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The growing solar industry needs more workers equipped to get panels into fields and onto roofs. Meanwhile, disinvested populations — including communities of color and formerly incarcerated people — often lack access to such jobs.
An Illinois program aims to tackle both of those problems at once — and goes beyond a few months of training to ensure workers have everything they need to succeed, Audrey Henderson reports for the Energy News Network.
With funding from community solar developer Cultivate Power, the Chicago-based Renewing Sovereignty Program works with a training partner to provide a 13-week solar installation program for people leaving the criminal justice system. Last year’s cohort of 12 trainees all got jobs in solar and related industries. Jacqueline Williams, who works with a social services organization that administers RSP, said this year’s 18 cohorts are on track for similar results.
RSP’s holistic approach to jobs training is a big reason for that success.
“Anything that you can think of that would prevent someone from being successful in a really intensive 13-week program, we’re going to assess that barrier and we’re going to provide it,” Williams told ENN. That includes housing, food, child care and transportation — and that support continues for a year after trainees graduate.In turn, those newly trained solar workers are helping Illinois meet its ambitious clean energy and climate goals.
Read more about RSP’s solar training success at the Energy News Network.
🐢 Hydrogen’s holdup: Uncertainty surrounding federal tax credit rules has left the clean hydrogen industry stuck in neutral, but experts say the delay is providing much-needed time to figure out the best uses for the fuel. (Canary Media)
🪧 Who’s behind anti-protest laws: Records reveal how fossil fuel lobbyists worked with state lawmakers to craft anti-protest laws that increase penalties for non-violent participants and aim to quiet opposition to fossil fuel infrastructure. (The Guardian)
🚘 City charging deserts: Rideshare drivers are adopting electric vehicles at five times the rate of other drivers but say they’re struggling to find places to charge in major cities. (Axios)
🥵 Heat waves: Advocates sound the alarm over a lack of policies stopping utilities from shutting off customers’ power for nonpayment during deadly heat waves. (The Guardian)
👷 Building a clean workforce: The governors of 22 states launch an initiative aimed at getting 1 million residents to complete climate-related apprenticeships by 2035, pledging to set up funding and partnerships to expand the clean energy workforce. (The Hill)
🌡️ Hands-on grid management: Utility customers around the country are signing up for programs to save money in return for allowing power companies to remotely adjust their thermostats to manage grid demand. (Washington Post)
⚛️ Nuclear resurgence: The Energy Department approves a $1.52 billion loan guarantee to restart the closed Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, part of a resurgence of interest in nuclear power in the U.S. (New York Times)
🇺🇲 Plus, some politics
NUCLEAR: The owners of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant are seeking a $1.6 billion, taxpayer-backed federal loan guarantee to help finance its plans to restart and sell electricity to Microsoft. (Washington Post)
ALSO: The Three Mile Island plant will need extensive and rigorous safety inspections if it is to come online again to provide power. (Scientific American)
WIND:
GRID: PJM Interconnection refuses to let power generators add battery storage to facilities that have surplus grid capacity, confounding clean energy advocates. (Canary Media)
NATURAL GAS: A proposal to build a natural gas power plant in Newark, New Jersey – the fourth in the same neighborhood – faces intense local opposition from residents who say the plan runs counter to the state’s renewable energy goals. (NJ Spotlight News)
OIL & GAS: A Pennsylvania Republican introduces a bill that would sell state alternative energy credits and use the funds to cap abandoned oil and gas wells. (Pennsylvania Business Report)
SOLAR:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Electric vehicle ownership in Connecticut is concentrated in wealthy Fairfield County, raising questions about how the state can better encourage more widespread adoption. (CT Post)
TRANSPORTATION: Vermont is holding public meetings as part of its investigation into the possibility of using a cap-and-invest strategy to lower emissions from transportation in the state. (WCAX)
BUILDINGS: A 17-story Boston office building is the first commercial project to use cement made by a Massachusetts company with technology to significantly reduce emissions during the production process. (CommonWealth Beacon)
CLARIFICATION: A Pennsylvania solar bill would not require developers to pay up front for future costs of removing panels. An item in yesterday’s newsletter mischaracterized the bill.
A newly published study examining property values near dozens of large Midwest solar farms has found no significant negative impact — and even a slight positive effect — from the projects, according to the data.
Loyola University researcher Gilbert Michaud has attended scores of community meetings about proposed solar projects across the Midwest. In past research, he quantified that property values were the most common concern brought up in local hearings about proposed utility-scale solar.
And while solar arrays may have an aesthetic impact, property values are influenced by a wide range of other factors, such as the quality of schools and the local economy.
