The Wall Street Journal’s recent article about a deal between Galvanic Energy and ExxonMobil to buy lithium leases in Columbia and Lafayette counties has led to a follow-up in the Journal, and other media. We can’t give you a direct link for legal reasons, but we can tell you that on Friday, the Journal had a story by Benoit Morenne headlined, “The surprising new source of lithium for batteries.” The article goes into efforts to extract brine from regions better known for oil and gas – including South Arkansas. This may be surprising to the Wall Street Journal, but of course our readers have been following this for a decade. On Monday, CNBC’s website had a story by Katie Brigham, “Now new lithium extraction technology could help us meet electric vehicle targets.” It focuses on several companies that hope to extract lithium from brine, including Standard Lithium. There has been mention of South Arkansas lithium elsewhere in recent days. Bottom line: Potential lithium production in South Arkansas is getting worldwide attention.
After an outage of more than a day, our email system is up and running again. We’re still trying to catch up so please bear with us.
Our computer change-out yesterday apparently had something to do with the email outage, but if a day without email is the worst of it, we’ll live. It’s all the little annoyances of changing out a computer that are the killers. We’ll get all the links and passwords and subscriptions straightened out eventually.
Walter Cronkat was in lock-down on Monday. We were messing around with two different computers, typing passwords and access codes. It was not the time for Walter to arbitrarily decide to walk across keyboards.
The June bid letting by the Arkansas Department of Transportation will include a big project of interest to Interstate 30 travelers. Among the projects is the rehabilitation of 10.75 miles of the interstate from Rockport to the U.S. 70 interchange south of Benton. Of course, the project to widen Interstate 30 from U.S. 70 through Benton is on-going. This news should gladden the hearts of all those who enjoy traveling to Little Rock via that route. (Yes. We’re being sarcastic. We know sarcasm does not translate well into print so we feel obligated to flag it).
A quick review reminds us that the widening of 5.5 miles of Interstate 30 to six lanes from Benton to U.S. 70 began in 2019 and is supposed to end later this year. It’s a $187 million job — the most expensive single highway project in Arkansas history at the time it was bid. We’re thinking that $187 million, plus whatever the state will spend to rebuild Interstate 30 between U.S. 70 and Rockport, would go a long way toward four-laning U.S. 82 across South Arkansas.
We noticed that three public meetings have been set in Shreveport, Ruston and Monroe this week to explain and promote the idea of extending Amtrak rail passenger service across North Louisiana, linking Dallas and Atlanta. This would set up exciting prospects for expanding rail passenger service from the Southwest to the Eastern Seaboard, and we’re all for it.
Five years ago, we reported that two SAU baseball players were taken in Major League Baseball’s Amateur FIrst Year Player Draft. CLICK HERE to see the story.
Our new online poll seeks to know reader preference among three space operas — the StarTrek and Star Wars franchises, and AppleTV’s ongoing “For All Mankind” series. We don’t subscribe to AppleTV but we’ve seen snippets on YouTube. We’ll just have to wait for it to materalize on a streaming service we do view.
Pick pick pick.
Mike McNeill is publisher and editor of magnoliareporter.com. Email him at news@magnoliareporter.com or call him at 870-904-3865. Opinions expressed in this column are his own. America needs a viable third-party alternative to Biden/Trump.
