On March 26, 2026, EnergyX unveiled the largest direct lithium extraction facility in the United States at a former Army munitions site outside Texarkana, anchoring a $20-30 million demonstration plant above one of the world's most consequential untapped lithium deposits. The launch accelerates a rapidly intensifying competition among EnergyX, Standard Lithium, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and MIT-founded startup Lithios to be first to commercial-scale production from the Smackover Formation, whose southwestern Arkansas portion alone holds an estimated 5 to 19 million metric tons of lithium in place.
Introduction
On March 26, 2026, roughly 200 guests gathered at TexAmericas Center, a 12,000-acre industrial park just west of Texarkana in Bowie County, Texas, while thousands more watched a live stream. What they witnessed was the public debut of Project Lonestar, EnergyX's 250 tonne-per-year lithium carbonate equivalent demonstration facility, built inside 22,000 square feet of converted space on a site that once housed a U.S. Army munitions depot. Senator Ted Cruz appeared virtually to offer congratulations, calling the plant "first-of-its-kind" and linking its output to military readiness and energy security.
The event was carefully choreographed, but the underlying moment is genuine. EnergyX founder and CEO Teague Egan, who started the company in 2018 at age 28 with no mining or chemical engineering background, told guests: "We have come a long way and today I'm beyond excited to show you the biggest DLE plant in the US, on top of a world-class lithium deposit." The claim to "biggest" refers specifically to integrated direct lithium extraction capacity in the United States, a distinction that matters because the broader DLE industry has, until very recently, existed almost entirely at bench and pilot scale.
The Texarkana launch does not stand alone. It is the latest and most visible move in a land rush that has drawn ExxonMobil, Chevron, Standard Lithium, and a cohort of technology startups to the Smackover Formation, a geological arc stretching from central Texas to the Florida Panhandle that is emerging as North America's most strategically significant lithium brine resource. Understanding what EnergyX has actually built, what it plans to build next, and who is racing alongside it requires unpacking both the technology and the geology.
What the USGS Found Beneath Southern Arkansas
The resource estimates that underpin the Smackover frenzy come primarily from a peer-reviewed study published in Science Advances by researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey. Using lithium concentration maps combined with reservoir parameters and geologic data, the team estimated that the southwestern portion of the Smackover Formation in Arkansas alone holds between 5.1 and 19 million metric tons of lithium in place. The low end of that range is equivalent to more than nine times the International Energy Agency's projection of global lithium demand from electric vehicles in 2030.
It is important to be precise about these numbers, because they have been badly garbled in some coverage. Multiple journalistic sources have cited figures of "5 to 19 trillion tons," which appear to reflect a unit conversion error rather than any new data. The USGS figure is 5.1 to 19 million metric tons, confined to the southwestern Arkansas portion of a much larger formation. Katherine Knierim, the hydrologist who led the study, was explicit on the limits of the finding: "We have not estimated what is technically recoverable based on newer methods to extract lithium from brines." The in-place estimate, in other words, is a ceiling, not a production forecast.
Nonetheless, the scale of the resource is extraordinary by any measure. Brine concentrations in parts of the formation exceed 400 milligrams of lithium per liter, grades comparable to the producing regions of Argentina and Chile. Unlike the South American lithium triangle, the Arkansas Smackover does not face acute water stress, and the region benefits from existing oil and gas infrastructure, competitive reagent supply chains, and a regulatory environment that has moved quickly to accommodate lithium development. MIT professor Martin Bazant, who co-founded one of the companies now competing in the basin, has estimated the in-place lithium value at roughly two trillion dollars at current prices, though recoverable fractions and extraction costs will determine how much of that figure is commercially accessible.
