Nearly Un-Li-mited

Lithium isn’t sexy.

It is a soft, silvery-white alkali metal (atomic number 3) that is the lightest solid element, known for its high reactivity and excellent electrochemical properties.

It is a critical mineral used in ceramics, lubricants, pharmaceuticals to treat bipolar disorder, and batteries.

A lot of batteries.

A surprising number of devices have a lithium battery in them, including whatever screen you might be using to read this newsletter on.

Your TV’s remote, your smart light switch, your earbuds, your smartwatch, your flashlight, your laptop, your smartphone, your power drill, your weedwacker, your hearing aid (you’ll need one eventually), your electric lawnmower, your golf cart, your pacemaker (yep, you’ll need one of those too, probably), and potentially your car are all powered in part by lithium.

The use of lithium in batteries has grown exponentially in the last decade as more of the critical element is used in electric vehicles, data centers, and battery energy storage systems (BESS).

Estimates suggest that demand for lithium will double, then triple, over the next 15 years.

ICYMI: Lithium is mined in only a handful of countries.

Australia, Chile, and China mine the majority of all of the world’s lithium.

However, China maintains a near-monopoly on lithium refining and battery component manufacturing.

By 2035, China is projected to supply over 60% of the world’s refined lithium.

Back in 2019, the US Geological Survey (USGS) reported that there were around 80 million tonnes of identified lithium reserves globally.

This past week, new research from the USGS uncovered an estimated 2.3 million metric tons of previously undiscovered, economically recoverable lithium in the Appalachian region of the eastern United States. This deposit alone is enough to replace 328 years of America’s lithium imports at last year’s level.

In late 2024, the USGS announced that the Smackover Formation, a Jurassic-aged limestone aquifer stretching from Texas to Florida, contains between 5.1 and 19.0 million metric tons of lithium within its brines. Energy companies, including ExxonMobil, are dropping billions to deploy Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) technologies in the region. Commercial production is targeted to begin by 2028, positioning the “Gulf of whatever we’re calling it this week” as a major new hub for lithium and battery production.

Last year, the Lithium Americas Corporation started poking around the McDermitt Caldera, a massive extinct 16-million-year-old supervolcano on the Nevada-Oregon border. Under its volcanic ash flows and rhyolite ring domes, they found deposits estimated to clock in somewhere between 20 and 40 million metric tons of lithium-rich clay at this site. The site could be worth $1.5 trillion at current lithium prices and might be the largest lithium deposit ever found.

(Think of all the bipolar disorders we could remedy.)

Battery nerds call end-of-life batteries “Urban Mines” because they are rich in critical metals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese.

Unlike the fossil fuels we burn, lithium and lithium-based batteries are nearly 99% recyclable.

Two weeks ago, Mangrove Lithium opened a proof-of-concept facility for its new Clear-Li refining process in Delta, British Columbia. They expect to produce 1,100 tons of battery-grade lithium per year.

At current production levels, that’s enough lithium to power 25,000 electric vehicles.

In two short years, based on the deposits discovered, the US went from being at the bottom of potential lithium-producing countries to the top.

The US has a long way to go to get that silvery-white material out of the ground and into your electronic devices. Still, it now has an opportunity to eclipse China in lithium production and refining. Once they do, the combination of US mining and Canadian recycling could create a nearly unlimited cyclical lithium supply chain in North America.

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