Demand for lithium is predicted to surge over the next two decades, especially as transport electrifies. Currently, however, most of this lithium is sourced from China – sparking a global search for new supplies Anthony King reports.
The battery of an electric car typically contains a hefty 8kg of lithium. And demand is growing. In 2020, the UK imported 467t of lithium oxide and lithium hydroxide and 1508t of lithium carbonate precursor chemicals for battery manufacture. Meanwhile, other metals in Li-ion batteries include manganese, nickel, cobalt and iron, depending on the cathode chemistry.
‘The beauty of lithium is that you can make batteries that are lightweight but with high energy density,’ says Elizabeth Driscoll, a battery chemist at the University of Birmingham, UK. Geologists say Europe has enough lithium to be self-sufficient, yet there are no large commercial-scale mines.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) categorises the supply risks as high. With Australia, Chile and China mining 68% of all lithium and China processing 57% of this, other countries have become increasingly concerned about guaranteeing supply of such a critical metal. The IEA estimated demand for lithium metal in 2020 at 100kt, forecasting this will grow to 503kt in 2030 and 1172kt in 2040.
Unsurprisingly, there is increasing interest in finding alternative supplies.
‘If we take all the known occurrences of lithium in Europe, we would have enough lithium to be self-sufficient,’ says Jochen Kolb, economic geologist at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology in Germany.
Cornish mines
In the UK, most commercial concerns centre on granite rocks. Granites contain mica, a mineral rich in silica that sometimes also contains high concentrations of lithium, thought to originate from the last residual fluid crystallising from volcanic magma. Lithium-bearing granites often have a history of previous mining since they may be associated with tin and other desirable elements.
‘Cornwall was famous for tin, copper and arsenic, historically, though the importance of those elements changed over time,’ notes Robin Armstrong, a geologist at the Natural History Museum in London, UK.
Lithium-bearing mica was first identified in St Austell granite in 1825, but the element was not useful enough to mine. Similar granites are also found in Spain, Portugal, central France and along the German-Czech border. Some contain zinnwaldite – KLiFeAl(AlSi3)O10(OH, F)2 – a mica that could contain sufficient lithium to be of interest for processing. In many of these locations, companies are actively investigating how much lithium is present and how best to process these rocks.
During the 1980s, the British Geological Survey (BGS) assessed the potential of lithium resources from mica in St Austell granite. British Lithium and Cornish Lithium are companies exploring this area, while Northern Lithium is looking at northeast England.
All the major granites in southwest England contain lithium-bearing micas, ‘although the amount of lithium contained in the micas is highly variable,’ according to a 2022 BGS commissioned report. The potential for lithium in the UK from the UK Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre was authored by Richard Shaw, an economic geologist at BGS.
The granite in Cornwall is relatively enriched in lithium-rich micas zinnwaldite and lepidolite compared with some other granites around the world. The report notes that zinnwaldite from near St Austell contains up to 17,818ppm Li, while the mica lepidolite from the same granite body can contain up to 23,953ppm. An outcrop of the lithium-mica St Austell granite occupies an area of about 8.5km2 and contains ca 9% lithium-mica.
‘Micas are quite a complex mineral group,’ says Shaw. ‘They can accommodate an awful lot of elements. [However,] the challenge is around processing them.’
In October 2024, Cornish Lithium announced that a demonstration plant is to open near St Austell to extract and process hard rock into lithium hydroxide. The aim is to produce 10,000t/year of battery-grade lithium from a former china-clay pit using a new process technology. Cornish Lithium says no new pits will be needed and much of the required infrastructure such as power, rail and road is already in place.
Processing these granites and micas is work in progress. Some years ago, the UK’s Natural History Museum was involved in a project to look at how granite containing lithium might be processed. ‘The method we used was very energy intensive, with the mica taken to in excess of 900°C,’ says Armstrong, adding that fluorine can also be present in both lepidolite and zinnwaldite (see Precursor materials below), which means hydrogen fluoride gas can be generated in the process. ‘That’s problematic to handle. It’s not insurmountable but it adds cost.’
Lithium Hydroxide demonstration plant
Cheapest sources
Currently, the easiest lithium to mine is contained in the brines of South America, which can be evaporated in sunlight before further processing to enrich the metal as a salt. The other major source of lithium today is spodumene, a lithium aluminium inosilicate (LiAl(SiO3)2) usually found in pegmatite, a coarse-grained igneous rock formed when magma cools.
‘The brines in South America seem to be the cheapest to operate, followed by the Greenbushes deposit in Australia,’ says Kolb, referring to the world’s largest hard rock lithium mine bearing pegmatites rich in spodumene.
There are few hard and fast rules on costs, however. Processing hard rock always requires substantial energy in the form of crushing and heating. Also, a rock type might look promising yet contain too little metal. Nevertheless, processing of pegmatite and brine are established technologies.