EnergyX's Technology Stack and Scale-Up Roadmap
EnergyX's core extraction platform, now marketed as GET-Lit (previously called LiTAS), integrates three distinct methodologies: adsorption using lithium-selective sorbent beads, solvent extraction capable of concentrating lithium content to as high as 60,000 parts per million, and membrane separation combining electrodialysis with selective bipolar electrodialysis. The company says the combination allows it to process virtually any brine composition and to produce battery-grade lithium with recovery rates above 94%, while using a fraction of the freshwater consumed by competing DLE approaches and injecting no harmful chemicals back into the ground. EnergyX holds over 100 global patents across the platform and manufactures its own membranes, resins, and solvent extraction reagents in-house.
Alongside GET-Lit, the company is developing SoLiS, a solid-state battery technology program aimed at integrating lithium metal anodes into next-generation cell architectures. EnergyX VP of Battery Technology Dr. Nicholas Grundish describes the ambition: the company is targeting lithium metal batteries capable of exceeding 1,000 cycles with a range of more than 600 miles per charge and a potential vehicle lifetime of 500,000 miles. Whether or not those performance targets are achieved on the stated timeline, the dual focus makes EnergyX one of the very few DLE players pursuing both upstream extraction and advanced battery chemistry simultaneously, a vertical integration logic that extends from brine to cell.
The 250 tpa Texarkana facility is designed as a proof-of-concept and qualification engine, not a revenue generator on its own. Egan has described its primary commercial function as enabling EnergyX to provide five to twenty-five tonne samples of battery-grade lithium to prospective customers for qualification, while simultaneously optimizing system design and validating process economics at industrial scale under real-world brine conditions. The scale-up roadmap is aggressive: a first commercial train of 12,500 tpa is targeted for 2028, followed by a 50,000 tpa facility by 2030 at an estimated capital cost of approximately 1.4 billion dollars, with a projected operating cost of around 3,750 dollars per tonne. The ultimate ambition is 100,000 tpa by 2032, contingent on acquiring additional Smackover acreage. Egan has framed the 50,000 tpa plant as potentially the largest lithium facility in the world when completed.
Comparison against traditional evaporation methods is instructive. Conventional pond-based lithium extraction takes 12 to 24 months from brine pumping to product, recovers 40 to 60 percent of available lithium, and demands enormous land footprints in areas often under significant water stress. EnergyX claims its DLE process compresses that timeline to days, reduces per-tonne costs from roughly 4,200 dollars to 3,500 dollars versus evaporation benchmarks, and operates with minimal freshwater consumption. The company's engineering partner is Worley, and its major investors, including General Motors (which led a 50 million dollar Series B in 2023), POSCO, and Eni, hold first rights to portions of offtake. Total capital raised now exceeds 150 million dollars, and a signed letter of interest from the U.S. Export-Import Bank for 690 million dollars in project finance support was announced last year.
The Competition: Oil Majors, Established Players, and the Electrochemical Challenger
EnergyX is not racing against a single rival. The Smackover basin has attracted a striking range of competitors spanning oil majors, established lithium developers, and venture-backed startups, all converging on a formation where demonstration plants from EnergyX, Standard Lithium, and Lithios sit within roughly 100 miles of each other.
ExxonMobil has moved with what industry observers have called "oilfield speed." Through its Saltwerx subsidiary, the company has assembled more than 300,000 net acres of brine rights in the formation since early 2023, received Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission approval for a 56,000-acre production facility in April 2025, and announced in April 2026 that it had produced its first battery-grade lithium from a modular pilot plant near Magnolia, Arkansas. ExxonMobil is targeting initial commercial production in 2027 and aims to supply enough lithium for more than one million electric vehicles annually by 2030. Chevron entered the basin in June 2025 by acquiring 125,000 net acres from TerraVolta Resources and East Texas Natural Resources, describing the Smackover as its first step toward a commercial-scale domestic lithium business.