“I’ve observed a lot of the negative comments framed as ‘I think’ or ‘I saw something on social media,’” said Michaud, an assistant professor of environmental policy at the School of Environmental Sustainability at Loyola University Chicago. So he sought to “elevate the discussion from ‘I think, I think, I think,’” by injecting it with some hard data.
His latest study, published in the December 2024 issue of the journal Solar Compass, looked at property values surrounding 70 utility-scale solar projects in the Midwest and found they actually had a minor positive effect — increasing values 0.5% to 2%.
“While the impact itself — of a few thousand dollars — might not be incredibly meaningful,” said Michaud, “clearly these projects drive economic development in rural communities, through jobs, tax contributions, etcetera, which in turn increase residential property values.”
Michael Wildermuth, a landowner in Allen County, Ohio, was glad to hear about the proposed 300 MW Birch Solar farm, since he supports clean energy and welcomed the economic benefits. Wildermuth cofounded an organization, Allen Auglaize Coalition for Reasonable Energy (named for the two counties where the project would be sited), to advocate for the project as it faced local opposition.
“The nearest neighbors became enraged so quickly and voiced their rage so loudly that others were placed in a reactionary mode,” Wildermuth said. “The neighbors were greatly concerned with property values and flooding. The landowners were afraid of these vocal neighbors, the public officials were afraid of being on the wrong side of a political ‘hot potato’ issue.”
The developer appealed to the Ohio State Supreme Court, and Allen Auglaize Coalition for Reasonable Energy filed an amicus brief in support of the solar farm. Wildermuth wishes more data about property values had been available during the debate. He also thinks opponents ignored the $81 million the developer estimated it would contribute to the economy, with local officials saying the project would have little local economic benefit since the power would go to an Amazon facility.
“Just get people ‘all het up’ and you don’t have to deal with reason and facts,” Wildermuth said.
“Do I think solar farms could actually improve property values or the financial well-being of landowners and neighbors of solar farms? Yes, I do. We argued that. We also pointed out that, in the rural area where the farm was planned, the properties would remain stable for 30 years,” preventing them from being developed for other purposes that neighbors may find less desirable.
The study, co-authored by Loyola graduate Sampson Hao, notes that the benefits of rooftop solar on energy bills and property values are well-documented. But less is known about how utility-scale solar farms impact nearby properties — even though utility-scale solar accounts for about three-quarters of new solar development.
The study reviewed 70 solar farms built in the Midwest between 2009 and 2022, from a database by Berkeley Laboratory including solar farms over 5 MW. Hao and Michaud analyzed property values compiled by real estate firm Zillow, comparing values five years before a solar project became operational, with values at the operational date, which is often about two years after construction starts.
They aggregated by zip code, and controlled for factors like the COVID-19 pandemic that could affect housing values in a given year. Three-bedroom houses were used as a measure of overall property values. They also analyzed “control group” zip codes near the solar farm zip codes, but without solar farms, to account for other factors that might affect property values.
Michaud noted that while the number of bedrooms and other factors have a much larger impact on property values, the small positive impact that nearby solar farms could have could be similar to that of cultural amenities, like arts centers. Solar farms can also have an impact on schools — a major factor in determining property values — since solar projects augment local tax bases. Solar developers also often make ongoing contributions to school districts in the form of donations, supplies and energy education opportunities.
The study showed high numbers of solar farms going online in 2017 and 2021, with a smaller spike in 2020.
The projects included in the study range from a 10 MW urban installation in Chicago, installed by Exelon in 2010, to the 268 MW Riverstart Solar Park in Indiana, from 2021. Only 11 of the 70 projects studied were over 100 MW in capacity. Indiana had the most arrays at 22, followed by 14 in Minnesota, eight in Michigan and seven in Illinois.
The most beneficial impact on property values was from solar farms between 5 and 20 MW in size, perhaps in part because these can be hidden by vegetative buffers.
“The paper is not about a house that’s 200 feet away from a solar project, that’s very rarely the case,” said Hao, noting that developers often offer to buy properties at above market value in such situations. “We wanted to look at a bigger scale. A project between 5 and 20 MW, you’re really not supposed to even see these with your bare eyes.”
Michaud said that debunking myths around solar farms is particularly important in the Midwest, where there is much untapped potential for solar. While it has less sun than the Southeast and California, which have led the nation in solar farm development, the Midwest has massive stretches of agricultural land where solar can be deployed along with crops.
“This is a really important finding for Midwestern government officials, land owners, and many others to know about,” Michaud said. “Many of these folks are now making decisions about whether to host a large-scale solar project in their community, and the potential impacts to property values is often something that comes up in local debates and at local hearings. Data can help tell a story and move the debate beyond anecdotal or subjective arguments.”
