U.S. Representative Bruce Westerman of Arkansas’ Fourth Congressional District grew up in a rural area outside of Hot Springs Arkansas. He said for some time it was five miles to the nearest paved road. “I promise you I’m not city,” he said when asked if he grew up as a city boy or a country boy.
With this knowledge, it is widely understood as with the comradery of country music fans. That a young man who grew up in the country, on a small farm, not only learned to love the land, but to also protect and understand the land. He portrays this very truth with everyday actions taken while serving as the Chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources.
“ Arkansas, the Natural State, is blessed with natural resources. Just being from the fourth district of Arkansas gives me a lot of practical knowledge and experience on the importance of resources and whether you’re talking about lithium or oil and gas or timber or our agriculture resources we have lots of resources here in Arkansas lots of other mining activities and deposits here as well.
“Ha ….A big natural dude..?” Westerman repeated the reporter’s comment with a chuckle.. He was calm, and gentle-spirited as he talked about the subject most vital to Arkansans and Americans- energy production and competitive markets.
Westerman was detail oriented as he explained the situation in states like Arkansas where a country is rich in natural resources, and all the steps being made to prevent foreign countries, mainly China, from dominating the market.
Westerman also serves on the Committee for Transportation and Infrastructure. He said in response to being commended for his work on complex and complicated issues in Washington DC on lithium production, forestry, permits application processes and agriculture. ”” I feel like my head is going to explode sometimes..” he remarked. Although his comment would seem a flustered response, the representative remained composed and focused as he expressed a deep knowledge of the subjects at the forefront of importance in Arkansas and beyond. He further discussed with Hopeprescottnews. He talked about his progress helping Arkansas and the nation utilize its own resources instead of being dependent or outsourced from cheaper communist style markets.
What do you or would you want the public to know in regards to lithium in Arkansas? Has construction begun?
“There’s work being done. You have the standard lithium plant in El dorado where they’ve proven you can extract the lithium from the brine water, but the big deal is the fact that lithium is a critical mineral the projected demand for it continues to go up,” he replied.
Westerman said the United States Geological Survey says there’s up to 19 million tons of lithium in this Smackover formation, so that could be worth “more money than all the oil and gas extracted out of the Smackover.”
Westerman said if you look at current prices of lithium carbonate are somewhere $10 to $15,000 a ton and then lithium metals $80,000 plus per ton, and you look at that time 510 million tons… “That’s a lot of economic impact and plus you get not just the value of what you’re extracting, but all the jobs that go with processing that and it turns into a massive economic driver.”
He said the USGS and commerce departments do a report every year that shows the impact of our mined material to the economy, last year for the whole country. It was with $140 billion worth of mined material when the mined and material got processed and refined it was worth a trillion dollars, according to Westerman.
He explained that when that processed and refined material went into the economy it had a $4 trillion impact on the economy. “So there’s great value in the lithium itself, but we need to make sure that we refine and process the lithium in south Arkansas” and “do things like make batteries in the finished products to get the full economic benefits of it. He went on..
“And really, as big as that is, that’s minor compared to the jobs downstream of processing it and manufacturing it. so I hope that everybody that’s working in that field is keeping that big picture look at what this can mean economically for south Arkansas.”
What were some major hurdles and where does Arkansas stand on lithium production currently?
“One of the big hurdles was the Arkansas oil and gas commission getting the royalty rates set there’s been a lot of announcements on projects and partnerships there’s a lot of leases that are being put together and you know it takes time to build these big plants…. but as far as I know all of that is being planned and hopefully construction will start soon” he said.
How are you helping the United States and Arkansas alone in dealing with China taking American markets? Does China still dominate critical minerals and what have you worked on to combat that situation?.
“Weve allowed all of that production for a lot of these minerals to go overseas and we find ourselves in a really bad position, where China controls like 90% of the world’s critical minerals and that’s not only mining them, but it’s processing them and these are critical for national defense as well as for our economy.
“ And this Congress and this administration made a real focus on bringing that back to the United States.
“The good news is we have deposits of all of these critical minerals in the United States and we don’t have to depend on China. He expounded on unethical methods involving child slave labor.
He said they go to Africa and exploit areas of Africa involving child slave labor in the cobalt mines in the Congo. “And all of that product ends up here in our consumer goods, so we know we can do it better, but the problem is they control so much of the market that when somebody announces a new project, the Chinese will dump that product into the market and drive the price down that makes the economics look bad for the project.
What is being done to counter this type of takeover and to ensure that American products and factories remain?
So to counter this the XM Bank and the administration and I’m working with several others in congress came up with this plan for something called “the vault” .Which is like the strategic petroleum reserve, but for critical minerals. So this organization will be formed, funded by the XM Bank, so that when U.S. companies produce critical minerals they can go into the vault which will set a floor on the prices… so that if China tries to dump product into the market it doesn’t drive the price down to put these plants out of business in the United States and you’ve also got big consumers of critical minerals like General motors and the defense department that will buy their critical minerals from the vault.
“So this is the US government going head-to-head with the Chinese government if they’re going to try to put our companies out of business. No single company in the United States can go head-to-head with the Chinese Communist party with the United States federal government definitely can and we have just got to be smarter about the way we look out for our companies here in America and for our national security and strategic needs.
“All that to say lithium is one of those critical minerals and there’s the largest deposit of it in the Smackover formation so there’s a lot of positive signs about what could happen with the lithium in South Arkansas.
I’ve heard there are concerns with lithium production at an all time high, the water supply may be affected… is this true?
Westernam said the Smackover Lithium project, the extraction method, relies on Direct Lithium Extraction, or DLE. This process uses advanced technologies to selectively capture lithium directly from brines without needing large evaporation ponds. Instead, it returns the treated brine underground, which minimizes net water consumption and avoids the water supply issues often linked to more traditional methods.
“ The idea is that we leave it better than we found it.” Westerman said.
“We’ve got so much potential here because we’ve got resources and we got common sense people and there’s so many external factors that just throw a wet blanket on that and that’s what I’m trying to do is make the path a little smoother,” Bruce Westerman