An expert in lithium lives in our backyard
A few weeks back we did part one of the article on John Burba, whom many fondly call Dr. Burba or to others the Godfather of Lithium. Since then, he has been featured in Texas Monthly, “The Lone Star Lithium Boom.” The Journal-Sun continues to follow Lithium closely as it continues to be a hot topic around the Ark-La-Tex region as new players emerge in the market for a potential boon including “big oil”.
The TM article highlights Burba’s move from Baylor University to his move to his East Texas ranch (located in Cass County). After a near-death incident with hydrogen sulfide at his first job in an oil field, “He headed to Waco, leaving Baylor University nine years later with a doctorate in chemistry and a nascent family. His new wife, Carol, who’d also studied chemistry at Baylor, was pregnant, so he dropped his plans for further studies and went to work for a global chemical company (Dow). Dozens of patents followed.
“Nearly five decades later, the 73-year-old Burba has amassed the trappings of a successful life. He and Carol live on two hundred acres in East Texas with a donkey, three horses, five cows, and a one-ton bull named Max. But Dr. Burba—everyone calls him doctor, likely because of his professorial demeanor—isn’t ready to slow down. One of his inventions looks poised to become as critical to the twenty-first century as the rotary drilling rig was to the twentieth.”
In the previous Journal-Sun article, we mentioned that Burba’s retirement was slow-lived. “I was asked to come in as the CEO of a company called Symbol, which was a lithium extraction project in the Imperial Valley. That worked. We then had a demonstration plant demonstrating that we could do it. We needed about half $1 million to actually build a commercial plant, and we couldn’t raise the money.”
Unfortunately, the company went bankrupt, but Burba said he couldn’t let go of Lithium. Burba said he drove his wife crazy trying to come up with a better solution.
“I decided that we had to redesign the extraction column. I did that, and then it really became clear to me that going modular was going to be a big deal. So, I worked on that and came up with a design. I had two partners. We filed a patent on that, and then we formed International Battery Metals with another company, a Canadian Company. Which is where Burba is now. The founder and Chief Technology Officer for International Battery Metals’ (IBAT).”
It seems serendipity that Burba is at the right place at the right time. His backyard from his property in Cass (The Smackover Formation) boasts of some of the highest-grade Lithium in the world. Could it be that he has the right tool, at the right place at the right time?
It is a question that Burba was not able to comment on at this time, but the Journal-Sun will be keeping an eye out for something.
It is interesting to note that the mentioned Texas Monthly article is that there are very few places on the earth where you can get your hands on the quality of Lithium you would need to go in many of the car batteries. One exception notes the article, “is Western Australia, where hydraulic excavators gouge enormous craters to get at the lithium-rich mineral spodumene. Elsewhere—particularly in the high desert where Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile converge—salt water is pumped out of the earth and left to evaporate, in pools that can be a halfmile long and a third of a mile wide, so enormous that they’re visible from space. It’s a slow and environmentally damaging process that leaves behind a lithium-rich aqueous mixture.”
Another environment suitable for lithium extraction is here in the Ark-LaTex region in what geologists call the Smackover Formation.
Volcano ash very well could have been the source of the Lithium dating clear back to the Jurassic period.
Burba developed a third way to extract Lithium that may be a perfect fit for this area in 1995, “direct lithium extraction. In DLE, brine is pumped through cylinders made of a fiber-reinforced polymer and filled with crystalline granules slightly larger than grains of sand. Lithium ions get stuck, much like contaminants in an ordinary water filter, but the granules release the prized metal when the cylinder is flushed with fresh water. The process takes less than an hour to extract lithium that would otherwise take months or years to mine or to concentrate through evaporation, and it doesn’t ruin large stretches of land or pollute millions of gallons of water.”
As mentioned in the last article Burba used his method of extraction in a plant in Argentina, however at the time DLE didn’t immediately take off because global lithium demand at the time was satisfied by existing mines and evaporation ponds. But as the need for batteries has soared, so has interest in new lithium sources. Last year the financial giant Goldman Sachs called DLE “a potential game-changing technology.”
Texas Quarterly noted in the article that, “By 2040 nearly three-quarters of new passenger vehicles bought globally are expected to rely on them. The revenue from the lithium-ion battery industry is projected to quintuple by the beginning of the next decade, to more than $400 billion a year.”
What it could mean for our area is yet to be measured. Regardless, having a hometown expert in Lithium in our background with his background and experience should be a good thing.