The Loyola study cites a 2018 analysis of 956 specific solar farms by a University of Texas researcher that found no conclusive evidence of impact on property values one way or another. The Loyola researchers also noted a study by Berkeley Laboratory that found about a 1% decline in property values around 2,000 solar farms in six states on the east and west coasts and in Minnesota.
“Most Midwestern states have 10 to 20 gigawatts of potential utility-scale solar in their queue, and developers are coming off of the coasts where the grid is more congested and there is less land for development, targeting agricultural land in the center of the country,” Michaud said. “Finding a large plot of land with good solar irradiation and access to a substation is the sweet spot for a lot of solar developers, and in essence, positive attributes of farming crops in the Midwest are also positive attributes for farming ground-mounted, large-scale solar.”
The study notes the irony that perception plays a significant role in determining property values, and fears about property value declines can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Projection and speculation drive market forces,” Michaud said. “A farmer might be angry that a solar farm is going in the community, he’s going to sell and move to Florida. A buyer thinks, ‘maybe I can negotiate this price down,’ and the house sells for less than its value, and an appraiser looks at that. But none of this is real, it’s just based on speculation and emotion, which then drives data points … it all started with an emotional response.”
Hao theorized that developers who make poor choices in siting and managing solar farms can have an impact on property values elsewhere, if negative stories about solar spread by word of mouth or social media.
“Is a developer doing their best to have as much of a buffer as economically feasible?” he asked. “Is the developer making vegetative screenings so you’re not going to see millions of panels? Is the developer doing their best to move the inverter to the center of the leased land so noise doesn’t get over the road? There’s a lot of things at the end of the day that developers can do better. It’s up to the developers to really step up their game to eliminate those potential negative effects.”
The Loyola study notes that solar developers often do things like hosting county fairs or supporting local organizations that can increase property values. Michaud said it’s possible such dynamics were reflected in their data showing small increases in property values, along with other benefits.
“From an economic perspective,” Michaud said, “locals should increasingly look at these data to understand the job opportunities, wages paid, new tax revenues and negligible or positive impacts on property values, and realize that large-scale solar projects might actually be an amenity in their community.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Michael Wildermuth planned to lease land for the Birch solar project, and that he personally filed an amicus brief in the case. The story has also been updated to clarify the scope of Gilbert Michaud’s research.
COAL: Clean energy advocates push back on Duke Energy’s new plan to extend the life of the country’s second-largest coal plant, the Gibson plant in Indiana, by three years to 2038 to meet rising electricity demand. (Inside Climate News)
CLEAN ENERGY:
UTILITIES: Protesters outside We Energies’ headquarters in Milwaukee call on the utility to invest in more renewable energy instead of gas plants, and to limit requests for rate increases. (Wisconsin Public Radio)
GRID: A new U.S. Energy Department study identifies parts of U.S. grid territories that could be suitable for new transmission interconnections. (Utility Dive)
OIL & GAS: The Ohio Supreme Court rejects a company’s effort to block a gas pipeline from traversing its property in Maumee after raising safety and environmental concerns. (Ohio Capital Journal)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
CLIMATE: Researchers in northern Minnesota are testing different formulations for biochar, a charcoal-like material that advocates say stores carbon dioxide that would have otherwise been released into the atmosphere. (MPR News)
NUCLEAR: Regulators and lawmakers should do more to make nuclear reactor licensing more accessible and craft regulations that allow existing reactors to support data centers and hydrogen producers, panelists say during a clean energy conference. (Utility Dive)
COMMENTARY: Advocates continue to see longstanding failures in enforcing groundwater protections from the widespread injection of oil and gas drilling wastewater, including in Ohio. (Natural Resources Defense Council)
CLEAN ENERGY: The Inflation Reduction Act has spurred more than $115 billion in clean energy manufacturing investment in its first two years, with a sodium battery plant and a solar panel factory among the latest project announcements. (Canary Media)
ALSO:
OIL & GAS:
BUILDINGS:
WIND: Opposition to offshore wind projects along the East Coast can be traced back to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s fight against wind turbines in the Nantucket Sound near his family’s Cape Cod estate. (Inside Climate News)
UTILITIES: Orlando, Florida’s municipal utility moves to build two new solar facilities, add battery storage and jettison 90% of its fossil fuel plants, but customers push back against plans to charge more for power during peak times and decrease solar net metering payments. (Orlando Sentinel)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
WORKFORCE: The governors of 22 states launch an initiative aimed at getting 1 million residents to complete climate-related apprenticeships by 2035, pledging to set up funding and partnerships to expand the clean energy workforce. (The Hill)
