Mackey’s research, published recently in Nature Scientific Reports, says the brine water that lies deep within the Marcellus Shale — and comes to the surface during gas production — could provide 38–40% of the current domestic demand for lithium, which is estimated at 3,000 metric tons a year. But that demand is expected to jump to 340,000 metric tons by 2032.

Lithium is now considered one of the most essential components for the energy transition. Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are light and able to store a lot of energy. They power electric vehicles, computers, iPhones and large battery storage facilities.

“So, we’re going to need a lot of lithium if we’re going to decarbonize all of these things,” Mackey said.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law requires electric vehicle batteries to use domestically sourced raw materials by 2030. The law’s aim was to reduce dependency on Chinese sources of lithium and will likely increase the domestic demand. The Biden administration also recently imposed steep tariffs on electric batteries and vehicles coming from China.

More than half of the global supply of lithium is extracted from subsurface brine deposits in Chile and Argentina’s Atacama Desert, then shipped to China to be processed into lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide, which is then used to make lithium-ion batteries.

David Boutt, a hydrogeologist and professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who  was not involved in the study, said the analysis done shows the Marcellus Shale could be a large source of lithium.

“These are very high lithium concentrations. And some of them are approaching concentrations of lithium that we see in [South America],” said Boutt, who researches lithium systems in the U.S., Canada and South America. He said in South America, there are concerns about extracting too much water in an arid landscape.

“So having a source of lithium in what is essentially a waste product is a really important step,” he said. “I think how we get [enough supply] is having multiple sources of lithium that have low-carbon and low-water footprints.”

But extracting the lithium from the wastewater is not easy, Boutt said, and would require a large amount of energy.

While the U.S. has very little current domestic supply, it does have the world’s first lithium mine in Nevada. The Silver Peak mine extracts lithium using hard-rock mining, which is energy and water-intensive. The Department of Energy just agreed to a $2.26 billion loan to help jump-start another lithium mine in Thacker Pass, Nevada.

A new domestic source of lithium from brine is the Smackover Formation of Arkansas, operated by Standard Lithium. Exxon Mobil has invested heavily in lithium production in that formation.

But questions remain on the economic feasibility of extracting lithium from Marcellus Shale wastewater.

One company that operates in the Marcellus Shale has already begun developing a process to  extract lithium from the wastewater. Eureka Resources reported back in July that it “extracted 97% pure lithium carbonate from oil and natural gas brine from production activities with up to a 90% recovery rate.”

The company is based in Williamsport and operates two wastewater treatment facilities in Pennsylvania. It says it uses a closed loop system that combines “physical and chemical treatment, concentration and crystallization,” similar to the process it uses to extract and sell salts, such as sodium chloride and calcium chloride. In the press release, it said it expects to be selling lithium within two years.

But Boutt said it’s unlikely that oil and gas companies are going to rush to sell lithium. “There’s a lot of work that goes into making battery-grade lithium,” he said.

And once the lithium is extracted, there is still the issue of disposal of the remaining wastewater that could still contain toxic substances, whether it gets used to frack another well or if it gets shipped off to a deep injection well for disposal.

The family of the youngest person ever executed in the state of Pennsylvania — a Black 16-year-old sent to the electric chair in 1931 and exonerated by the governor in 2022 — is suing the county that prosecuted him.

Alexander McClay Williams was convicted of murder in the October 1930 icepick stabbing of a white woman in her cottage on the grounds of his reform school.

Vida Robare, 34, had been stabbed 47 times. Her ex-husband, who also worked at the school, reported finding the body, and a photograph of an adult’s bloody handprint, taken at the scene, was examined by two fingerprint experts. But that wasn’t mentioned at the trial, nor was the fact that she had been granted a divorce on the grounds of “extreme cruelty.”

The 5-foot-5, 125-pound Williams instead quickly became a suspect, even though his hands were smaller, there were no eyewitnesses and no evidence linked him to the crime. He was held for days of interrogation without his parents or a lawyer on hand, and ultimately signed three confessions, researchers found.

He was convicted by an all-white jury on January 7, 1931, and executed five months later, on June 8.

“They murdered him,” Susie Williams Carter, 94, of Chester, the last surviving sibling in the family of 13 children, said at a press conference Monday. “They need to pay for killing my brother.”

She was only about a year old at the time, and her parents, devastated, did not talk about it much. They had run a boarding house in Coatesville, but abandoned the business and left town as the scandal garnered national attention, she said.

“This tragedy haunted the family, haunted the parents, haunted Susie, haunted (trial lawyer) William Ridley and his family,” said Philadelphia lawyer Joseph Marrone, who filed the federal lawsuit on Friday against Delaware County and the estates of two detectives and a prosecutor who had pursued the case.

“There was nothing to connect him to the murder. He was a convenient Black boy at the hands of these detectives and this prosecutor,” Marrone said.

Gov. Tom Wolf apologized on behalf of Pennsylvania when he exonerated Williams, and called his execution “an egregious miscarriage of justice.” District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said the teen’s constitutional rights had been violated, and a Delaware County judge vacated the conviction.

Williams had been sent to the Glen Mills School for Boys for starting a fire that burned down a barn, Carter said. The 193-year-old school closed in 2019 after a Philadelphia Inquirer investigation into decades-long allegations of child abuse.

Author and educator Samuel Lemon had known about the case since he was a child because Williams was defended at trial by his great-grandfather, William H. Ridley. The only Black lawyer in Delaware County at the time, Ridley had been paid $10 for the trial, with no support for investigators or experts. He faced off against a team of 15.

Lemon researched the case, tracking down the 300-page trial transcript, and found problems with the evidence, including documents that show Williams’ age incorrectly listed as 18, not 16, along with the husband’s history of abuse.

“As I unpeeled the layers, it became quite evident to me that Alexander McClay Williams was innocent,” Lemon said. “This was kind of a legal lynching.”

Carter said the truth about her brother might never have been known if not for the work by Lemon and others.

“My mother kept saying, ‘Alex didn’t do that. There’s no way he could have done that.’ She was right. But it affected us all,” she said.

KING OF PRUSSIA, Pa. (CBS) — This week marks the 50th anniversary of EMS Week, and one Pennsylvania department is celebrating faster response times, thanks to new graduates from the fire academy.

“A dream. I love my job,” said Joshua DePietro, more than two weeks into his new role as a firefighter-paramedic.

He is one of 12 new professional firefighters and emergency medical technicians with the Upper Merion Township Fire Department. DePietro helps to supplement about 50 volunteer first responders who cover the community of more than 35,000 people.

“We can help them out, they help us out,” he said. “And it creates better coverage for the township at whole.”

Before graduation day on May 3, the department had just one shift with professional firefighters and EMTs along with on-call volunteers, Upper Merion Fire Chief James Johnson said. At the time, the response time was more than eight minutes.

“So by having that second unit, we’ve actually reduced those response times down into the 5-minute 20-second area,” he said.

Johnson said since the newest class of firefighters joined the station, it means even faster results when the community needs them most.

“So that we can get to residents’ homes quicker, so we can help our mutual aid partners in Norristown, people who are on the Schuylkill Expressway or on the Turnpike that have a motor vehicle accident,” Johnson said.

The new positions were made possible by a three-year FEMA grant. That grant made firefighter-paramedic DePietro’s dream of becoming a first responder possible, too.

“Truly, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” DiPietro said.