Where does lithium come from?

In 2025 Australia mined 92,000 tonnes of lithium content, 32% of the world's 290,000 tonnes (USGS MCS). China followed with 21%, then Chile (19%), Zimbabwe (9.7%) and Argentina (7.9%). The top five account for 90% and only 9 countries mine lithium at all. Reserves are less concentrated than production: Chile holds 25% of the world's 37 million tonnes (USGS MCS).

One caveat before reading those numbers. The United States Geological Survey withholds United States production to avoid disclosing individual company data and excludes it from its world total, so the world figure is slightly understated and the United States does not appear in the ranking even though it produces lithium.

The two sources are worth separating because they behave differently. Hard-rock mining extracts spodumene from pegmatite in Western Australia, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Canada, China and Portugal, producing a concentrate that must be shipped to a converter. It can be scaled up in two to three years and responds to price like a normal mine. Brine operations pump lithium-rich water from beneath salt flats in Chile, Argentina and China into evaporation ponds, where sun and wind concentrate it over twelve to eighteen months. Brine is cheaper to run but far slower to expand, and it is exposed to rainfall, altitude and water-rights politics in a way a hard-rock mine is not.

Production means mined lithium content unless stated. It is not refined chemical: a very large share of the world's spodumene is shipped to converters elsewhere, which is why the mining map and the chemical map are different, and why the country that mines the most is not the country that sells the most battery-grade material.

Chile was the largest exporter of lithium carbonate (HS 283691) in 2024 with 73% of world export value, ahead of Argentina (19%), on world trade of $3.8 billion (CEPII BACI). China was the largest importer with 67%.

That table is about chemicals, not rock, and it shows the split in the industry clearly. Chile exports finished lithium carbonate directly from its brine operations, so it leads the carbonate trade. Australia mines more lithium than anyone but exports it as spodumene concentrate under a different customs heading, and the concentrate goes overwhelmingly to Chinese converters that turn it into carbonate and hydroxide for cathode makers. Read the export table as a map of chemical conversion, and the production table as the map of geology.

Be careful with the number on this page. The series shown is Lithium metal, 99% battery grade, which was $156,809/t in July 2026, up 103% from a year earlier (IMF PCPS). That is lithium metal, not the carbonate or hydroxide that battery makers actually buy. Lithium metal is a further refining step beyond the chemicals and trades at a large multiple of their price, so this series is useful for direction and useless as a contract reference. Its nominal high was $490,008/t in April 2022.

The prices that matter commercially are battery-grade lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide delivered into China, Japan and Korea, plus spodumene concentrate on a specified lithium oxide content. All of them are assessed by private price reporting agencies rather than published free, which is why this site cannot quote them. CME and other exchanges list futures that settle against those private assessments, and the CME lithium hydroxide contract referenced in the registry is one of them.

Historically most lithium moved on long-term contracts at negotiated prices, and the spot market was thin. The 2021 to 2023 price cycle changed that: contracts increasingly reference an index, and converters and cathode makers now hedge. Grade and impurity specifications are unusually important, because a battery cathode is intolerant of sodium, potassium, iron and magnesium, so chemical-grade and battery-grade material are genuinely different products with a persistent price gap.

Batteries take the overwhelming majority of lithium demand, and an electric car contains tens of kilograms of lithium carbonate equivalent against grams in a phone. Vehicle sales growth, subsidy changes and the mix between battery chemistries therefore set demand almost entirely, and forecasts of that growth move the price years ahead of any physical shortage.

Lithium iron phosphate cells use lithium carbonate and no nickel or cobalt; high-nickel cells use lithium hydroxide. The market share of each chemistry decides not just how much lithium is needed but which chemical, and converters cannot switch product instantly. A shift toward iron phosphate raises carbonate demand relative to hydroxide even if total lithium demand is unchanged.

Hard-rock mines can be brought on in two to three years, far faster than brine, so they set the marginal supply. When prices spike, Australian and African spodumene expands first and hardest, which is why the 2021 to 2023 boom ended in oversupply rather than persistent shortage.

Mining lithium and making battery-grade chemical are separate businesses in separate countries. Converter capacity, concentrated in China, is the real bottleneck between rock and cathode, and a shortage of qualified conversion capacity can leave concentrate stranded while chemical prices rise.