POLITICS:
CLEAN ENERGY: Large tech firms part of the Sustainable Steel Buyers Platform launch a competitive bidding process asking steelmakers to deliver 1 million metric tons of near-zero emissions steel a year by 2028. (Canary Media)
HYDROGEN: There’s been little progress on plans to convert a troubled West Virginia coal-fired power plant to run on hydrogen, and its new owners have operated it barely half the time since acquiring it a year ago. (West Virginia Public Broadcasting)
EMISSIONS:
NUCLEAR: The nuclear industry reckons with how to best take advantage of a sweeping pro-nuclear law passed in June and weighs future legislative goals. (Utility Dive)
GRID:
ELECTRIFICATION:
COAL: An Alaska utility scraps plans to shutter a troubled coal plant, saying it needs the facility’s generation to offset a looming natural gas shortage in the Cook Inlet. (Alaska Beacon)
SOLAR:
WIND:
CLEAN ENERGY:
HYDROPOWER: The U.S. Energy Department awards Pacific Gas & Electric $34.5 million to fund 19 hydropower projects in northern California. (Power)
GRID: California’s grid operator says new data center interconnections have led them to increase demand forecasts for the San Jose area by 60%. (RTO Insider, subscription)
MINING:
ELECTRIFICATION: Washington state’s building industry and conservative advocates push a ballot measure that would prohibit local and state governments from banning natural gas hookups. (Crosscut)
EMISSIONS: Colorado advocates say a newly launched state initiative using cutting-edge technologies to monitor landfill methane pollution could be a model for slashing emissions of the potent greenhouse gas. (Canary Media)
PUBLIC LANDS: A federal court begins hearing a Utah lawsuit seeking to revoke presidents’ authority to establish landscape-scale national monuments that block mining and oil and gas drilling on hundreds of thousands of acres of public land. (Bloomberg Law)
BIOFUELS: A company looks to produce biofuels by injecting molasses into coal seams in Wyoming, extracting the methane and leaving the carbon dioxide underground. (Buffalo Bulletin)
HYDROGEN: Uncertainty surrounding federal tax credit rules has left the clean hydrogen industry stuck in neutral, but experts say the delay is providing much-needed time to figure out the best uses for the fuel. (Canary Media)
ALSO: General Motors plans to partner with a large supplier to build a hydrogen fuel cell plant in Detroit, which could take a few years until production starts. (Crain’s Detroit, subscription)
OIL & GAS:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
UTILITIES: Advocates sound the alarm over a lack of policies stopping utilities from shutting off customers’ power for nonpayment during deadly heat waves. (The Guardian)
GRID:
NUCLEAR: The U.S. Energy Department greenlights California startup Oklo’s plan to begin developing an advanced nuclear reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory. (Newsweek)
POLITICS: Environmentalists push back against a bill that would weaken semiconductor industry oversight that President Biden is reportedly set to sign. (The Hill)
PIPELINES: A planned 645-mile pipeline across Texas from the Permian Basin to a Louisiana terminal creates landowner concerns about its effects on nearly 13,000 acres of land, including the possibility of eminent domain. (KOSA)
MINING: Arkansas sees a rush to mine lithium for batteries, triggering memories of unscrupulous and shady behavior during a previous oil boom and raising concerns about the ephemeral nature of extraction. (Grist)
COMMENTARY: Federal support for carbon capture and storage relies on the assumption that unproven and prohibitively expensive technologies will soon become viable, an energy analyst writes. (Utility Dive)
This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.
This story was supported by the Fund for Environmental Journalism of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
In the dusty light of a decades-old lunch counter in Lewisville, Arkansas, Chantell Dunbar-Jones expressed optimism at what the lithium boom coming to this stretch of the state will mean for her hometown. She sees jobs, economic development, and a measure of prosperity returning to a region that needs them. After waving to a gaggle of children crossing the street in honey-colored afternoon sunshine, the city council member assessed the future as best she could. “Not to say that everything’s perfect, but I feel like the positives way outweigh the negative,” she said.
Lewisville sits in the southwest corner of the state, squarely atop the Smackover Formation, a limestone aquifer that stretches from northeast Texas to the Gulf Coast of Florida and has for 100 years spurted oil and natural gas. The petroleum industry boomed here in the 1920s and peaked again in the 1960s before declining to a steady trickle over the decades that followed. But the Smackover has more to give. The brine and bromine pooled 10,000 feet below the surface contains lithium, a critical component in the batteries needed to move beyond fossil fuels.
Exxon Mobil is among at least four companies lining up to draw it from the earth. It opened a test site not far from Lewisville late last year and plans to extract enough of the metal to produce 100,000 electric vehicle batteries by 2026 and 1 million by 2030. Another company, Standard Lithium, believes its leases may hold 1.8 million metric tons of the material and will spend $1.3 billion building a processing facility to handle it all. All of this has Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders predicting that her state will become the nation’s leading lithium producer.