Standard Lithium, operating the South West Arkansas Project as a 55/45 joint venture with Equinor, has the most advanced paper economics in the basin. Its definitive feasibility study contemplates 22,500 tpa of battery-quality lithium carbonate over a 20-year operating life, an unlevered pre-tax NPV of 1.7 billion dollars at a lithium carbonate price of 22,400 dollars per tonne, and average cash operating costs of 4,516 dollars per tonne. In January 2025, Standard Lithium secured a 225 million dollar DOE grant, the largest federal commitment to DLE technology on record. In March 2026, the joint venture signed a binding take-or-pay offtake agreement with Trafigura for 8,000 metric tonnes per year of battery-quality lithium carbonate over 10 years, a milestone CEO David Park described as "a major step in moving the SWA Project towards FID and construction."
The most technically distinct competitor is Lithios, a Medford, Massachusetts company founded by MIT scientists Mo Alkhadra and Professor Martin Bazant. Where EnergyX and Standard Lithium use adsorption and membrane-based approaches, Lithios has built an electrochemical extraction system: lithium-selective battery electrodes capture lithium ions from brine when electricity is applied, with no chemical reagents involved. Alkhadra describes the operating principle as "a big battery with wastewater flowing into the system" that "selectively pulls lithium while rejecting essentially all the other contaminants." The key commercial proposition is that this approach works on low-grade, high-impurity brines down to 10 parts per million lithium, concentrations that conventional DLE economics cannot address, at up to 40 percent lower cost and using roughly 10 times less energy for those difficult brine profiles. By September 2025, Lithios had completed more than 1,000 hours of continuous operation at its Massachusetts pilot facility with virtually no downtime. The company was selected for the Arkansas Lithium Technology Accelerator (ALTA) program in December 2025, has shipped an early-generation system to a commercial partner scaling up operations in Arkansas, and is currently piloting its third-generation technology in the state. Lithios has raised approximately 24.9 million dollars to date and is seeking an additional 25 million dollars to fund a commercial demonstration plant operational by 2027, with a target of 25,000 tpa commercial capacity before the end of the decade.
DLE at Scale: What Has and Has Not Been Proven
The competitive intensity in the Smackover is real, but so is a fundamental caveat that applies to every company in the basin, including EnergyX. Direct lithium extraction has not yet been proven at commercial scale anywhere in the world. The most advanced deployments to date are demonstration and pilot facilities; the transition from hundreds of tonnes per year to tens of thousands of tonnes per year involves engineering challenges, capital requirements, and operational risks that remain largely untested in practice.
This context matters when evaluating EnergyX's claims. Egan has said at the Texarkana launch: "Our costs are the lowest, our efficiencies are the highest and our recovery rates are superior." Those assertions may ultimately prove accurate, but they are made by a company whose largest facility currently produces 250 tpa, not the 50,000 tpa it plans to operate within four years. The founder of another lithium exploration company noted in 2024 that EnergyX's claims are "certainly the types of claims that other companies would not put out without publicly available documented engineering and scoping studies." EnergyX's response, in effect, is the demonstration plant itself: the Texarkana facility exists to generate the real-world data that will either validate or revise those projections.
Building on my analysis of the demonstration imperative in April 2026, the pattern here is consistent with what EnergyX, tozero, and the DOE's accelerator funding all represent: the industry has recognized that the most dangerous gap is not between research and pilot scale, but between pilot scale and the first genuinely commercial facility. Project Lonestar is EnergyX's answer to that gap. Whether it closes it depends on two years of operational data that has not yet been generated.
The broader DLE market context adds urgency. The global DLE sector is projected to grow from approximately 1.54 billion dollars in 2026 to 5.72 billion dollars by 2036, with more than three billion dollars already invested in the category since 2020. China currently controls 70 to 75 percent of global lithium chemical conversion capacity and has applied intermittent export restrictions on lithium-based products. The U.S. imports more than 25 percent of its lithium supply. EnergyX CMO Kellee Khalil framed the dependency in stark terms at the launch event: "Right now, China controls most of the lithium supply, as well as the lithium technology, so it's a matter of defense if our grid goes offline, we don't have lithium in the batteries to keep us stable." That framing, combining economic and defense logic, has proven effective in securing both federal support and strategic corporate backing.
