It is the lightest metal on Earth, light enough to float on water, and almost every battery on the planet now depends on it. The world digs up only 240,000 tonnes a year, the price just crashed 80%, and most of it still has to pass through one country to become a battery. 2024 (USGS / IEA) · Compiled June 2026
World mine output 2024
240 kt
▲ +18%, a record year
Australia, top miner
88 kt
~37%, all hard-rock spodumene
Top 3 share
~75%
Australia, Chile, China
Demand from batteries
~90%
up from 64% in 2020
Where the World's Lithium Is Mined (2024)
Colour intensity shows each country's share of global mine production. Hover a country for its tonnage. The Andes brine producers and Australia's hard rock light up the map.
Lower shareHigher share
2024 Lithium Mine Production by Country (kt)
Australia digs hard rock, Chile pumps brine, China does some of both. Three countries make three-quarters of the world's lithium, but as the supply-chain tab shows, that is only half the story.
Reserves Tell a Different Map
The biggest reserves sit in South America's "lithium triangle", Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, which holds about 56% of the world's lithium. Australia mines the most but is not where the most lithium is.
Production Has Nearly Tripled Since 2020 (kt)
The EV boom pulled output up fast. Then supply overshot demand, and the market turned, hard.
240,000 tonnes a year, made tangible.
A small amount of metal doing an outsized job. Verify-and-cite figures in the footer.
8 kg
every second
The world mines about 8 kg of lithium per second.
30 mn
EV batteries / year
At ~8 kg of lithium per electric-car battery.
8,000
phones per EV
One EV battery holds the lithium of about 8,000 smartphones.
0.53
floats on water
Lithium is the only metal lighter than water. It floats, and burns.
How Small Is 240 kt? (annual world production, Mt)
Like rare earths, lithium proves that importance has nothing to do with volume. We make 7,700 times more steel than lithium, and yet lithium is the bottleneck everyone is worried about.
Two Ways to Get Lithium
Hard rock is faster and dirtier; brine is cleaner but slow. Spodumene rock is crushed and roasted. Brine is pumped from under salt flats and left to evaporate in the sun for over a year.
The Carbon Gap Between Them
Per kg of lithium carbonate, hard-rock spodumene emits roughly five times the CO2 of brine. The cleaner route is the slow one, which is exactly why the dirty one scaled fastest.
Why the Method Matters
The same metal arrives two very different ways. In Australia, lithium comes from hard-rock spodumene: mine it, crush it, roast it at 1,000 degrees, and ship a concentrate, fast to scale, but energy-hungry. In the South American salt flats, it comes from brine: pump salty water into vast ponds and let the sun evaporate it for a year or more, far less CO2 but slow, water-intensive, and tangled up with local communities and fragile ecosystems. The world wants lithium fast and clean, and right now it mostly has to pick one.
Mined in Australia
~37%
the world's biggest raw supplier
Aussie ore refined in China
97%
it is dug here, processed there
China, global refining
~65%
of all lithium processing
Battery cell making
~75%
also concentrated in China
Mining Is Spread Out. Refining Is Not.
This is the lithium version of a pattern that repeats across critical minerals: the rock can come from anywhere, but turning it into battery-grade material runs through China. Even Australia, the top miner, ships almost all of its spodumene to China to be refined.
Why It Matters
A country can have the mine and still not have the supply chain. Australia pulls more lithium out of the ground than anyone, yet around 97% of its spodumene is shipped to China to be turned into the carbonate and hydroxide that batteries actually need. China refines roughly two-thirds of the world's lithium and makes most of its battery cells. That is why "we have our own lithium" rarely means energy independence, and why the US, EU and others are now racing to build refining capacity, the unglamorous middle of the chain, at home.
The Price Rollercoaster (lithium carbonate, USD per tonne)
Lithium is the most volatile major commodity of the decade. It spiked roughly tenfold into 2022 as carmakers panicked over supply, then crashed about 80% as new mines flooded the market and EV growth cooled. Boom, bust, repeat.
Where Lithium Goes
A decade ago lithium meant ceramics and greases. Now it is almost entirely batteries, and almost entirely about cars.
The Bigger Picture
Lithium is the clearest bet on the electric future and the clearest example of how bumpy that road is. Demand follows EV sales, EV sales follow policy and price, and new mines take years to switch on, so supply lurches between glut and shortage. The 80% crash bankrupted projects that the next shortage will badly miss. Long term the direction is one way: more batteries, more grid storage, more lithium. The short term is whiplash.