With so much money to be made, Dunbar-Jones and other public officials find themselves being courted by extraction company executives eager to tell them what all of this could mean for the people and places they lead. They have been hosting town meetings, promising to build lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with the communities and residents of the area. So far, Dunbar-Jones and many others are optimistic. They see a looming renaissance, even as other community members acknowledge the mixed legacies of those who earn their money pulling resources from the ground. Such companies provide livelihoods, but only as long as there is something to extract, and they often leave pollution in their wake.
The companies eyeing the riches buried beneath the pine forests and bayous promise plenty of jobs and opportunities, and paint themselves as responsible stewards of the environment. But drawing brine to the surface is a water-intensive process, and similar operations in Nevada aren’t expected to create more than a few hundred permanent jobs. It’s high-paying work, but often requires advanced degrees many in this region don’t possess. Looking beyond the employment question, some local residents are wary of the companies looking to lease their land for lithium. It brings to mind memories of the unscrupulous and shady dealings common during the oil boom of a century ago.
For residents of Lewisville, which is majority Black, such concerns are set against a broader history of bigotry and the fact that even as other towns prospered, they have long been the last to benefit from promises of the sort being made these days. Folks throughout the area are quick to note that the wealth that flowed from the oil fields their parents and grandparents worked benefited some more than others, even as they lived with the ecological devastation that industry left behind.
Dunbar-Jones is confident that, if nothing else, concern about their reputation and a need to ensure cordial relations with community leaders will sway lithium companies into supporting local needs. “All I can say is right now it’s up in the air as to what they will do,” she said, “but it seems promising.”
Lewisville sits just west of Magnolia, El Dorado, and Camden, three cities that outline the “golden triangle” region that prospered after the discovery of oil in 1920. In an area long dependent upon timber, the plantation economy transformed almost instantly as tenant farmers, itinerant prospectors, and small landholders became rich. Within five years, 3,483 wells dotted the land, and Arkansas was producing 73 million barrels annually.
Although the boom created great wealth, Lewisville remained largely rural, and its residents labored in the fields that made others rich. Still, the oil economy, coupled with the timber industry, brought a rush of saloons, itinerant workers, and hotels to many towns. Restaurants, supermarkets, and other trappings of a middle-class community soon followed, though Lewisville always lagged a bit behind.
That prosperity lasted a bit longer than the oil did. The first wells ran dry by the end of the 1920s, but the Smackover continued producing 20 to 30 million barrels annually until 1967, when it began a steady decline. These days, it offers about 4.4 million a year.
The shops that once served Lewisville and the furniture and feed factories that employed those who didn’t work the fields have long since gone. Jana Crank, who has lived here for 58 years, came of age in the 1960s and remembers prosperous times. She runs a community gallery in what’s left of downtown, where most buildings sport faded paint and cracked windows. “It used to be a TV fix-it shop,” Crank, a retired high school art teacher, said of the space.
As she spoke, a group of friends painted quietly. Canvases showing sunsets, crosses, and landscapes lined the walls. The scenes, bright and cheerful, stood in contrast to Lewisville, where retailers have moved on, the hospital has closed, and the schools have been consolidated to save money. Fewer than 900 people live here, about half as many as during the town’s peak in the 1970s. They tend to be older, with a median household income of around $30,000. “People are just dying out, their children don’t even live in town,” Crank said. “They have nothing to come back for.”
That could change. Jobs associated with mining rare-earth minerals are highly compensated and highly sought-after, many of them netting as much as $92,000 per year. State Commerce Secretary Hugh McDonald believes the state could provide 15% of the world’s lithium needs, and Sanders has said Arkansas is “moving at breakneck speed to become the lithium capital of America.”
A few steps in that direction already have been taken around Lewisville, the county seat of Lafayette County. It is home to 13 lithium test wells, the most in the region. They’re tucked away behind pine trees, fields of cattle, and, occasionally, homes. The dirt and gravel roads leading to them have been churned to slurry by heavy equipment.
Those who own and work the wells arrived quietly last year, their presence indicated by the increasing number of trucks with plates from nearby Texas and Louisiana, sparking rumors throughout the region. They officially announced themselves to Mayor Ethan Dunbar last fall, in visits to local officials, mostly county leaders, to initiate friendly relations and establish the basis for economic partnerships. Mayor Dunbar and the Lewisville City Council were invited to a public meeting where lithium company executives discussed their plans and took questions.
The town’s motto is “Building Community Pride,” something Dunbar-Jones, who is the mayor’s sister, takes seriously. She and others have hosted movie nights, community dinners, and, in a particular point of pride, clinics to help people convicted of crimes get their records expunged. Meanwhile, the city council, joined by a number of residents, has come together to nail down just what the lithium boom will mean for the town and to ensure everyone knows what’s in store.
