Talk:Smackover Formation

"Standard Lithium" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Standard Lithium has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 July 26 § Standard Lithium until a consensus is reached. Johnjbarton (talk) 16:47, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

Possible future commercial decisions are not encyclopedic knowledge

The current article says

• A commercial production decision to develop a 50 square miles (130 km2) brine extraction field is expected by the end of 2025.

Wikipedia is not the place to speculate on future events or products. @N2e I ask you to remove this addition as not encyclopedic knowledge. Johnjbarton (talk) 19:59, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the note. Let's engage to make the description better.

Respectfully, I disagree with your take. While it would be a speculative statement to say "x will happen." The mining and natural resource extraction industry has a pretty well defined process (often decade-long) on these steps and major phases. This particular lithium brine extraction and refinement/collection project is merely in one of those middle phases (prospecting and early exploration are behind them; while resource definition/prove out is what they are just finishing up (in one view); and "scoping & economic evaluation" is ahead. In another cut of the extraction industry, they are already beyond that stage, and in the more-detailed "feasibilty study" stage, where comprehensive engineering, capital/operating cost estimation, stakeholder engagement & financial commitments are made.

"FEED" (front-end engineering design) is a (widely used) specific part of that, and the news article I used as a source said the company had progressed on their FEED study, etc.... I made a summary of that in my original addition to the article, and named the two large companies (Standard Lithium of Canada and Equinor of Norway) who are developing the project. You reverted that. I figured you didn't like the company names or the low-level detail of the FEED study info.

So I did my best to abstract the info at a higher level, one I think is quite appropriate for explicating notable resource extraction progress on an economically-important element like lithium, so critical to many early 21st century economic uses. (I left "FEED" and the company names out.)

So do feel free to edit the prose to improve the article, But I think the large deletion you did the first time was not the appropriate way, and am pleased you chose to engage, and think a bit about it, this time around. I'm confident we can work to make Wikipedia better together, and improve the coverage of the development of this major new brine-based resource extraction source for lithium, and a U.S. source no less, right when political and legal considerations of many nations are increasingly caring about the national source of resourced minerals/elements. Cheers. N2e (talk) 04:15, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

In my opinion the origin of our differences is completely different from your description. You focused on industrial standard process and politics, neither of which are the topic of this article. The sole issue in my opinion is whether this content represents notable encyclopedic knowledge about the Smackover Formation. If the project goes forward it might be knowledge in the future. Speculation of all kinds should be avoided in an encyclopedia, no matter how common it is on web sites.

In regards process, perhaps you can find other editors to agree to your addition. Maybe someone from the Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geology project will weigh in. Johnjbarton (talk) 15:08, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

That is not correct. This article is clearly about the "Mineral resources" of the Smackover Formation, as that is the title of the section describing the resources, and makes up over three-quarters of the article length. Mineral resources aren't resources unless they are economically recoverable, so of course the multi-year development of resources (from prospecting to proving to operational extraction of the resource) is all in scope. If notable, and verifiable, then information of course may be added. If and when there is sufficient information on the topic so as to warrant a separate article, then that might also be done. It just seems that the appropriate article now, on mineral resources in the Smackover formation, is this article which has a several-paragraph section on the topic. The progress of economic development is certainly in scope. Cheers. N2e (talk) 04:22, 4 August 2025 (UTC)