From the lithium triangle to Australia: the new routes of extraction

It is one of those materials that is never seen in its pure form outside chemistry laboratories, and its reactivity explains why it is found at the heart of the most powerful batteries and therefore at the heart of the twenty-first century.

Spread across Chile, Bolivia and Argentina lies the so-called "lithium triangle". The lithium triangle boasts the world's largest concentration of lithium-rich brine, but it can also be found in the salt lakes of the Tibetan plateau in China. Lithium can also be extracted from spodumene, a hard beige-coloured rock, a lithium and aluminium silicate. In fact, these hard rocks explain the origin of the element's name: from lithos, meaning "stone" in Greek.

The extraction of spodumene is much more similar to that of iron or copper: the rock is blasted, then crushed and processed more or less as we do with other rocks. This is what happens in Australia, and at such a pace that, overtaking Chile, it has become the world's largest producer of lithium, even though almost all the extracted spodumene is shipped to China to be processed.