Arkansas Times: “Will Arkansas’s Big Bet on Lithium Benefit All of Us, or Just the Wealthy Few?”
RFF Fellow Beia Spiller discusses new research on direct lithium extraction in Arkansas with a major state paper.
“Despite the excitement, Arkansas’s lithium boom remains far from guaranteed. A new analysis from Resources for the Future, a think tank in Washington, DC, warns that the industry’s success hinges on a precarious mixture of the technology scaling just right and the market rebounding. Lithium prices have cratered by nearly 80 percent since 2022, and technology delays could quickly push projects into the red, leaving the state facing yet another boom-and-bust cycle and causing environmental disruption with little gain...
‘If everything works out well, this is a very solid industry, and it will be very profitable over the next 20 years,’ Dr. Beia Spiller, energy economist and coauthor on the report, told the Arkansas Times. ‘The second things start to break down, this is when we get into trouble in terms of actually having a vibrant industry that’s profitable in the long run.’”
