four-year term as county judge, has witnessed the population of the county dwindling for decades. Lafayette County is the smallest county in Arkansas in terms of area and ranks third from the bottom in terms of population.
“About 20 years ago, there were 10,000 people here, now there are only 6,100,” Clark told The Epoch Times at the end of September. This is confirmed by U.S. Census Bureau data. The records show that the population of Lafayette County peaked in the mid-1930s with nearly 18,000 residents. Since then, the population has continuously declined.
In fact, the population residing in this rural corner of Arkansas (30 miles west of Texas and 30 miles south of Louisiana) is now fewer than in the 1890s. By 2024, the population of Lewisville was 867, and Stamps had 1,200 residents, significantly lower than in 1920.
Clark mentioned that starting from 2000, the region’s furniture industry shut down, resulting in the loss of 600 jobs. Alan White Furniture closed in 2005, being the “last one” in the local furniture industry to shut down. The closure of this company led to the subsequent closure of many sawmills supporting the supply of Southern pine and shortleaf pine woods in the area.
However, the century-long trend of decline in Lafayette County may be reversing. Or more accurately, the reversal has already begun.
The Ark-la-tex region, comprising Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, is witnessing a “white gold” rush, with global corporations engaged in a high-stakes race to extract battery-grade lithium from the Smackover Formation arch across these states.
The epicenter of this competition is Lafayette County, with the core area cutting through the dry and desolate streets south of Lewisville downtown.
“We are a small flower,” Clark said. “We are about to bloom.”
As we all know, lithium is a crucial mineral for powering high-tech electronic devices. It is essential for manufacturing lightweight lithium-ion rechargeable batteries widely used in smartphones, computers, electric vehicles, solar panels, and utility-scale power storage systems.
Data from the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows that nearly 30% of the raw materials needed by U.S. manufacturers are imported, with the majority coming from China. 90% of the materials required for global lithium-ion batteries come from Chinese exports.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that the global lithium market could grow eight times by 2040.
Lithium can be obtained through hard rock lithium mining or brine extraction. The brine from the Smackover Formation not only has the ideal composition but also boasts a unique geological history. This concentrated brine has been depositing for over one hundred fifty million years, located below a limestone belt that stretches from a narrow strip in Florida to eastern Texas.
A century ago, the world’s largest oil field produced oil from the Smackover region of the Ark-la-tex area. Today, the rusty pumpjacks that once operated in these high-yielding oil fields still sporadically dot the landscape, surrounded by slash pine forests and swampy areas with hickory trees.
When small refineries separate oil from the brines in the Smackover region, lithium, iodine, and magnesium, considered “waste streams,” are discarded while bromine, a halogen liquid, is extracted for use in pharmaceuticals, flame retardants, insecticides, and photography.
Arkansas is the world’s largest source of bromine, with Albemarle based in North Carolina and Lanxess from Germany operating factories in the region.
Former Judge Danny Ormand expects that geologists are currently testing the lithium density in wells scattered across the lands of Lafayette County, known for its “woods, herds, and flocks.”
However, all of this is happening secretly. “I didn’t know until later that they have been surveying this area since 2017—no one knew they were here,” he told The Epoch Times.
Ormand, a longtime resident of Lafayette County, is well-versed in the local conditions. He served as the Stamps Fire Department chief, Lafayette County sheriff, and Arkansas Crime Information Center director. After retiring in 2012, he was elected as a county judge in 2018. Clark took over his role in 2022, and Ormand currently serves as Clark’s assistant.
He remembers the day when the “lithium rush” officially began in 2019. “One morning, I was watching Fox News, and they announced that the largest lithium mine in the U.S. … is located in Lafayette County,” Ormand recalled. “I was like, ‘What are they talking about?'”
In October 2024, the U.S. Geological Survey confirmed that underground deposits in four southern Arkansas counties contain up to 19 million tons of lithium in the form of “dissolved brine” within the Smackover Formation. This announcement removed all doubts.
Hydrologist Katherine Knierim from the Survey stated, “We estimate that the region’s dissolved lithium reserves are enough to replace the lithium the U.S. needs to import and then some.”
“It’s been five or six years now,” Ormand said. “We are finally getting the project off the ground.”
Clark mentioned that as she campaigned for county judge in 2022, she already knew that lithium development was “undoubtedly a great opportunity.”
However, she acknowledges the complexity of the scientific knowledge involved and the intimidating presence of large multinational corporations involved in the process.
“I took chemistry in high school. I should have paid more attention back then,” Clark said. “We are dealing with companies we have never encountered before, navigating through unknown territories.”
In December 2023, Australian company Pantera Lithium acquired the Superbird Lithium Brine Project of Daytona Lithium in Arkansas, covering 35,000 acres in Lafayette County. The plot was acquired by EnergyX, a lithium technology startup supported by General Motors, in July this year.
In early 2023, Exxon Lithium acquired mineral rights to 120,000 acres in Lafayette and Columbia counties, and in November 2023, they announced the drilling of their first lithium well. The company plans to begin production in 2027.
Albemarle operates two bromine factories east of Lafayette County in Columbia County and is currently extracting lithium.
In June, Chevron announced the acquisition of 125,000 acres in northeast Texas and southwest Arkansas for lithium mining.
Smackover Lithium, a joint venture between Bestway Lithium and Equinor Energy, has made significant progress. With support from Koch Industries in Kansas, Smackover has conducted a pilot project at the Lanxess bromine plant near El Dorado, or as Arkansans call it, “Eldo Rada,” and drilled multiple test wells in the Ark-la-tex area.
Smackover Lithium claims that its Southwest Arkansas project, south of Lewisville, will host the highest lithium extraction plant capacity in the U.S.
In January of this year, the company received a $225 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. In April, the Trump administration listed it as one of the top 10 key mineral projects to advance.
In March this year, the company opened an office at the intersection of Highways 82 and 29 in Lewisville, adjacent to an abandoned gas station.
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