All right. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for continuing to join us throughout the day here at the Lytham Partners fall 2026 investor conference. Again, my name is Robert Blum, Managing Partner at Lytham. Up next, Dan Rosen, VP of Strategy and IR at Standard Lithium, will be taking us through the company slide presentation. Dan, thanks so much for your participation today. The floor is all yours.
Great. Thanks so much, Robert. Appreciate you having us at your conference. Just quick background on myself. My name's Dan Rosen, VP of IR and Strategy at Standard Lithium. I have been in the lithium space for going on almost a decade at this point. Before joining Standard, a little over a year ago, I was at a number of lithium companies, Livent, Arcadium Lithium, and Rio Tinto. So been following the space for quite a long time. Have the typical cautionary disclosure statements up front, which I encourage you to review, but we'll skip through those. Who is Standard Lithium? So we are a lithium developer with a focus on developing lithium assets in the United States and more specifically within the Smackover Formation within the U.S., and we'll talk about why we think that is such an advantaged and strategic location.
We have a portfolio of projects that we are looking to develop at various stages of maturity, but just to walk you through them real quick, we have what's called the South West Arkansas Project. That is our most developed project to date. It's shovel-ready, and we'll walk you through what that timeline looks like. But the initial phase of that project is a 22,500 ton lithium carbonate project with first production expected in 2029. We have a number of different projects within East Texas, also in the Smackover Formation. We think that'll ultimately be three projects, but there's one that's a little bit more progressed than the others. That is called the Franklin Project. We just put out a PEA, preliminary economic assessment, for that project, but that points to 70,000 tons of lithium carbonate potential of production.
That is going to take a little bit longer to bring online. That'll likely come after South West Arkansas. A gain, very high quality, large project there. Between the three projects in East Texas, we think we can ultimately take our production there to over 100,000 tons per annum. I would also just say East Texas has a defined asset for bromine as well as for potash as well. So some other potential economic opportunities. All of our projects are under a JV structure with a company called Equinor, a big Norwegian Oil and Gas company, formerly called Statoil. We own 55% of the economic interest in the project. They own 45%, and Standard Lithium is the operator of those assets as well.
Yeah, and great partner, very skilled in oil and gas development, and they bring a lot of expertise into the fold, in addition to obviously having a very strong balance sheet. That's that. Then we also have a demonstration plant, which we will also talk about, that also exists within the Smackover Formation. It is within the LANXESS' existing bromine operation. We'll talk about why that, too, is a big strategic advantage for us. Just a quick history on the company. Our history as the company that you'd know today dates back to 2017, when we acquired our first land position in the Smackover Formation. 2020 is when we started up our demonstration plant on LANXESS' existing operations. 2021 is when we received an investment from Koch, and we also started incorporating their direct lithium extraction process technology into our operations.
That technology was then acquired by a company called Aquatech, but that is the technology that we have proven out and de-risked, and that's the technology that we will be using at our South West Arkansas Project. We've been testing it for a number of years to this point. 2024 is when we started our joint venture with Equinor, and then we've made a lot of progress over the last two years getting our SWA Project to being shovel-ready on the verge of taking FID, hopefully by the end of this year. We've signed customer offtake agreements with some very reputable names, including Trafigura, a big global commodity trading house, as well as LG Energy Solution, one of the biggest battery producers in the world. We have offtake agreements with both of them.
Again, targeting to take FID on that South West Arkansas Project by the end of this year, which would then allow us to start construction shortly thereafter and put us in place to have initial commercial production in 2029. Just a few quick investment highlights to go through. As I said, we think the Smackover Formation is the best place for potential U.S. lithium production. It's massive, very high lithium concentrations and a clear ability to scale that up, based on the size of our position. We think we're very strategically advantaged within the Smackover. We had a first-mover advantage as far as acquiring our land position. Again, we're the only project within the Smackover that is shovel-ready today. Advantage cost structure. We've put out cost estimates for South West Arkansas and in East Texas, but South West Arksnsas, it's under $6,000 per ton in operating cost.
That is a clear first quartile producing asset within the global cost curve. Again, very well-positioned once it's up and running. Strong government support. We have a $225 million grant, not a loan, but a grant from the Department of Energy within the U.S. government, that is one of the largest grants given to a critical minerals project in the U.S., and it's going to be very helpful for us as part of the sources of funding for our SWA project once that gets up and running. That was actually put in place under the Biden administration, and we've actually started to draw on it already. It's been very helpful in that respect. We also have very strong support from government at the state level as well within Arkansas and Texas. Very well-positioned in that respect.
Strategic location, not just the Smackover itself, but very close to the Gulf Coast for raw material inputs and the like. Strong labor, strong regulatory environment. We will touch on all of that. World-class partners between Equinor, between Aquatech, the company we are working with on the technology, between our commercial offtake partners in Trafigura and LG Energy Solution. Very strong partners that we are working with. Again, shovel-ready project. We put out a DFS on our South West Arkansas Project in the fourth quarter of last year, and we are in the final stages of getting ready to take FID there. We have done a lot of work to get to this point, and we do have that first-mover advantage in the Smackover. Very attractive market fundamentals in lithium, in battery production, in critical minerals more broadly.
