Smackover minerals and lithium brine royalties.

The Smackover is the strangest asset in American mineral ownership right now. It is an Upper Jurassic carbonate that has produced oil since a 1922 discovery near the town of Smackover, Arkansas. It has been drilled, depleted, waterflooded, and largely written off for two generations. And in the last three years it has become the most important domestic lithium prospect in the country, because the brine that oil operators spent a century treating as a nuisance turns out to carry some of the highest lithium concentrations reported anywhere in North America.

Berlin buys Smackover minerals and royalties across Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, including the small legacy oil interests nobody else will look at.

Why the standard valuation method breaks here

Almost every mineral offer in the country is built the same way: take the last twelve months of royalty income, apply a multiple, adjust for decline. That method is defensible in a mature single product field.

It is close to useless on a Smackover tract.

A south Arkansas mineral owner may be receiving forty dollars a month from a stripper oil well drilled in 1961. Under the standard method, that interest is worth a few thousand dollars. But the same acreage may sit inside a brine production unit, or adjacent to one, or inside acreage a major has been quietly leasing for brine rights. None of that shows up in the check.

The gap between those two numbers is not a rounding error. It is the entire transaction. And it is invisible to an owner who only has a check stub, which is precisely the information asymmetry that makes mailer offers profitable in this trend.

The Arkansas royalty ruling, and why it matters beyond Arkansas

Arkansas is unusual: it has had a brine statute for decades, built for the bromine industry, and it gives the Oil and Gas Commission the power to establish brine production units and set the royalty rate when the operator and the owners cannot agree. That machinery, built for bromine, is what the lithium industry inherited.

On May 29, 2025, the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission unanimously approved a 2.5 percent royalty on lithium for the Reynolds Unit in Columbia and Lafayette Counties, the first lithium royalty rate ever set in the state. The applicant was SWA Lithium, the joint venture between Standard Lithium and Equinor.

The path there is the useful part:

• In November 2024 the joint venture applied for 1.82 percent. The Commission did not approve it.
• The applicant returned with 2.5 percent.
• Mineral owners, organized through the South Arkansas Minerals Association, opposed 2.5 percent as too low. Their vice president, Emon Mahony, put the pressure plainly on the record: the longer it drags on, the more pressure there is to take the easy number.
• The Commission approved 2.5 percent.

If you own in the trend, that sequence is your single most useful piece of leverage, because it establishes three things. There is a floor. It was set through an adversarial process rather than agreed to quietly. And organized owners moved it.

The project itself has continued to advance: a definitive feasibility study filed in October 2025, a first binding offtake agreement, well field engineering contracts awarded in 2026 ahead of a final investment decision, and roughly 225 million dollars in U.S. Department of Energy funding against a project estimated near a billion. The initial phase targets 22,500 tonnes per year of battery quality lithium carbonate from a field of four pads, twelve supply wells, and ten injection wells.

Separately, ExxonMobil has assembled a large south Arkansas brine position and drilled its first lithium well there in late 2023, operating under its low carbon business rather than its upstream one. Two very different companies committing real capital to the same formation is the strongest signal available that this is not a promotion.

Northeast Texas is the newer story, and the messier one

The same joint venture's Franklin project covers western Titus, Franklin, and eastern Hopkins Counties in northeast Texas. Public resource work reports roughly 2.16 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent at an average 668 mg/L, with the Pine Forest 1 well measuring 806 mg/L, described as the strongest concentration reported in North America to date. The position covers about 46,000 acres of brine rights inside a project area near 80,000 acres, assembled from more than 600 separate leases.

More than 600 leases is the detail worth sitting with. It tells you the acreage was gathered tract by tract from individual owners, most of whom were approached before any of this was public.

Texas law has moved unevenly:

If you are being offered a brine lease in Texas, the ownership law behind it is unresolved. That is not a reason to refuse. It is a reason to read the instrument carefully and to be skeptical of anyone who presents the question as closed.

North Louisiana sits in the same trend and has neither Arkansas's brine unit machinery nor a definitive answer of its own, so the documents matter even more there.

What we actually do with a Smackover interest

1. Read the chain, not the check. We pull the recorded instruments and determine what your lease or leases actually grant. Broad "oil, gas and other minerals" language, a narrow oil and gas grant, and a separate recorded brine lease from the bromine era are three very different positions.
2. Locate you against the units. Inside an established brine production unit, adjacent to one, or inside an area under active brine leasing are three different values.
3. Value the oil on its own terms. The legacy production is real, it is long lived, and it gets valued as what it is: a slow decline stripper tail, not a growth asset. See how mineral rights are valued.
4. Price the brine exposure explicitly and separately. With the probability we assigned and the reason, as a visible line rather than folded into one number. A buyer who will not break that out is either not doing the work or does not want you to see it.
5. Tell you when to keep it. On acreage inside an advancing unit, holding is frequently the better answer, and we say so. See when not to sell.

The interests nobody will touch

The Smackover oil trend left behind exactly the kind of interests the industry has abandoned: forty dollar a month royalties in Union County, an eighth of a fourth of a quarter section that passed through three unprobated estates, bromine era brine royalties nobody in the family understood.

Every large buyer ignores these, because the cost of running title and recording a deed is the same whether the interest is worth two thousand dollars or two hundred thousand. Owners read that silence as proof of no value. In this particular formation, at this particular moment, that inference is wrong more often than it is right.

We run our own title, we have no minimum, and we pay all closing costs. If money is sitting in operator suspense or with a state unclaimed property division, we will tell you how to claim it and you keep it, whether or not you sell anything to us. See small mineral interests and unclaimed royalties.

Where to go next

• Arkansas mineral rights: the Fayetteville, the Smackover, and the brine statutes
• Texas mineral rights: Cactus Water, brine regulation, and the ownership question
• Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama Smackover interests
• Compare your options before selling and when not to sell
• Free letter templates and the royalty statement decoder
• Taxes when you sell mineral rights

Last reviewed August 2026. This is a fast moving trend and rates, units, and pending legislation change. Berlin Royalties is a mineral buyer and a landman shop in Tulsa, not a law firm or a tax advisor, and this page is general information rather than advice about your interest. If you have been offered a brine lease, have a lawyer look at it.