LG Energy Solution signs a 10-year Arkansas lithium deal starting 2029

LG Energy Solution has signed a binding 10-year take-or-pay agreement for 8,000 tonnes a year of battery-grade lithium carbonate from Smackover Lithium in Arkansas, a joint venture 45% owned by Norway’s state-controlled Equinor, starting in 2029. LG signed a comparable offtake with Vulcan Energy in Germany in January 2022 that was due to begin delivering in 2025.

LG Energy Solution has bought a decade of American lithium. The battery maker will take 8,000 tonnes a year of battery-grade carbonate from 2029, Bloomberg reported.

The seller is partly Norwegian. Smackover Lithium is a joint venture in which Standard Lithium holds 55% and operates, and Equinor holds the other 45%.

Equinor is not a mining company. The Norwegian state owns two thirds of it, and it bought into two Standard Lithium projects in May 2024 for $30M in past costs plus development funding.

The lithium is a long way down. It sits in brine in limestone about two miles beneath Arkansas, and is pulled out chemically rather than mined.

The agreement is binding and take-or-pay. It is the project’s second, after a matching 8,000 tonnes for the trader Trafigura in March, and together they cover roughly 90% of the targeted offtake.

The pitch has moved past cars. “There’s no data centers without energy and energy storage,” Standard Lithium chief executive David Park told Bloomberg.

Europe has the same geology and none of the industry. The Commission’s own raw materials factsheet puts the EU at less than 0.1% of global lithium mine production.

Processing is the worse number. The same factsheet records 100% import dependency at the processing stage, against a Critical Raw Materials Act benchmark of 40% of consumption from EU processing by 2030.

One European project is of comparable size. Vulcan Energy’s Lionheart in the Upper Rhine Valley targets 24,000 tonnes a year of lithium hydroxide from geothermal brine, which bears on Europe’s battery ambitions.

LG signed for that lithium first. It agreed a binding offtake with Vulcan in January 2022, for 41,000 to 50,000 tonnes over five years, with commercial delivery set to start in 2025.

Those deliveries have not begun. Vulcan took its final investment decision in December 2025, started building its Frankfurt plant in April and now targets commercial production in 2028, in a market reshaped after Northvolt.

Which is the comparison worth making. The European contract signed four years ago was due to deliver last year, and the American one signed on Monday is scheduled for 2029.

Recycling moves faster than a drill rig. Europe’s first industrial battery recycling plant opened this year, and the Act’s 25% recycling benchmark is the only one that does not need a new borehole.