Lithium Li
What it is for
Lithium is the element in the battery that stores the charge, and there is no drop-in substitute at comparable energy density. That makes it the input with the least slack in the electric vehicle chain: a shortage cannot be engineered around in the way a shortage of, say, a particular steel grade can.
What it costs
Where it sits in the chain
Two extraction routes lead to the same product by different economics. Hard-rock spodumene, mostly Australian, is quick to build and expensive to run; brine evaporation in the South American salt flats is slow to build and cheap to run. Both then need conversion into battery-grade carbonate or hydroxide, a chemical step overwhelmingly located in China. As with copper, the country that digs it and the country that refines it are usually not the same, and the value sits with the second.
Who has it
| Country | Production | Reserves | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australia | 88,000 | 7,000,000 | 2024 |
| Chile | 49,000 | 9,300,000 | 2024 |
| China | 41,000 | 3,000,000 | 2024 |
| Zimbabwe | 22,000 | 480,000 | 2024 |
| Argentina | 18,000 | 4,000,000 | 2024 |
| Brazil | 10,000 | 390,000 | 2024 |
| Canada | 4,300 | 1,200,000 | 2024 |
| Namibia | 2,700 | 14,000 | 2024 |
| Portugal | 380 | 60,000 | 2024 |
Production and reserves in tonnes of contained lithium; price in US dollars per tonne.
How concentrated it is
Production is dominated by Australia and Chile, with China third and growing. The price series begins only in 2012, which is itself informative: before the electric vehicle build-out there was no benchmark worth publishing, because the market was too small and too bilateral to have a public price.
What this cannot show
Lithium is sold on long-term contracts far more than on spot markets, so a benchmark price describes a thin slice of actual trade and moves more violently than the average transaction. The 2022 spike and subsequent collapse are real, but almost nobody bought or sold at either extreme.
Other resources
Copper · Cobalt · Nickel · Potash · Phosphate · Iron ore · Aluminium · Zinc · Tin