That’s particularly important, Dunbar-Jones said, because 60% of the town’s residents are Black. “Typically in minority neighborhoods, people are not as aware of what’s going on, because the information just doesn’t trickle down to them the way it does to other people,” she said. “At the meetings with the actual lithium companies, there may be a handful of people of color there versus others. So that lets you know who’s getting that information.”
A representative of Exxon, the only company that responded to a request for comment, said it has strived to build ties with communities throughout the region. “We connect early and often with elected officials, community members and local leaders to have meaningful conversations, provide transparency, and find ways to give back,” the representative said. It has opened a community liaison office in Magnolia and has worked with the city’s Chamber of Commerce to sponsor community events. It also established a $100,000 endowment for Columbia and Lafayette counties to provide grants for “education, public safety, and quality-of-life initiatives.”
Folks in Lewisville would like to see more of that kind of attention. In March, the city, working with the University of Arkansas Hope-Texarkana, hosted a town hall meeting so residents could speak to lithium executives and express concerns. The mayor recalls it drawing a standing room-only crowd that expressed hope that the industry would bring jobs and revenue to town, but also worried about the environmental impact. Folks called on Exxon and other companies to support new housing and establish pathways for young people to work in the industry.
Venesha Sasser, who at 29 is the chief development officer of the local telephone company, sees the coming boom providing an opportunity to build generational wealth for families and resources, like broadband internet access, for communities. Any company that can invest $4 billion in a lithium operation can surely afford to toss a little back, Sasser said. “We want to make sure that whoever is investing in our community, and who we are investing in, actually means our people good.”
Sasser followed a trajectory common among young Black professionals from the area: She left to pursue an education, then returned to care for loved ones. As she got more involved in the community, she often found herself being treated a little differently, an experience Mayor Dunbar delicately described as bumping up against “old systems.” Lewisville is a majority-Black town in a majority-White county, and as of 2022, had a poverty rate of 23%. Although community leaders say they work well with colleagues in other towns and with county leaders, they also feel that they’ve had to elbow their way into conversations with lithium companies. They worry that the dynamics of the oil days, when Black men worked alongside whites but often in lower-paying, less desirable jobs and most of the money stayed in wealthier cities like El Dorado, will repeat themselves.
“You had people from Magnolia and El Dorado and Spring Hill and other places coming in and doing the work and reaping the benefits, and then when it was gone, they were gone,” said Virginia Henry, a retired school teacher who grew up in Lewisville and lives in Little Rock. Her ex-husband drilled for oil years ago, and the experience left her with a sour taste in her mouth. “I’m thinking it’s going to be pretty much the same,” she said. “They’re going to ease in, they want to do all this work and create all these jobs for somebody and then ease out when it’s done in a few years. Then here we’ll be with soil that can’t grow anything, contaminated water, and a whole bunch of kids with asthma.”
Mayor Dunbar, who is midway through his second term, is trying to balance reservations with optimism. “‘Imagine the possibilities.’ That’s my tagline,” he said, settling into a chair at City Hall. A blackboard behind him outlined his priorities: housing, recreation, education. He hopes support from companies like Tetra Technologies, which is developing a 6,138-acre project not far away, will finance those goals and give people a future that’s more stable than the past, one in which Lewisville’s children can pursue the same opportunities that kids in nearby, better-resourced communities can.
“Think about Albemarle in Magnolia,” he said, referring to the bromine plant about 30 miles up the road. “Get a job at Albemarle, you stay there 25 years, you earn a decent salary, you’d have a decent retirement. You can live well. Quality of life is good. We are hoping to see the same thing here.”
Many of the people poised to benefit from the lithium beneath their feet seem ambivalent about climate change. In El Dorado, in a bar called The Mink Eye, an oil refinery worker grimaced at the mention of electric vehicles. The next morning, retired oil workers gathered at Johnny B’s Grill scoffed at the idea of a boom. A waitress admitted that she’d bought stock in lithium companies, but said any faith that the industry will bring renewed prosperity does not necessarily mean folks are on board with the green transition. “These men drive diesels,” she said, pointing toward her customers. Still, she said, any jobs are good jobs.
That attitude pervades the state capitol in Little Rock, where politicians who don’t give much thought to why the energy transition is necessary cheer the state’s emerging role in it. The governor, who has cast doubt on human-caused climate change, has appeared at industry events like the Arkansas Lithium Innovation Summit to proclaim the state “bullish” on its reserves of the element. “We all knew that towns like El Dorado and Smackover were built by oil and gas,” Sanders told the audience. “But who knew that our quiet brine and bromine industry had the potential to change the world.”
