Battery demand for electric vehicles, energy storage systems, and portable electronic devices are propelling lithium mining around the planet.
As a result, worldwide lithium production increased by 21% in 2021 compared to 2020 to approximately 100,000 metric tons.The above infographic lists the world’s largest mining companies of the white metal by market capitalization. Lithium brine deposits are accumulations of saline groundwater enriched in dissolved lithium. Although abundant in nature, only select regions in the world contain brines, mostly in South America.
Lithium can also be extracted from lithium clays, but there’s still no commercial scale of production for this method of extraction., four mineral operations in Australia, two brine operations each in Argentina and Chile, and two brine and one mineral operation in China accounted for the majority of global lithium production in 2021.
Albemarle also has assets in Nevada, U.S., and Australia. Its Clayton Valley operation is the only source of lithium production in the United States. While Australia and Chile account for the majority of the lithium supply, China has more than half of all capacity for refining it into specialized battery chemicals. to dominate the clean energy metals supply chain, three Chinese companies are also among the top lithium mining companies. The biggest, Tianqi Lithium, has a significant stake in Greenbushes, the world’s biggest hard-rock lithium mine in Australia.
Not only are batterymetals making commodity markets more volatile but they are making metals a correlative factor in the production of EVs ElectricVehicles causing producers Tesla BHP to rethink strategies around industrial policies in the future.