Tuesday, 21 October, 2025 / Edition 81

I took my kids to a fall festival on Sunday, and it was so hot that I forgot it is mid/late October. We’re usually pretty bundled up and sipping hot cider at those things, but we shared slushie floats in the tiniest sliver of shade we could find this year. My mountain children are not built for the blazing seventies so late in the year 😆

Speaking of heating things up and delightful pairings, this week, I cover how Halliburton is helping a company squeeze every last bit of productivity they can out of wells in the Smackover. Let’s dig in!

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

Hot Brine, Cool Solution: Halliburton and GeoFrame Tap Geothermal for DLE

Alexey Kornylyev

GeoFrame Energy recently highlighted how their partnership with Halliburton is using an innovative combination of geothermal energy and direct lithium extraction (DLE) to help the United States secure a domestic supply chain for the much-needed metal.

What they’re saying: Laura Zahm, chief geologist and director of business development at GeoFrame Energy, explained the need for the project, “Global lithium consumption reached 220,000 metric tons in 2024, a 29 percent increase from the previous year. However, the United States relies on imports for nearly all of its lithium supply.”

Down and dirty: The project is targeting deep (~12,000-foot) brines in the Smackover Formation, which is unique because most targets for geothermal energy production in the United States are in the west/southwest part of the country.

Zahm explained the reason for the targeting, “beneath its surface lies a new opportunity in the form of waters rich in lithium and boron. While we used to dispose of these brines, they now stand at the heart of a technological transformation.”

How it works:

• Subsurface water at 275°F is brought to the surface under carefully controlled pressure to prevent the fluid from flashing to steam. Halliburton’s expertise plays a key role here since flashing to steam would reduce mineral concentrations and generally muck up the process.

• Heat exchangers extract heat from the brine into a working fluid that is vaporized, and that steam does the magic work of driving turbines, which drive generators and produce electricity.

• That geothermal energy powers different processes, including the DLE process.

• This not only offsets power needs in a remote area but also maximizes the use of each well, which makes the project more efficient and sustainable.

• The geothermal power generation does more than provide power for the process. It also cools the brine to a workable temperature so solvents can do their work and selectively bind to lithium ions for extraction.

• Having squeezed every last drop of resource out of the brine, it either gets reinjected into a shallower subsurface horizon or, potentially, desalinated for agricultural use.

Bringing in the big boys: Halliburton’s role in the project goes beyond well design. It is providing project management and reservoir engineering teams to help guide the overall development of the 9,000-acre field, where 34 production wells and 21 injection wells must be optimally placed to avoid interference and maximize efficiency.

Bruce Cutright, CEO of GeoFrame Energy, said, “The collaboration with Halliburton allowed us to design a system that maintains the integrity of the Smackover Formation, preserves lithium concentrations, and ensures long-term operational success.”

Future work: GeoFrame is already looking toward the future using this collaboration as a framework, “Within our project, we proved that working fluids can sit at a cooler temperature than previously thought. As we move forward, we can incorporate geothermal into a wider range of industrial processes—we just need a turbine,” said Zahm.

Here come the geos: The partnership utilized a great deal of geoscience expertise, and as these types of projects grow and expand, so will the need for geoscientists.

Dig deeper: To read the interview with Zahm and learn more, go here.

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New Ways to Look at Seismic Data

Stephen Valastro/Shutterstock.com

Geoscientists studying volcanoes must have a deep understanding of many topics such as heat transfer, fluid dynamics, and earthquakes. And in geophysics, innovative data analysis is often the name of the game.

Studying seismic signals: As such, it’s no surprise volcanologists (as opposed to Vulcanologists for my Star Trek nerds) have incorporated the Gutenberg and Richter frequency-magnitude distribution (FMD) of earthquakes: log 𝑁 = 𝑎 − 𝑏𝑀, where 𝑁 is the cumulative number of seismic events with magnitude greater or equal to 𝑀, 𝑎 represents the productivity, and the slope b is commonly referred to as the b value.

Key variable: The b value is useful as a descriptor of magma movement in the subsurface and potentially as an eruption predictor in the latest study out of Science Advances.

The b value is inverse to the magnitude of earthquakes that occur, so larger b values mean there are more smaller magnitude events.

Larger b = lots of boogie: Smaller magnitude events are often associated with volatile gasses coming out of the melt around magma storage zones that may increase fluid pressure within fractures and fault surfaces and cause slip.

Smaller b = bigger boogie: Conversely, tectonic loading or the rapid ascent of magma can pressurize the system without releasing considerable quantities of gas, which leads to the closure of microcracks, their propagation, and coalescence into larger fractures and lower b values.

What they looked at: The researchers, led by Marco Firetto Carlino, wanted to know if tracking b value movements through time could indicate an eruption was imminent.

What they did: To achieve that, they needed to understand how magma ascent impacted earthquake production, so they took nearly 20 years of earthquake data from the Istituto Nazionale Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Osservatorio Etneo and relocated them using the tomoDDPS software and a 3D velocity model that integrated active and passive seismic data.

With the locations better constrained, they binned earthquakes into three distinct areas under the volcano:

1. A deeper volume interpreted to be a purely tectonic environment with a b value of 1.0 (10–30+ kilometers below sea level)
2. A middle volume more poorly constrained between 7 and 12 kilometers below sea level with a high magmatic influence and a b value of 1.7
3. A volume from surface to about 2 kilometers deep that is a shallow magma storage and plumbing area with a b value of 1.3

What they found: Looking at a five-year period of unrest at Etna, which included three different phases of volcanic activity, Carlino’s team saw the b value was in overall agreement with the expected sequence of mantle recharge, its transfer and storage at intermediate depths, and its final ascent to the uppermost part of the system. 

Yes, but: A downside of the study is that it requires a dataset bred from accurate and continuous monitoring, which is available at some volcanoes, but not all, and there needs to be a relatively solid understanding of the volcanic system to begin with.

Transferable insights: When reading the article, I was struck by the parallels between understanding magma movement in the subsurface and oil and gas operations, including how changes in the stress regime were measured and might indicate whether subsurface fissures are sealed or transmissive, much like fractures in our wellbores.

The implications shown in this study could be applied to oil and gas reservoirs. Micro seismic is often used to track and understand fracture propagation in a reservoir, and perhaps applying the ideas displayed in this work could help us understand reservoir and fracture dynamics at a deeper level.

Dig deeper: There is so much more in the article, and I highly recommend checking it out to get a dose of volcanology and even some igneous petrology. For a higher-level overview, go here.

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