Is Produced Water a Source of Lithium?

The American Chemical Society (ACS) 2026 Fall Meeting is set to take place in Chicago, Illinois, from August 23 to the 27^th.¹ During the week, conference attendees will gather to present their latest research. Some attendees will be presenting their research in a dedicated oral symposium on the topic, while others will be delivered via a poster presentation during dedicated poster sessions during the conference week.

One of these posters, titled “Tracing Lithium in Bakken Produced Waters,” will be presented by Anthony Chappez of Central Michigan University. His poster will discuss a novel method that can pinpoint the geological origin of lithium dissolved in oilfield wastewater from North Dakota's Bakken Formation, a step that could help energy companies evaluate and de-risk lithium recovery from a resource currently treated as waste.² The findings will be presented Monday, August 24, 2026, in Hall F2 of the McCormick Place Convention Center.

What is North Dakota’s Bakken Formation?

The Bakken Formation is a rock unit within the Williston Basin, a large sedimentary basin that spans parts of North Dakota, Montana, and southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada.³ It's one of the most significant oil-producing formations in the United States.

The formation became one of the biggest stories in American energy over the past two decades because of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. These technologies unlocked oil that was previously considered too difficult to extract from the tight, low-permeability rock. Production surged starting around 2008, turning North Dakota into one of the top oil-producing states in the country.³

What will the poster presentation cover?

The poster presentation will explore produced water, which is the saline brine brought to the surface alongside hydrocarbons, as a domestic source of lithium, a metal essential to batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage.² Although companies have invested heavily in extraction technology, Chappez will present how the underlying geology driving lithium enrichment in these brines has remained poorly constrained, complicating efforts to estimate how much lithium a given basin can realistically yield.²

The poster will outline the strategy that Chappez and the rest of the research team used, highlighting the role of inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) in this process. The research team combined standard elemental geochemistry with lithium isotope analysis of both produced waters and candidate source rocks from multiple stratigraphic layers within the Williston Basin.² Lithium samples were purified through column chromatography in clean-room conditions before being measured using a new generation of multicollector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) tools.² Using ICP-MS was critical to the study because it helped detect subtle isotopic differences between fluids and the rock formations.

That precision allowed the team to trace dissolved lithium back to specific mineralogical sources and determine whether enrichment stems from localized inputs at particular rock layers or from broader geochemical processes operating across the basin.² The distinction matters for industry: it affects how companies model reserves, target drilling and production strategies, and design extraction processes suited to a given brine's chemistry.²

Why should you visit this poster at ACS Fall 2026?

This poster addresses two hot topics in spectroscopy circles: environmental sustainability and lithium-ion battery research. Because there is a push for the development of better-performing lithium-ion batteries, battery manufacturers are racing to securing more lithium supplies, and that means they have to know where the sources of lithium are. This poster session offers a data-driven basis for resource evaluation that has largely been missing from a field driven so far by extraction engineering rather than source geology, and it is part of ongoing sessions addressing critical mineral recovery from unconventional and waste-derived sources.²

Meanwhile, on the environmental sustainability front, tracing dissolved lithium sources more accurately will help inform oil and gas companies on their target drilling and production strategies. This information will help these companies avoid unnecessary drilling, which is better for the environment and the surrounding ecosystem in the area.

References

1. Wetzel, W. Why Spectroscopists Should Attend the ACS Fall 2026 Conference. Spectroscopy Online, 2026. https://www.spectroscopyonline.com/view/why-spectroscopists-should-attend-the-acs-fall-2026-conference (accessed July 13, 2026).
2. Chappez, A. Tracing Lithium in Bakken Produced Waters. Presented at the American Chemical Society Fall 2026 Meeting, Chicago Illinois, August 24, 2026. Available at: https://acs.digitellinc.com/live/37/page/1374?search=spectroscopy%20in%20pharmaceutical%20analysis&window-fcm5oz&window-jbjz39
3. Continental Resources, Bakken. Continental Resources, 2026. https://www.clr.com/operations/bakken/ (accessed July 13, 2026).