For most of the past century, the salty water trapped a mile and a half beneath Bowie and Miller counties was a nuisance. Oil and gas crews called it “brine,” pumped it up by accident, and paid to push it back down. Now that same brine is one of the most valuable things in the ground around Texarkana, because it is loaded with lithium, the metal that powers electric-car batteries, phones, power tools, and a growing share of the U.S. military’s equipment.

This guide explains what the Smackover Formation is, why our two-state region sits at the center of a national race for domestic lithium, who the players are, and what is and is not settled about money, jobs, and regulation. Where a fact is still moving or unconfirmed, we say so.

The Smackover Formation is a layer of porous limestone that formed roughly 150 million years ago, in the Jurassic period, from an ancient sea that once covered the Gulf region. As that sea evaporated and got buried over millions of years, it left behind a band of rock that stretches under parts of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle.

Texarkana old-timers already know this rock, even if they never heard the name. The Smackover has been one of the South’s great oil and gas producers since the 1920s, and it has long been mined for bromine, a chemical used in flame retardants and drilling fluids. South Arkansas built an entire chemical industry on Smackover brine around El Dorado and Magnolia.

What changed is the lithium. The same deep, super-salty water that carries bromine also carries lithium, and in this formation the concentrations are high by world standards. The USGS has measured lithium above 400 milligrams per liter in southern Arkansas brine, with some project areas reporting averages in the 440 to 600 range. Those numbers put the Smackover in the same conversation as the famous brine deposits of South America. The brine sits deep, generally on the order of 8,000 to 10,000 feet down, which means lithium here is reached with oil-and-gas-style drilling, not open-pit mines.

When most people picture lithium mining, they think of hard-rock pit mines (Australia) or enormous evaporation ponds baking in the sun for a year or more (Chile and Argentina). The Smackover plan is neither. The method here is direct lithium extraction, or DLE. The basic loop:

Companies argue DLE is cleaner and faster than the alternatives: a much smaller land footprint than pit mines, far less water than evaporation ponds, and brine returned underground rather than left in tailings. Those claims are central to the pitch to landowners and regulators, and they are still being proven at full commercial scale, because no Smackover plant is yet producing lithium in large volumes.

Several companies hold leases across Bowie County, Texas, and Miller County, Arkansas, plus the surrounding counties. Here are the ones most relevant to our region, ordered roughly by how close they sit to Texarkana.

TerraVolta Resources — “Project Liberty Owl”

The project sitting closest to Texarkana. TerraVolta Resources, backed by Houston investment firm The Energy & Minerals Group, plans a lithium plant that the U.S. Department of Energy mapped to Miller County, Arkansas.

• Investment: more than $1 billion
• Federal support: a $225 million DOE grant selected for award negotiation in September 2024
• Output: at least 25,000 tons of lithium carbonate a year, enough for roughly 500,000 EVs
• Jobs: 125+ permanent positions in the region
• Timeline: construction targeted around 2028, operations around 2029

In June 2025, TerraVolta and The Energy & Minerals Group sold roughly 100,000 net acres of Smackover leases in East Texas and southwest Arkansas to Chevron, bringing one of the world’s largest oil companies directly into our region’s play. TerraVolta said it continues to advance its remaining resource.

Standard Lithium & Equinor — “Smackover Lithium”

The most advanced project in the region. Standard Lithium, in a joint venture with Norwegian energy giant Equinor, runs the South West Arkansas Project centered in Columbia and Lafayette counties, west and southwest of Texarkana, on roughly 30,000 acres of brine leases. The venture is also exploring lithium prospects in East Texas.

• Capacity: about 22,500 tons a year of battery-quality lithium carbonate, billed as the first commercial lithium production in the Smackover
• Federal support: a separate $225 million DOE grant
• First customer: commodity trader Trafigura agreed to buy 8,000 metric tons a year for a decade
• Timeline: first production targeted around 2028 to 2029, subject to a final investment decision

ExxonMobil — “Mobil Lithium”

ExxonMobil entered the Smackover in 2023 and has acquired brine rights to well over 120,000 acres (the company cites 300,000-plus net acres across the formation). It drilled its first Arkansas lithium well, plans to convert brine to battery-grade material on-site, and markets the future product as Mobil Lithium. Its subsidiary Saltwerx won approval for a roughly 56,000-acre production unit and is targeting first production in the 2027 to 2030 window.

EnergyX and the Red River Army Depot

Austin-based EnergyX has set up operations on former Army depot land in Bowie County to develop and test extraction methods. The company says its DLE process returns unused brine to the formation the same day with very little water use. EnergyX is closely tied to the federal Army-hub effort described below.