Brine extraction moves large volumes of water in some of the driest inhabited places on earth, and the resulting disputes over water rights, indigenous consent and royalties have delayed projects in Chile and Argentina for years. This is a permitting constraint rather than a geological one, and it does not respond to price.

Chile has moved toward state participation in new lithium projects, Mexico nationalised its lithium, Indonesia and Zimbabwe have restricted raw exports, and Argentina's provincial governments set their own terms. Ownership rules change the timing and location of new supply more reliably than the price does.

Battery recycling returns lithium along with nickel and cobalt, but the volume available depends on how many batteries reached end of life a decade ago, not on today's price. Recycling will eventually damp the cycle; for now the fleet is too young for it to matter much.

Hard-rock production starts with an open pit in a pegmatite. The ore is crushed and passed through dense media separation and flotation to produce a spodumene concentrate of about six percent lithium oxide, which is what actually gets shipped. At the converter, the concentrate is roasted at over a thousand degrees to convert the crystal structure into a form that acid can attack, then leached with sulfuric acid, purified, and precipitated as lithium carbonate or reacted further to lithium hydroxide.

Brine production is slower and stranger. Lithium-bearing water is pumped from beneath a salt flat into a sequence of shallow evaporation ponds, where over roughly a year and a half sun and wind remove water and successive salts crystallize out: first halite, then sylvite, then carnallite, leaving a concentrated lithium liquor. That liquor is treated to remove magnesium and boron and precipitated as carbonate. Yield is modest and recovery from the ponds is imperfect, which is why direct lithium extraction technologies, which pull lithium from brine with sorbents and return the water, attract so much attention.

Battery-grade material must then be purified to very tight limits on sodium, potassium, iron, calcium and magnesium, because these contaminate the cathode and shorten cell life. Qualification of a new chemical plant by a cathode maker takes many months of testing, which is why converter capacity cannot simply be switched on.

The industry quotes several units and they are easy to confuse: lithium content, lithium carbonate equivalent, lithium oxide in concentrate, and metal. The figures on this page are lithium content as reported by the United States Geological Survey. Multiplying by about 5.32 converts lithium content to lithium carbonate equivalent.

Rechargeable batteries dominate and the share has grown steadily; electric vehicles, grid storage and consumer electronics together take the great majority of world lithium supply. Within that, the split between lithium iron phosphate and nickel-rich chemistries determines whether the demand is for carbonate or hydroxide.

The older industrial uses persist but are now a small minority. Lithium compounds lower the melting point and improve durability in ceramics and glass, including glass-ceramic cooktops and specialty glass; lithium greases stay stable across a wide temperature range and are used in vehicles and aviation; lithium is used in continuous casting mold flux for steel, in air treatment as a carbon dioxide absorber, in aluminium smelting, in polymer catalysis and in pharmaceuticals as a mood stabiliser. Lithium metal itself, which is what the price series on this page tracks, is used in primary batteries, in alloys with aluminium and magnesium for aerospace, and as a chemical reagent.

The chain has an unusual shape: mining is spread across Australia, South America and Africa, while conversion is concentrated overwhelmingly in China, and cathode and cell manufacturing are concentrated in China, Korea and Japan. The narrow point is not the ore, of which there is a great deal, but the qualified chemical conversion capacity in between, and the fact that so much of it sits in one country is the reason lithium appears on every critical minerals list.

Logistics themselves are undemanding. Spodumene concentrate is a bulk mineral shipped in ordinary carriers, and lithium carbonate travels in bags and containers. The constraints are upstream and downstream: pond capacity and water permits in the brine triangle, and cathode qualification schedules at the far end.

The genuine single points of failure are political and hydrological rather than industrial. A change in Chilean or Argentine ownership rules, an Indonesian or Zimbabwean export restriction, or a drought in the Atacama affects more supply than any plant outage would. Meanwhile the price cycle itself is a risk: the 2021 to 2023 spike drew in so much hard-rock capacity that the subsequent slump closed marginal mines, and that stop-start pattern is likely to repeat because demand growth is policy-driven and supply growth is capital-driven.