Globally, meanwhile, various other potentially significant lithium deposits have never been mined. A huge lithium deposit was recently reported from a volcanic crater at Thacker Pass in Nevada, US, for example, present in an unusual claystone. Similarly, Serbia has a substantial lithium-boron resource in a mineral, jadarite (LiNaSiB3O7(OH)), formed in former lake sediments up to several hundred metres below the surface.
‘The number of deposit types that will host lithium is actually quite diverse, but many are not currently exploited on a commercial scale,’ says Shaw.
Hot brines
In Germany, there is also interest in granites and micas, where mining could likely spin off other potentially useful materials such as gypsum for the local building industry. Another potential source of lithium in Germany is from hot brines, which can also generate thermal energy. In 2024, Vulcan Energy began production of the first lithium chloride extraction plant using geothermal energy in the Upper Rhine Valley region. The lithium chloride obtained would then be turned into battery-grade lithium hydroxide at its new conversion plant in Frankfurt.
‘We did calculations for some of the power plants,’ says Kolb, referring to work he undertook with the company. ‘They showed that the lithium would not be exhausted for 30 to 40 years.’
Cornish Lithium is also pursuing hot brines with geothermal energy. In March 2025 the company obtained approval for the UK’s first commercial lithium production plant at a facility near the village of Chacewater in Cornwall. The plan is to develop two boreholes down to 2000m to pump up geothermal water from which lithium will be extracted.
‘We’ve drilled eight exploration boreholes and expect to be a few years away from commercial production,’ says Lucy Crane, a geologist with Cornish Lithium. Meanwhile, Weardale Lithium and Northern Lithium are interested in heat-producing granite in County Durham, northeast England, which has warm geothermal brine with elevated concentrations of lithium.
These new European processes, however, have faced headwinds. Elsewhere, lithium production has been surging, with Chile and Argentina upping their lithium outputs. The price of lithium carbonate has slumped since 2023 when it averaged around $40,000/t. For 2024, the average fell to around $12,000/t, slipping to around $10,000/t in early 2025. ‘In the last few years, we have seen some overproduction of lithium, causing price changes,’ says Kolb. ‘Very few companies invest during low price times, so the situation is difficult.’
Another obstacle is public opposition: Europe in particular is a densely populated region, and most countries have no recent history of mining.
‘Many people still think of mining as done in the 1970s and 1980s, but when done in a modern way, it is completely different. There’s a lot of automation and the environment is taken into account from the start,’ says Kolb. Cornish Lithium says that the history of mining in the southwest of England means there has been little public opposition to its activities.
It can take 15 to 20 years for a resource to be discovered and mined. If Europe wants to be less dependent on countries such as China for batteries – especially in times of trade tensions – it may need to commence mining its own lithium resources for processing in Europe. And with choppy waters in international trade, there is little guarantee that lithium ore would otherwise be shipped to Europe for processing. As securing supply chains becomes more important, European countries might prefer to mine and process lithium to supply its own battery industry, making the region less reliant on other countries for this critical green technology.
Given that it can take over a decade to bring a mine into production, European countries need to be making more progress towards lithium extraction to feed the processors and factories of the future. ‘It matters to have a battery ecosystem’ says Evangelos Kallitsis, an electrochemical energy researcher at Imperial College London, UK. ‘To establish that, controlling the raw materials that go inside the batteries is important.’
Precursor materials
Two main forms of lithium are supplied to battery factories. They are lithium carbonate (Li2CO3) and lithium hydroxide (LiOH). If the source of lithium is from a brine, it is likely to be in the form of lithium chloride, which is purified and converted into lithium carbonate. To make lithium iron phosphate (LFP), a popular cathode chemistry in Li-ion batteries, a manufacturer usually combines lithium carbonate and iron phosphate in a solid-state reaction, with a carbon source.
‘You grind them up, mix them together and you heat to around 700°C,’ says battery chemist Elizabeth Driscoll at Birmingham University, UK. This solid state chemistry reflects how minerals are formed in Earth’s crust at high temperatures.
The other major precursor, lithium hydroxide, is how lithium is often supplied for NMC (lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide) cathode production. ‘They’ll take starting salts. It could be nickel sulfate, cobalt sulfate and manganese sulfate. Those sulfate groups are just there to help solubilise the metal. We don’t care about them,’ says Driscoll. ‘Then add a base, such as sodium hydroxide, and that will form the metal hydroxide groups.’ The lithium hydroxide is added to react with the metal hydroxides, generating lithium for the metal oxide of the cathode.
NMC materials are among the best performing lithium-ion batteries. LFP batteries do not quite match their performance but are more stable and cheaper and increasingly popular for EVs.
But this is not the whole story. The precursors can be converted from one form to the other. What battery makers are using as inputs will depend on their processes and battery chemistry, which are commercially sensitive. ‘It’s very hard to get detailed information from manufacturers in terms of whether they’re using carbonate or hydroxide for their operations,’ says Evangelos Kallitsis at Imperial College London, UK. ‘Generally, LFP produced through solid state synthesis uses lithium hydroxide while the hydrothermal process uses carbonate.’
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