Much of the world’s lithium is blasted out of rocks or drawn from brine left to evaporate in vast pools, leaving behind toxic residue. The companies descending on Arkansas plan to use a more sustainable method called direct lithium extraction, or DLE. It seems to be a bit more ecologically friendly and much less water-intensive than the massive pit mines or vast evaporation ponds often found in South America. It essentially pumps water into the aquifer, filters the lithium from the extracted brine, then returns it to the aquifer in what advocates call a largely closed system. Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, in a report prepared for the Nature Conservancy, said that “DLE appears to offer the lowest impacts of available extraction technologies.”
Still, the technology is relatively new. According to Yale Environment 360, Arkansas provides a suitable proving ground for the approach because it has abundant water, a large concentration of lithium, and an established network of wells, pipelines, and refineries. But there are concerns about the amount of water required and the waste material left behind, despite repeated assurances from lithium companies that the process is safe and sustainable.
Although DLE doesn’t require as much water as brine evaporation, in which that water is lost, “it is a freshwater consumption source,” Patrick Donnelly, of the Center for Biological Diversity, said in an interview with KUAF radio in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The waste generated by the process is another concern, he said, “in particular, a solid waste stream. It’s impossible for them to extract only the lithium.”
Locals are well aware of the impact brine can have on the land. Before anyone realized its value, oil and gas producers didn’t worry much about it leaking or spilling onto the ground, literally salting the earth. Some are concerned that the pipelines that will carry brine to refineries might leak, as they did in the oil days. Such fears are compounded by the fact the state Department of Environmental Quality relies on individuals to report problems and doesn’t appear to do much outreach to residents.
There’s also a lot of skepticism about how many jobs the boom may create. So far, Standard Lithium’s plant in El Dorado employs 91 people, said Douglas Zollner, who works with the Arkansas branch of the Nature Conservancy and has toured the facility. No one’s offered any projections on how many people might find work in the budding industry, but a lithium boom in Nevada suggests it may not be all that many. Construction of the Thacker Pass mine, which could produce 80,000 metric tons of lithium annually, is expected to generate 1,500 temporary construction and other jobs — but it will only employ 300 once operational.
Those jobs pay well, but typically require advanced training. Public universities like Arkansas Tech University are revising science and engineering curricula to meet the lithium industry’s needs, hoping to connect students with internships in the field. However, locals worry that disinvestment in schools in rural and largely Black communities will leave those who most need these jobs unable to attain the training necessary to land them.
Just how much money might flow into local communities remains another open question. Fossil fuel companies lease the land they drill and pay landowners royalties of 16.67% of their profit. Any oil pumped from the land also is taxed at 4 to 5% of its market value. This fee, called severance tax, is paid to the counties or towns from which the resource was extracted.
None of these things apply to lithium. So far, there is no severance tax on the metal, though the state levies a tax of $2.75 for every 1,000 barrels of the brine from which it is extracted. The state Oil and Gas Commission continues haggling over a royalty rate, though it seems unlikely the fee will be as high as those paid on oil and gas leases. When the state sought a double-digit royalty, the industry balked, arguing that extracting and processing lithium is expensive and officials ought to wait until production begins in earnest before deciding what’s fair.
Companies cannot extract and sell the metal for commercial use until the commission sets a royalty rate, a process expected to drag on for some time. On July 26, the major players in the Arkansas lithium industry filed a joint application seeking a rate of 1.82%. The South Arkansas Mineral Association — which represents the majority of landowners, which is to say, timber companies, oil companies, and other corporate interests — demanded a higher share.
Small landowners still hope to benefit, and the lack of clarity around royalties hasn’t done much to engender trust among locals wary of the companies looking to lease their land. Some folks, already offered terms, are using online forums to determine if they’re being stiffed. Others fear efforts to wrest land from the few Black families who own property, often passed between generations informally without a deed or title. Such land, called heirs’ property, accounts for more than one-third of Black-owned property in the South, and without the documentation required to prove ownership, land can be subject to court-ordered sales.
Many in Lewisville say they regularly receive calls and texts from people interested in buying land, and Henry has seen people checking out properties and attending auctions. During a visit to the Lafayette County courthouse archives, I noticed a woman thumbing through mineral rights records. Although she wouldn’t identify herself, she politely explained that she was checking such documents throughout Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana, bringing to mind the speculators who, during the oil boom, did the same before approaching naive residents who may not know about the riches under their land.
Beyond the timber companies with holdings in the region, most of the major landowners are white and wealthy, and any spoils, Henry suspects, will simply pass from one affluent family or powerful company to another, with no benefit to people like her. “What land, honey?” she said with a small, sardonic laugh. “That’s a pie in the sky type dream to me.”
Despite the concerns, the hype and fanfare surrounding the possibility of an economic revival remains high. City officials in Lewisville, and the people they lead, are trying to remain open-minded and easygoing even if unanswered questions linger about how many jobs might be coming, how the boom will benefit their town, and what it will mean for the environment.
