The global lithium race: Where does India stand?

Dr. Devarajan Mylappally, MAusIMM, a leading Indian exploration geologist, has more than three decades of experience exploring for precious and base metals, both domestically and internationally. In this article, he provides a comprehensive view of the current global lithium race, leading countries and insights into the efforts being made by India and others to secure lithium reserves.

“There is a global competition for resources, but we don’t need to substitute soldiers… use business to compete effectively.” – General Wesley Clark

When India reported the finding of a massive lithium deposit in the Reasi area of Jammu and Kashmir state in February 2023, the world’s battery metal industry took notice. Subsequent events, however, showed that the resource, grade, and recovery assumptions were not supported by enough data. During the past two years, the Indian government has taken a series of steps to augment the nation’s lithium needs.

This note gives an overview of India’s current position on the global lithium map.

Global Lithium Reserves and Production

Table 1 – Global lithium production and reserves

Source: Table 1 displays the global lithium production according to data compiled by the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy (2024) and global lithium reserves according to the USGS mineral commodities summary for 2024.

Lithium ore comes in two major varieties.

• One type of lithium ore, primarily spodumene mineral, is found in hard rocks like pegmatite.

• The second main source is lithium-bearing salts and brines found in salt lakes, such as those in the Andes. These brines contain lithium salts such as lithium hydroxide, carbonate, and chloride.

• Lithium is also present in certain clay deposits, but its extraction presents considerable challenges.

In terms of reserves, Chile leads the pack with 9.3 million metric tonnes of brine-type lithium. With an output of 56,000 tonnes, it ranks second in the world in terms of production. Australia was the world’s largest producer of lithium ore in 2023, producing about 86,000 tonnes. The country has 6.2 million tonnes of lithium reserves, primarily of the hard-rock spodumene type.

Argentina produced 9,600 tonnes of lithium in 2023 and has 3.6 million tonnes of deposits. Most of the lithium mined in the United States comes from Albemarle’s Silver Peak mine in Nevada, a brine evaporation mine.

Despite having the world’s greatest brine-type lithium resource, estimated at about 23 million metric tonnes, mostly under the enormous Salar de Uyuni salt flat, Bolivia is not included in the list because of its political unpredictability. Even after signing a deal with a Chinese consortium, Bolivia’s public sector has not been able to make significant progress in developing its nationalized lithium resources.

Needless to mention, India has yet to find a position within the ranks of lithium-producing countries.

The majority of lithium producing nations export lithium ore (lithium carbonate) and are not as diversified as China in setting up the downstream links of the value chain, especially processing and battery manufacturing.

Multipronged Approach of China

Given that India’s green energy needs are similar to those of China’s, extra attention should be paid to China’s multifaceted activities in exploration, import, processing, manufacturing, and recycling that touch every link in the lithium value chain.

• An estimated 3 million tonnes of lithium are found in China. It has one mining activity and two sizable brine activities. Salt lakes in the Xizang autonomous area and Qinghai province provide the majority of China’s lithium. Additionally, China is actively searching Tibet for hard rock lithium resources in the pegmatite and granite rocks. China’s state media announced additional finds on January 8, 2025, including some lithium salt lakes in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and a 2,800-kilometer spodumene belt in Tibet’s Xikunsong-Pan-Ganzi area. According to the agency, China now holds the second-largest lithium deposit in the world, with its reserves having increased from 6% to 16.5% of the worldwide total.

• China is mostly dependent on lithium imports, mostly from Australia and the lithium triangle, despite producing 33,000 tonnes of lithium ore in 2023. Nearly 97% of Australia’s lithium exports go to it. This seems to be a tactic meant to conserve and build a domestic stockpile while meeting the immediate requirements through import.

• Chinese mining companies, including Ganfeng, Tianqi, and Zijin, have significant ownership positions in international lithium mines and extraction businesses across several nations. Tianqi owns a 23% investment in Chile’s state-owned mining corporation, SQM, and the bulk of the Greenbushes lithium project in Australia, the biggest hard rock lithium mine in the world.

Zijin owns the Tres Quebradas project, while Ganfeng co-owns the Cauchari-Olaroz lithium project in Argentina. For Bolivia’s Pastos Grandes lithium project, the Russian Uranium One Group and the Chinese company CITIC Guoan will jointly invest 1.4 billion USD in two lithium factories.

• Nearly 75% of the world’s capacity for lithium processing and refinement is thought to be in China. In addition, China has advanced quickly in the metallurgy of several metals essential to battery manufacturing.

