Geopolitical Sustainability of Lithium Supply Chain

As mitigating climate change has become a global priority, nations worldwide are setting challenging and risky policies for decarbonisation of energy and transport. This is leading to significant growth in demand for electric vehicles and energy storage, particularly driven by Europe, Northern America, and Asia. Modern electric vehicles and energy storage applications dominantly use lithium-ion batteries, which require battery raw materials, labelled as critical, including lithium, graphite cobalt, nickel and manganese. Demand is expected to escalate rapidly in future, requiring the development of new sources and supply chains. This paper focuses specifically on lithium. Global supply chains of lithium for batteries are currently dominated by sources in Australia, South America, and China, with processing and manufacturing of the battery compounds and components focused in China, South Korea, and Japan. Limited geographical spread of locality in the supply chain presents potential geopolitical and logistics risks for security of supply, and many countries and regions have begun to consider how they can engage in lithium supply chains to ensure at least minimum level of self-sufficiency. However, despite the importance of lithium for global decarbonisation and foreseen rising future demand, the diversification of supply from new jurisdictions is early in its infancy. The anticipated growth in demand for battery raw materials has been identified to offer an opportunity and a challenge for natural resource -rich countries. In this paper we first discuss the swing producers who possess the capability to grow lithium production based on existing, already identified lithium resources. In the second part we discuss the possibility for developed nations to increase their self-sufficiency for engaging in the lithium supply chains through ensuring minimum-level long-term access to their own latent potential lithium resources through mineral systems modelling based prospectivity analysis and discovery for lithium resources. We present a case study conducted in Northern Finland for identifying and mapping potential lithium-bearing pegmatites in prospectivity chart for lithium resources.