How lithium gets from the earth into your electric car

Lithium has never been more in demand. The soft, silvery metal gives batteries more life and allows them to hold a longer charge. A lithium-ion battery is likely powering the device you’re using right now to read these words. And if you own an electric vehicle, these batteries make it go.

With EVs now accounting for 10 percent of all new car sales globally, there’s a scramble to get more lithium. For now, there are two ways to extract it from the earth.

We went to North Carolina, where there are extensive deposits embedded in rock.

This story is better experienced with audio.

And we went to Nevada, and the only lithium mine currently open in the country, where the substance is extracted from watery, salty brines.

This is the mine in Silver Peak, Nev., a remote area about three hours northwest of Las Vegas. The operation, run by Albemarle Corp., produces about 1 percent of the world’s supply of lithium. Most lithium comes from Australia, Chile and China, which also dominates in processing lithium and making batteries.

Brine from underground aquifers is pumped to the surface and into evaporation ponds.

The brine moves from pond to pond over 18 to 24 months. The pools turn a brighter blue as the brine evaporates and changes composition. Lime and sodium carbonate are added to remove impurities and byproducts. The shallow depths and refraction of light also change the colors of the pools.

Once the concentration of lithium in the brine is high enough, the slurry is pumped to a processing plant to be filtered and dried. This leaves behind a white powder, which needs to be further purified.

Then it’s poured into one-ton bags, ready to ship by truck to North Carolina.

Silver Peak produces about 5,000 metric tons of lithium a year, enough to power about 80,000 electric vehicles.

But this production pales in comparison with the amount needed to sustain global EV sales, which hit about 7.8 million vehicles in 2022.

The number of EVs sold in the United States is expected to rise as states like California and New York move to ban sales of gas-powered cars by 2035.

Once lithium arrives at Albemarle’s plant in Kings Mountain, it undergoes more processing and purification.

It’s a gritty industrial affair, as is all the crushing, smelting and digging of metals and minerals required to create green energy. The U.S. government is creating incentives to mine these materials, but the prospect of extraction angers some landowners and residents who live near sites of future mines.

In Minnesota, some residents are pushing back on a proposed nickel mine because of concerns about contaminating precious lakes. In Nevada, tribal governments are worried about new lithium mines despoiling traditional sacred lands.

Once lithium is mined and processed, the powder concentrate undergoes a complicated chemical transformation to become a solid metal. Now it’s ready to be used in batteries.

Lithium is the least dense metal — and also one of the most reactive, always wanting to shed electrons. It’s sensitive to moisture, even from breath, so workers at this stage wear masks.

An electric battery is a compact sandwich of metal sheets, foils and films. The flow of lithium ions within this sandwich creates electricity.

These batteries can hold a tremendous amount of energy in tight spaces, such as the floor of a car. With enough cells packed together, an EV can drive for several hundred miles.

EV maker Polestar, started by Volvo, stylized the manufacturing process in this commercial.

To meet the demand for lithium, Albemarle Corp. is looking to expand production in Nevada and reopen a mine in North Carolina next to its processing plant in Kings Mountain.

North Carolina has some of the highest-grade lithium deposits in rock, and once supplied most of the world’s lithium.

The Kings Mountain mine was operational for 50 years before shutting down in the 1980s when it became cheaper to extract lithium from brines in South America.

But even before batteries, lithium had an array of uses — in glass, grease and nuclear weapons. In medicine, lithium salts are mood stabilizers, treating mental health conditions such as bipolar disorder.

After its closure, the open-pit lithium mine in Kings Mountain filled with water, and vegetation flourished. The water will have to be pumped out if the mine reopens.

In this drone footage, you can see remnants of benches, or terraces, ringing the pit that help miners get rock from greater depths.

There’s a higher concentration of lithium in hard rock than there is in brine evaporated over months. But noisy, heavy equipment is needed to dig it out and break it apart.

For decades, Kings Mountain was a mining town, and the mayor welcomes the revival of the lithium mine in the city of 11,000.

Even though the mine already exists, Albemarle officials say they’re doing environmental studies and would need permits to resume operations. Mining could start in 2027.

In this part of North Carolina, another company is on the lithium hunt — but it wants to dig a mine from scratch. That’s drawing opposition from landowners concerned about air and water quality and how the surface mine will change the rural setting.

Mining can affect water sources, said Tim Johnson, a professor at Duke University who studies energy and the environment. A pit mine is pumped as it is dug, and that impacts groundwater, he said. Leftover mine waste can be carried by rainwater or streams and contaminate watersheds.

Noise and dust are the other hazards, and all of that needs to be weighed, he said, against the mine’s output and the larger pursuit of cleaner energy.

“Ultimately, we’re doing this to replace carbon emissions, which has a huge benefit,” Johnson said. “There’s always a trade-off someplace else, and this is just a classic example of that.”

More from the Post

Here’s how the electric vehicle revolution is going

EV supply chains have a human rights problem. Can tech fix it?

This Midwestern factory was dead. Electric vehicles revived it.

The latest from The Washington Post

Credits

Video and reporting by Lee Powell in Kings Mountain, N.C.; aerial imagery and videography by Ricky Carioti in Silver Peak, Nev. Editing by Julie Vitkovskaya and Ann Gerhart. Copy editing by Martha Murdock.