Picture a shallow evaporation pond in the Atacama Desert, its surface encrusted with salt and its brine a pale greenish-blue. The liquid has been pumped from beneath the salt flat, and over eighteen months or more it will concentrate until lithium can be extracted from it. That pond is, in a practical sense, the beginning of a battery in a car being assembled thousands of kilometres away. Understanding how the material gets from that pond to the vehicle — and what else must join it along the way — is the subject of this article.
The five materials and where they begin
A lithium-ion battery cell draws on a small set of elements whose geology happens to be unevenly distributed across the planet. Lithium comes predominantly from two source types: brine deposits concentrated in the high-altitude salars of South America (Chile, Argentina and Bolivia hold the largest known reserves), and hard-rock spodumene deposits mined primarily in Australia. Cobalt is largely a by-product of copper mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which holds the majority of global reserves. Nickel enters the chain from laterite and sulphide deposits spread across Indonesia, the Philippines, Russia and a handful of other countries. Manganese is mined on several continents, with significant output from South Africa and Gabon. Graphite, which forms the anode in the dominant cell chemistry, comes overwhelmingly from natural deposits in China, though synthetic graphite — made from petroleum coke — is produced more widely.
That list already spans South America, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and East Asia. The supply chain is intercontinental before a single cell has been manufactured.
From ore to battery-grade material: the processing bottleneck
Mining the ore or pumping the brine is only the first transformation. Each material must be refined to a specification — purity, particle size, chemical form — that a cathode or anode manufacturer will accept. This intermediate processing stage is where the supply chain is most concentrated, and where the term "bottleneck" is most precisely applied.
China currently dominates the refining and processing of most battery materials. This is not primarily a geological fact — China does not hold the largest reserves of lithium or cobalt — but an industrial one built up over two decades of investment in chemical processing capacity. Spodumene concentrate mined in Australia, for instance, has typically been shipped to China for conversion into lithium hydroxide or lithium carbonate before it can be used in a cathode active material plant. Cobalt from the DRC follows a similar path. The country produces a large share of the world's refined cobalt chemicals even though it mines little of the ore itself.
The consequence is that a disruption in Chinese processing capacity — whether from energy constraints, policy changes or logistical problems — propagates quickly to cell manufacturers in South Korea, Japan and increasingly Europe and North America, regardless of where the raw ore originated. Efforts to build refining capacity outside China are underway in several regions, but refinery construction is capital-intensive and slow, and qualified technical workforces take time to develop.
Cathode and anode manufacturing
Refined materials converge at cathode active material (CAM) plants, where lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt and other elements are combined in precise ratios and calcined at high temperature to produce the powders that a cell manufacturer will coat onto metal foil. Different cell chemistries — NMC, LFP, NCA and others — call for different compositions, and shifts in market preference (the recent growth of lithium iron phosphate chemistry, which eliminates cobalt and nickel) alter which upstream supply chains are under the most pressure at any given time.
The anode side is somewhat simpler chemically but has its own geographic concentration: the bulk of the world's natural graphite processing and spheronisation capacity sits in China. Spheronisation — rounding graphite particles so they pack efficiently into an electrode — is an energy-intensive step, and the economics have historically favoured locations with lower electricity costs.
A worked illustrative example: grade, volume and loss
To make the scale of upstream effort concrete, consider an illustrative example. Suppose a hard-rock lithium mine operates at a spodumene grade of 1.5% lithium oxide. To produce one tonne of lithium carbonate equivalent, the mine must process a substantial quantity of ore through crushing, flotation and concentration before a single kilogram reaches a refinery. At each stage — mining, concentration, chemical conversion — there are yield losses: material that reports to tailings, process streams that are not fully recovered, impurities that must be removed. The overall recovery from run-of-mine ore to battery-grade lithium chemical is well below 100%, meaning the upstream tonnage required is a large multiple of the final product weight. This is not unusual; it is the normal arithmetic of mineral processing, but it underlines why a battery cell, though small and light, represents a disproportionately large upstream industrial effort.
(The numbers in this example are illustrative. Do not use them as a planning figure for a specific operation.)
Cell manufacturing and the role of geography
Cell manufacturing — where the processed materials are coated, wound or stacked, filled with electrolyte and sealed — is itself heavily concentrated, with China, South Korea and Japan accounting for the great majority of global capacity. Gigafactories announced or under construction in Europe and North America represent a deliberate attempt by those regions to capture this stage of the chain, partly for industrial policy reasons and partly to reduce logistics exposure. A cell plant in Germany that still sources cathode material from China has shortened the chain at one end while leaving the upstream exposure largely intact.
Assembly, use and what happens at end of life
Battery packs are assembled closer to vehicle manufacturing, and vehicle assembly is spread across many countries. At end of life, the question of where spent cells go — and how much material can be recovered through hydrometallurgical or direct recycling — connects the back end of the chain to its front end. Recycled lithium, cobalt and nickel can in principle reduce the demand placed on primary mining, though the recycling infrastructure is still developing relative to the volume of cells approaching end of life in the coming years.
Where to look next
Readers wanting to go deeper will find that the processing bottleneck described here is best understood through the technical literature on hydrometallurgy and solvent extraction, where the chemistry of separating battery-grade lithium hydroxide from a mixed brine or leach solution is treated with the rigour the subject warrants. The evolving economics of direct lithium extraction, the debate over anode graphite supply outside China, and the emerging regulatory frameworks around battery passports and due diligence — particularly the EU Battery Regulation — each open into substantial bodies of primary literature and industry reporting that reward careful reading.