Arkansas as a Policy Ecosystem and the Workforce Dimension
One underappreciated dimension of the Smackover race is how deliberately Arkansas has positioned itself as a policy and innovation hub for lithium development. The Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission has approved a 2.5 percent royalty rate for lithium projects, providing the regulatory certainty that large capital commitments require. Governor Sarah Sanders and Secretary of Commerce Hugh McDonald have emphasized tax incentives and workforce development as complementary tools. The Arkansas Lithium Technology Accelerator, launched in July 2025 in partnership with Standard Lithium, the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, the University of Arkansas, and the Walton Family Foundation, is the first program of its kind in the United States dedicated specifically to lithium innovation and the domestic battery supply chain.
State economic analysts have drawn explicit comparisons to the Fayetteville Shale Play, which generated roughly 20 billion dollars in total economic activity and approximately 22,000 jobs in Arkansas between 2005 and 2011. EnergyX alone projects 3,100 jobs from Project Lonestar's commercial phases and 17.2 billion dollars in regional economic impact over the next decade. Whether those projections materialize depends on successful scaling, but the regulatory and institutional infrastructure being built around the Smackover development is designed to make Arkansas competitive even if the specific companies now leading the race are ultimately displaced or acquired.
The workforce dimension is also deliberately inclusive in EnergyX's communications. Ebony Dailey, the company's Director of People Operations, has emphasized that no prior experience in lithium extraction is required for most facility roles: "This is definitely something that can be taught and learned. The most important thing is to be willing to learn, and then bring a sense of safety to the work that you do." For a region adjacent to communities shaped by decades of defense and petrochemical employment, that framing matters as much as the headline job numbers.
What Comes Next: A Two-Year Window That Will Define the Field
The next 24 months will be more consequential for the Smackover's commercial trajectory than the previous five years of land acquisition and pilot-scale work. ExxonMobil has targeted 2027 for initial commercial production. Standard Lithium's joint venture with Equinor is targeting FID around year-end 2025 (now passed) and first commercial operations in 2028. EnergyX's first commercial train of 12,500 tpa is also targeted for 2028. Lithios plans a commercial demonstration plant operational by 2027 before scaling to full commercial capacity before 2030.
These timelines are not independent. The first company to demonstrate genuinely commercial-scale DLE production in the Smackover will define cost benchmarks, attract the most favorable offtake terms, and most credibly challenge China's dominance of battery-grade lithium chemical supply. EnergyX's stated advantages are technology breadth (the integration of adsorption, solvent extraction, and membranes into a single platform), vertical manufacturing of key components, and a land position of 47,500 acres assembled through organic leasing and the acquisition of Daytona Lithium from Pantera Lithium in 2025. Its stated vulnerabilities are the ones common to every DLE developer: the absence of commercial-scale operating history and the capital demands of a planned one-billion-plus dollar facility.
Egan's demand projections provide the motivating logic. Lithium demand has grown from roughly 120,000 tonnes in 2010 to approximately 1.3 million tonnes today. Egan projects demand reaching 6 to 10 million tonnes annually by 2050, driven not only by electric vehicles but by grid-scale storage, drones, and humanoid robotics. EV sales alone reached 20 million units in 2025 and continue to grow. Against that trajectory, the Smackover's 5 to 19 million metric tons of in-place lithium represents a resource of genuine strategic importance, and the race to extract it efficiently and at scale is now visibly underway.
Project Lonestar is simultaneously a technical demonstration, a capital formation event, a workforce signal, and a competitive positioning move. Whether the 250 tonnes per year now flowing through that 22,000-square-foot facility in Texarkana proves to be the foundation of the world's largest lithium plant, as Egan has promised, or one data point among many in a more contested commercial outcome, the facility has already accomplished one thing with certainty: it has established that industrial-scale DLE on the Smackover is no longer a projection. It is, as of March 2026, a physical fact.