Indian Efforts in Securing Lithium Resources

1. Domestic Production: In August 2023, the Indian Ministry of Mines eliminated a number of minerals, including those containing lithium, from the list of atomic minerals included in Part-B of the First Schedule to the Mines Act. This made it easier for the private sector to explore for and exploit these minerals. India launched the National Geoscience Data Repository (NGDR) in December 2023 as a connected step. This serves as a central repository for geoscientific data produced by government organizations that the general public and exploration firms interested in lithium and other commodities can access.

However, the Reasi lithium ambitions hit a snag when the Ministry of Mines had to repeatedly annul its attempt to auction the block for mining. The repeated setbacks were due to insufficient information on the grade, resource and extraction challenges. The Ministry of Mines has since directed the Geological Survey of India (GSI) to conduct further exploration to generate further confidence in the viability of the deposit.

In June 2024, the Katghora lithium block in Chhattisgarh, where GSI had previously reported lithium concentrations up to 2000 parts per million (ppm) in granitic rocks, was won on auction by the Maiki South Mining Private Limited for further exploration. However, recovering lithium from lepidolite mica in the granite rock is challenging due to the presence of deleterious elements such as potassium, aluminium, silicon, and fluorine and the relatively low lithium content in mica compared to spodumene.

GSI and other government organizations have made significant headway in their lithium exploration efforts, particularly in Odisha, Karnataka, and Rajasthan, although details on the resources are not yet available.

2. Securing Lithium Abroad: In June 2023, India joined the Minerals Security Partnership (MSP), a group of Western countries engaged in the production and trading of critical minerals. The member countries include the US, Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the EU.

In January 2024, the Ministry of Mines, Government of India, signed an agreement between Khanij Bidesh India Limited (KABIL) and the state-owned CATAMARCA MINERA Y ENERGÉTICA SOCIEDAD DEL ESTADO of Argentina.

With this Agreement, KABIL has obtained exploration and exploitation rights for 5 blocks, covering an area of about 15,703 hectares in Argentina’s Catamarca province.

This is the first ever lithium exploration and mining project by a Government Company of India.

3. Processing and Metallurgy: Recently, the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad and the Monash University, Melbourne, signed an MOU to set up the Australia-India Critical Minerals Research Hub (AICMRH). The hub aims to bring together leading academicians, researchers and industry leaders from Australia and India to work on several joint projects related to the development of methodology for the exploration, extraction, processing and recycling of critical minerals.

4. Import of Lithium: According to available data, India primarily imports lithium-ion batteries, not raw lithium. During FY 2023, the import value of lithium-ion batteries to India was around 3 billion US dollars, with most of its imports coming from China and Hong Kong. Since 2021, India has launched a Production-Linked Incentive Scheme for manufacturing Advanced Chemistry Cell (ACC) batteries.

Way Forward for India

Although India has taken a series of steps in the different stages of the lithium value chain, a notable feature is that all these efforts envisage crucial roles to be played by the government sector itself. The previous attempts by the Indian public sector in exploration and mining abroad for precious and critical minerals have not met with any notable success. A case in point is that of NMDC’s gold exploration project in Tanzania, which was wound up after nearly two decades after sinking several million dollars.

• Considering the average time span of 15-20 years between discovery and production for most mines of critical minerals, it will take more than a decade from now to commercially operationalise a mine and even longer to establish a domestic value chain from mining ore to manufacturing of Li-ion batteries. Therefore, the battery metal policy warrants a more inclusive and aggressive effort that should attract a large number of private-sector mining companies, junior exploration companies and manufacturers to explore within India and abroad.

• Although the NGDR provides an excellent opportunity for interested parties such as junior exploration companies to review the available exploration data and select areas of interest for exploration of lithium and other critical minerals within India, the allocation policy by auction is heavily loaded against startups (Junior Exploration Companies-JECs).

• The exploration allocation policies should be further tweaked to attract JECs to enter into the fray for exploration and mining, especially for battery metals.

• Indian private exploration and mining companies should also be encouraged to acquire lithium projects/mines abroad by raising funds from the Indian stock exchanges. Such listed companies may be asked to use the CRIRSCO-compliant reporting code, the Indian Mineral Industry Code (IMIC), to meet investor confidence instead of the United Nations Framework Classification (UNFC) being used by Indian government agencies.

Only when a large number of private players are allowed to work with the government in exploring lithium in India and abroad will India achieve its green energy targets, such as net-zero emissions by 2070, a 30 per cent EV share in new vehicle sales, and increasing non-fossil fuel energy capacity to 500 GW by 2030, etc.

Also read: Building upstream lithium-ion cell value chain in India