Just a very good time to be in the industry and be in the position that we are to begin construction on our first project. Touching quickly on the Smackover and why we think it is such a strategic asset. First, high-quality lithium brine resource. It has a ton of history of various production. It has over 100 years of Oil and Gas production historically, not so much anymore. Over the last 60 years, it has been a big producer of bromine. People do not really appreciate this, but it produces about a third of the world's bromine today. Very similar brine extraction processing type of method. That means that the workforce understands what it is doing. The regulatory framework in the region is very well-defined and clear.
There has been a ton of drilling and exploration and development of the resource historically, so it is very well understood. Again, it is a very attractive place to be developing lithium asset. As I said, we were a first mover in acquiring our position in the Smackover. Since that time, some big O&G players like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Oxy have all come in and acquired their own land positions with the intention of developing lithium assets in the region as well. Definitely helps to support what we are doing. Again, by the Gulf Coast, plenty of access to water, power, natural gas, skilled labor, all that good stuff. Just again, further supporting our cost position within the region. As you will see, our cost is expected to be well within the first quartile from an operating cost standpoint.
As far as the concentrations of lithium within that brine, extremely high quality, when you look at the other potential North American resources that are at various stages of development. Again, we are one of the few projects that is shovel-ready at this point. That is for Smackover Lithium. Obviously, the Franklin Project is a little bit further behind. Just some quick highlights on South West Arkansas, specifically. It is a $1.5 billion CapEx project. Very attractive economic returns expected. 20-plus year operating mine life. Again, in a future phase, we think we can actually double the size of that. So taking it from 22,500 tons to 45,000 tons. First production would be in 2029, assuming we can take FID by the end of the year. This is where we are at as far as giving you the highlights on South West Arkansas.
As far as what remains in order for us to take that FID decision, this lays out all of the key things that we've been doing over the last year or so. We put out our DFS in the fourth quarter of last year. We made it through the federal environmental NEPA review. So full green light to proceed as far as the permitting and such is concerned. We've signed up our key construction vendors for the project that are going to take us through it. We also have put them on what's called the limited notice to proceed. So they're actually doing real work today. Early stages, of course, but what that allows for is once we ultimately do take FID, they can be off to the races, and we can start construction very shortly thereafter. So feel very good about that. Customer offtakes.
As we said, we've signed up Trafigura and LG Energy Solution. There's one more small piece that we're looking to complete by the end of this quarter in order to be completely done with our offtake process, which would then allow us to go and close our project financing. Just to give the quick overview on project financing. We are working with export credit agencies to put that in place. It's traditional non-recourse project financing. We are looking to get over $1 billion in project financing. And between that and the DOE grant, those will be the main sources of capital for the project. And then obviously, Equinor and Standard Lithium will come in for whatever is left over to get us over the hump. Quick overview on the Franklin Project, but I'll keep moving along here just to say that recently put out the preliminary economic assessment.
Very high quality resource, 70,000 tons of production capacity is very meaningful to our industry. Next steps are continuing to do development work to ultimately take that to a PFS, a pre-feasibility study in 2027. Very, very compelling lithium market fundamentals. This is an industry that is growing tremendously, looking to double by the end of this decade, and then triple from current levels by 2035. So massive compounding growth. As I said, I've been in this industry for almost a decade, and when we talk about where it was 10 years ago, it was a couple hundred thousand tons of demand. So this is an industry that continues to grow tremendously, and what that means is, as the compounding factor takes effect, you need more and more projects to ultimately fill that supply gap. The average project is not really getting much bigger.
The average train size is not getting much bigger. It means that you need more supply and more projects to come online to grow into this demand. When you take that a level down, you will see that most of lithium production today, not the resource, but the actual refining and production today, takes place in China, with very little of it taking place in North America and the U.S. specifically, despite a lot of demand being in North America, and despite that demand really expected to grow a lot over time. Not to mention that the narrative in our industry has really changed over the last few years. It used to be largely an EV clean energy story, and now so much of it is about security of supply, domestic critical mineral resources, and grid storage, AI data centers, all of that.
Ultimately, you need lithium-ion batteries to bring the energy to a lot of those systems. As I said, we've really de-risked the DLE technology. We've been running it at our operation since 2021. We have a commercial scale column that we're running at our DLE facility in Arkansas. It's at an existing operation. It's within LANXESS's existing operation, so it's real brine that we're working on. Because it's a commercial scale column, that means that from a scale-up factor, we're not increasing the size of the column when it comes to producing a commercial facility, it's just increasing the number of columns themselves. So really helps to de-risk the technology there. Aquatech, our partner who we're working with, does provide performance guarantees on that technology as well. So obviously wouldn't be doing that unless we felt very good about its effectiveness and ability to scale that.
Just real quick, we have almost $140 million of cash on our balance sheet, no debt. We've had shareholders that have been with us for quite a long period of time and are very supportive, and it's about a $600 million market cap today. So that's us as a company. We have a number of very exciting catalysts ahead for us. We'll leave it there.
Fantastic. Well, Dan, thank you very much for participation here in the conference. Thank you, of course, everybody, for watching here as well. If you would like to schedule a meeting, either here at the conference or in the days to come with Standard Lithium, shoot me an email. That's Blum@lythampartners.com. To learn more about Lytham , make sure you visit our website, follow us on LinkedIn, and subscribe to us on YouTube to stay connected on future events such as the webcast here with Standard Lithium. So we hope you all enjoy the rest of the conference. Have a great day. Again, Dan, thanks so much for your participation.