“You know, it’s kind of frustrating because the questions get asked at these meetings,” Dunbar, the mayor, said. But he feels the lithium companies often meet questions with the same pleasant, if unhelpful, answer of “We can’t talk about it.” They’re always so careful in their responses. “They deliberately did not say anything until they knew what they wanted to do and say, that’s the same with what they want to provide communities,” Dunbar said.
As for the $100,000 commitment from Exxon, no one’s sure exactly who will receive that money or how allocations will be made. The mayor, discussing that point, showed some frustration. He said he has tried, and will continue to try, to get the companies to put their promises of jobs and support for local infrastructure in writing.
The balance of goodwill that he is trying to maintain between everyone involved is delicate: the lithium companies, whose jobs and support his community desperately needs; the county officials he must work with; the residents of Lewisville; and the mayors he collaborates with on grant applications. These towns are small, and word spreads quickly; relationships are as precious as the riches deep below the ground.
As Dunbar-Jones, the city council member, finished her turkey sandwich in the late afternoon light of the diner, she spoke of her faith in the ties between the people of Lewisville. “It’s hard to get a group of people to work together, period, especially when they don’t know each other,” she said. “But we all know each other.”
Despite her confidence, she knows she’s dealing with relationships in which companies take what they can and leave, where the question of what they owe the communities that enrich them is naive. Her father benefited from his job at Phillips 66, but it couldn’t last forever. When the oil was gone, those who profited from it were, too. From their perspective, she said, it’s a question of “How long am I going to support a community I’m no longer in? It would be unrealistic to think that there will be some long-term benefits from it.” The same is true of lithium, and the companies that will mine it. At some point, they will leave, and take their jobs and their money with them. Dunbar-Jones only hopes they leave Lewisville a little better off once they’ve left.
Editor’s note: Climeworks is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
The clean energy transition doesn’t just need a ton of solar panels, electric vehicles, and batteries. It needs aluminum — a key component to all of those technologies and many more.
In the next 25 years, global aluminum demand is set to surge as much as 80% as we deploy clean energy and build out the grid. But if we keep making aluminum the way we have for decades, the emissions-heavy process will outweigh a lot of the clean benefits it’ll unlock.
A massive new aluminum smelter wants to set a new status quo, Canary Media reports in the first of a two-part series. Using $500 million from the U.S. Energy Department, the Century Aluminum plant aims to run on carbon-free energy and implement efficient designs to curb its emissions as much as 75% compared to traditional smelters. Procuring all that clean power won’t be easy, though, and the part of Kentucky where it’s likely to be built is also scaling up solar and transmission development to meet the demand.
Recycling can meanwhile reduce the need for new aluminum in the first place, Canary Media continues. As much as 80% of aluminum produced in the U.S. is recycled, and the industry relies on trash pickers, scrappers, and everyday Pepsi drinkers to gather up recyclable material. But because secondary aluminum still demands some virgin material, experts say cleaning up smelters should be the industry’s top priority.
Also this week in essential clean energy materials: There’s a debate raging over the merger of two major steel companies, Grist reports. Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel is looking to acquire U.S. Steel in a move some environmentalists say could slow both companies’ climate progress. The carbon-intensive industry has been notoriously slow to clean up its processes even with federal funding available, and advocates want to make sure the government keeps that in mind as it approves the consolidation.
🚗 EVs start delivering: The first electric U.S. Post Office trucks are on the road in Georgia and already winning praise from drivers who prefer them to the previous hot, noisy and inefficient combustion vehicles. (Associated Press)
🛟 Life-saving clean transition: The Biden administration’s environmental protections and clean energy incentives will save as many as 200,000 lives by 2050 by reducing pollution, an advocacy group finds. (The Guardian)
🤖 Virtual reality: Clean energy advocates and solar companies partner to draft model utility rules and legislation to help states deploy virtual power plants, which could reduce the cost of the clean energy transition by tying together solar, storage, and other distributed energy technologies. (Canary Media)
🏦 Banking on clean energy: A federal green bank aims to channel $500 million to community financial institutions to fund solar arrays, renewable energy apprenticeships, electrified public transit, and more in rural areas, with priority for projects in Appalachia. (Grist)
☢️ Nuclear plants’ new lives: Several dozen retired nuclear plants around the country could be suitable for repowering, according to a new federal report analyzing retired coal and nuclear sites that could host new nuclear generation. (Utility Dive)
⛈️ Back-to-back climate threat: Experts warn Houston’s experience with Hurricane Beryl this summer — widespread power outages followed by a dangerous heat wave — is an “absolute certainty” to affect other parts of the U.S. that are unprepared for such a scenario. (Washington Post)
🇺🇲 Plus, some politics
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