A Pennsylvania-based company is working to produce as much as 25% of the lithium needed annually in the US from drilling wastewater in the Marcellus Shale in the Appalachian Basin, Kallanish reports.

Eureka Resources began quietly extracting lithium from the drilling wastewater in Bradford County in northern Pennsylvania in October 2019, and it has just received its fourth patent for the proprietary extraction process, it says in a 10 November statement.

Its recovery system could produce enough lithium to meet the US Department of Defense’s annual needs, it says.

Lithium is a key component in electric vehicle and other lithium-ion batteries.

The company currently extracts lithium, calcium chloride, salt, oil and methanol from wastewater from oil and gas producers in the Marcellus Shale region of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Those materials are sold to third parties. It has also been returning water to local streams after treatment with state approval.

The lithium is coming from the underground rocks that have been hydraulically fractured or fracked in producing shale oil and natural gas. It is recovered from an array of different brines from the shale drilling.

“Eureka is committed to helping the country improve and strengthen domestic supplies of critical minerals by extracting them from oil and gas wastewater,” says ceo Daniel Ertel in a statement.

The company, headquartered in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, operates three treatment plants in the Marcellus Shale. It also intends to expand its operation into the Utica Shale of eastern Ohio.

It has plans to expand by 2023 to the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico, the Bakken Shale in North Dakota and Montana, the Barnett Shale of North Texas and the Haynesville Shale of East Texas and Louisiana., it says.

Its first plant was the Standing Stone treatment plant in Towanda, Pennsylvania, in a joint venture with MGX, a Canadian company based in Vancouver, British Columbia. That plant extracted lithium chloride in post-concentration lithium values in the range of 1,000 parts per million from produced water within the Marcellus Shale. That operation was called the first commercial rapid petro-lithium recovery system.

The company says a typical Marcellus well produces 1.5 million to 1.6m gallons of water to be treated.