新兴工业技术能否竞争？界定美国直接锂提取的市场可行性（英）

Frances Fitzgerald and Beia Spiller About the Authors Frances Fitzgeraldis a Master of Public Policy candidate at Harvard Kennedy School,where she studies the geopolitics of energy and green industrial policy. Previously,she worked as a Senior Analyst at a geopolitical consultancy and a staffer at the U.S.House of Representatives. She holds a B.A. in Political Economy from the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley. Beia Spilleris a fellow and the director for Resources for the Future’s (RFF’s)Transportation Program. Prior to joining RFF, she was Lead Senior Economist atEnvironmental Defense Fund (EDF), where she worked for almost a decade. She wasalso a Board member for the Association of Environmental and Resource Economiststhrough 2024. Spiller is an energy economist, with experience working on electricityand transportation issues. During her time at EDF, she participated in many electricutility proceedings in New York and California, with a goal of ushering in a cleaner,more efficient and equitable energy system. Acknowledgements We thank Aaron Malone for providing excellent feedback on and input to the report,and Sheryl Edwards, Jennifer Fowler, Jamie Liang, Remi Loiseau, Chad Martin,Arthur Orduña and Tim Wright for providing us with helpful background insights andinformation on DLE in SW Arkansas. Any errors are our own. About RFF Resources for the Future (RFF) is an independent, nonprofit research institution inWashington, DC. Its mission is to improve environmental, energy, and natural resourcedecisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. RFF iscommitted to being the most widely trusted source of research insights and policysolutions leading to a healthy environment and a thriving economy. The views expressed here are those of the individual authors and may differ from thoseof other RFF experts, its officers, or its directors. Sharing Our Work Our work is available for sharing and adaptation under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. Youcan copy and redistribute our material in any medium or format; you must giveappropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made,and you may not apply additional restrictions. You may do so in any reasonablemanner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.You may not use the material for commercial purposes. If you remix, transform, orbuild upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material. For moreinformation, visithttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Executive Summary Even as the United States rolls back renewable-energy tax incentives, globalinvestments in clean technologies are rising (IEA 2025). This financial and industrialinfusion has the potential to profoundly affect local economies. In rural southernArkansas, for example, companies are poised to spend billions to extract the region’slithium, filling the landscape with pipelines and wells while also injecting significantcash into the local economy. At the national level, the implications may be even moreconsequential; today, US supply chains for batteries—used to power everythingfrom consumer electronics to military systems—depend almost entirely on lithiumimports. In many ways, the technology the Arkansas projects plan to use, direct lithiumextraction (DLE), represents the promise of a new green industrial economy that coulddeliver high-tech growth, economic revitalization, and climate benefits all at once. Realizing these benefits will be easier said than done. The lithium market haswhipsawed over the past five years, and for every analysis predicting that DLE willreshape global markets (Patel 2023), another warns that its commercial viabilityis still far from certain (Pedersen and Iqbal 2024). Drawing on conversations withindustry experts, company feasibility studies, and project finance modeling, this reportprovides novel insights into the specific technological, market, and policy conditionsthat DLE would require to succeed in the United States. We take an in-depth look atthree projects in the Smackover region of Arkansas—ExxonMobil’s Saltwerx, StandardLithium’s Lanxess project, and the Reynolds Unit developed by Southwest Arkansas(SWA), a joint venture between Standard Lithium and Norway’s Equinor—as well asAnson Resources’ Paradox Project in Utah. SWA Reynolds offers particularly strongpublic data and is thus the focus of much of this analysis. Resources for the Future (RFF) has identified three core challenges to market viabilityfor DLE: price volatility of lithium, technological uncertainty, and macroeconomicfactors. Regarding price, we find that lithium prices must rise well above summer 2025levels, which were around $10,000 per tonne of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE),1to make the US projects profitable. Prices are currently in a multiyear trough, havingfallen 80 percent since 2023 because of a surge in production in China