One of the most consequential local developments has nothing to do with electric cars. It is about the military.

The Red River Army Depot, the roughly 15,000-acre installation about 18 miles west of Texarkana in Bowie County, sits directly on top of one of the country’s largest lithium-brine deposits. Lithium powers a growing list of defense equipment, from drones and night-vision gear to submarines and aircraft, and the U.S. currently leans heavily on China for it.

In May 2026, U.S. Rep. Nathaniel Moran of East Texas, joined by U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, introduced the Army Organic Industrial Base Mineral Partnerships Act of 2026. The bill would create a legal pathway for private companies to extract lithium from beneath military installations like Red River, which currently has no such mechanism. Supporters frame it as a national-security measure and describe a vision of Texarkana as the Army’s premier hub for lithium-battery production, with new jobs and tax revenue for Bowie County.

Two unsettled issues will shape how much this boom actually benefits local landowners and governments: royalties and regulation.

Royalties: how much do landowners get paid?

When a company produces a mineral from under your land, you are typically owed a royalty. In Arkansas, the Oil and Gas Commission set the state’s first lithium royalty rate in 2025 at 2.5 percent. That is well below the 12.5 percent many landowners and mineral-rights owners argued for, and the gap caused real friction. Companies countered that a separate brine-production fee pushes the effective rate closer to 3 percent. The rate is tied to the volume of lithium produced and the market price, so payouts rise and fall with the price of lithium.

The 2.5 percent rate was approved for the Standard Lithium and Exxon/Saltwerx units in south Arkansas. If you own minerals in Miller County or elsewhere over the Smackover, this is the number to watch, and the one to get professional advice about before signing any lease.

Regulation: Arkansas has a framework, Texas does not (yet)

Arkansas has decades of brine-regulation experience through its Oil and Gas Commission, including the unitization and royalty processes now being applied to lithium. Texas is, by comparison, starting close to scratch. Industry watchers have openly called the Texas side “the Wild West,” because the state does not yet have a comparable rulebook for lithium brine, and there is no current mechanism to access lithium under federal land such as the Red River Army Depot. That gap is one reason the Arkansas (Miller County) projects are moving first, and why the federal Army bill and any future Texas legislation matter so much for the Bowie County side.

If even a couple of these projects reach full production, the regional impact is significant. Beyond the lithium companies themselves, brine plants drive demand in trucking, construction, education and training, retail, and healthcare. TerraVolta alone projects more than 125 permanent jobs, and the combined investment announced across the regional projects already runs into the billions of dollars.

The realistic timeline is the back half of this decade. First commercial Smackover lithium is targeted for roughly 2028 and 2029, with the Miller County and south Arkansas projects leading and the Bowie County, Texas, side dependent on new state and federal rules. The biggest variables are the price of lithium (which has swung hard in recent years) and whether DLE performs at commercial scale the way its backers promise.

For now, Texarkana sits on top of a resource the rest of the country wants, with global oil companies, a Norwegian state energy firm, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. Army all circling the same Jurassic saltwater. How much of that value stays here will come down to royalties, regulation, and execution.

• The formation: Smackover, Jurassic-age limestone, about 8,000 to 10,000 ft deep, lithium brine above 400 mg/L.
• The resource (Arkansas portion, USGS 2024): 5.1 to 19.0 million metric tons of lithium.
• Closest project to Texarkana: TerraVolta “Project Liberty Owl,” Miller County, AR. About $1B, $225M DOE grant, ~25,000 tons/yr, 125+ jobs, operations targeted 2029; ~100,000 acres of regional leases sold to Chevron in 2025.
• Most advanced project: Standard Lithium + Equinor “Smackover Lithium,” Columbia/Lafayette counties, AR. ~22,500 tons/yr, Trafigura offtake, first production ~2028 to 2029.
• Oil-major play: ExxonMobil “Mobil Lithium” / Saltwerx, 120,000+ acres, first production targeted 2027 to 2030.
• Army hub: Red River Army Depot, Bowie County. The “Army Organic Industrial Base Mineral Partnerships Act of 2026” (Moran/Cruz/Cornyn) would open military land to lithium extraction. Not yet law.
• Royalty: Arkansas set 2.5 percent (landowners wanted 12.5 percent). Texas has no lithium-brine framework yet.

Facts in this guide are drawn from the U.S. Geological Survey, the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission, the U.S. Department of Energy, company announcements, and reporting by the Texas Tribune, Arkansas Advocate, Arkansas Business, and others. Figures tied to specific projects come from company and government statements and may change. This guide is informational and is not investment, legal, or mineral-rights advice.