DEEP WELL EFFORT RESULTS IN FIND OF RARE METAL

Efforts by Jimmy Reliford of Jimmy Reliford Drilling Company to drill the county's first deep oil well to a depth of around 5,000-6,000 feet continue to hit snags, but they are snags of the good type.
Reliford's first effort to drill a deep well in the Pickett's Chapel area of the county were abandoned when a good producing Knox formation well was hit. So, last month, Reliford began sinking another deep hole, only to run into an obstacle at 2,400 feet - a huge amount of brine (salt water that is found in many wells).
This would be bad news on most occasions, but this brine was discovered to contain a heavy concentration of lithium - a light metal used in medicine, batteries and for many other things - that is far more valuable than oil.
"After it has been refined into a solid, lithium sells for around $6,600 a barrel, compared to $60-70 for a barrel of oil," Reliford said. "If this turns out like we're hoping, it could be something else."
Reliford said that in drilling the well, they had hit some brine around 2,200 feet, but kept on drilling (after casing was installed) to a depth of 2,410 feet.
"When we got down to that depth, we hit something that shut the rig down," he explained. "I first thought we'd hit a big gas deposit, but when we pulled the steel, brine shot out into the air. It was like we'd hit a full blown ocean.
"I brought in a bigger drilling rig to take the hole on down, but after I talked to a Canadian oil man and described what the brine looked like, he told me it looked like we had hit lithium, and should have it analyzed," he continued.
Reliford said they sent a sample of the brine to the McCoy Laboratory in Lexington, and the test results came back showing a real high concentration of lithium.
"We're sending two more samples to a lab in Tennessee for full-blown testing, and we should know more once these results are back," Reliford explained. "There are five other things in the brine along with lithium, and there might be some value in them too."
Reliford said that he has already been contacted by the FMC Corp. in North Carolina, which purchases lithium, and he and his partners in the well (Jr. King of Wilmington, Ohio, who owns one-half of the well and Paul Grammer of Aaron, Tennessee, who owns an eighth) have been offered a contract from FMC to purchase all the lithium the well will produce.
"We're new to this process, and are still learning a lot of about lithium and how everything works," Reliford said. "We're not going to make any hasty decisions until we do a lot more research. But we're extremely excited about the prospects for this well, and what it might mean for Adair County."
Jim Helm, a former pilot for Reliford who has been doing extensive research about lithium for Reliford, said in a telephone interview from his home in Nebraska, said that large amounts of lithium are seldom found.
"What lithium has been found has not been searched for - it's been found while looking for something else, like Jimmy and them drilling for oil," Helm said. "It's a soft, silvery white light metal that's always found in brine."
He went on to explain that lithium is extracted from the salt water through electrolysis. An electrified rod is put into the brine, and the lithium is attracted to the rod.
Reliford said that if the further test results are as positive as the original one, they will put a pump on the well capable of pumping 100,000 gallons of brine a day.
"The brine could be shipped to North Carolina (to FMC) or it there could be some initial processing at the well site," he noted. "Like I said earlier, we're still learning a lot about the process."