Lithium by Country: Bolivia Has the Reserves, Australia Has the Output
Bolivia holds the world's largest lithium reserves but negligible production. Australia produces over a third of world supply from far smaller reserves.
Lithium’s country-level picture contains a genuine paradox worth stating plainly: the country with the largest known reserves is barely a producer, while the largest current producer holds a comparatively modest reserve base.
Current production is led by Australia, then Chile and China
In 2024, Australia accounted for roughly 36.7 percent of global lithium production, followed by Chile at 23.7 percent and China at 17.1 percent, with Zimbabwe, Argentina, Brazil, and Canada contributing smaller shares from 1.8 to 9.2 percent. Australia’s dominance stems from its hard-rock spodumene deposits, covered on this material’s geology page, which are faster to bring into production than the brine operations that define Chile and Argentina’s output.
Reserves point somewhere else entirely
Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni holds the single largest brine resource in the world, yet Bolivia’s current production is negligible, a gap driven by the technical and infrastructure challenges of Uyuni’s brine chemistry and by decades of state policy favouring domestic processing control over rapid foreign-partnered extraction, a genuinely different story from the extraction economics covered on this material’s mining page.
Refining closes the loop back to China
Regardless of where lithium is mined, roughly 97 percent of Australian spodumene concentrate is shipped to China for refining into battery-grade lithium chemicals, and China’s overall share of global lithium refining capacity is roughly 65 percent, covered in more depth on this material’s supply chain page. Australia’s dominant mine-stage position therefore does not translate into equivalent control over the finished battery material.
Sources: production and reserve figures reference this project’s own verified production data (USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025); refining concentration figures are widely reported (Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, IEA Critical Minerals Outlook).