Nitpicking a Reuters Article about Canadian Lithium
This is rather misleading.
“Canada and Australia together produce about a third of global lithium and uranium.”
To be fair, I am not going to look up uranium, but what I do know about the uranium supply chain that is most likely true. The lithium part is nonsense. The latest USGS report on lithium for 2025 has Australia at 92,000 tonnes and Canada at 5,600, so technically that is true.
However, we could replace Canada with the United States, which for proprietary reasons does not report production, which is odd since we know how much LCE is produced at Silver Peak. Silver Peak’s output, combined with ancillary sources, would be around 100 tonnes of lithium for the US. Remember, USGS measures by lithium content, not by LCE. So combined, even with just 100 tonnes, the US and Australia produce a third of the world’s lithium.
Here are the numbers from the USGS for 2025:
United States: ?
Argentina: 23,000
Australia: 92,000
Brazil: 12,000
Canada: 5,600
Chile: 56,000
China: 62,000
Mali: 9,400
Portugal: 380
Zimbabwe: 28,000
The thing to look at is the changes from 2023 to 2024 and from 2024 to 2025. Using the updated numbers, lithium production went from 204,000 in 2023 to 222,000 in 2024, an increase of 18,000, or about 8.8%. Production then rose from 222,000 in 2024 to 290,000 in 2025, an increase of 68,000, or about 30.6%, with the largest increases coming from:
China 21,000
Mali 9,400
Chile 7,000
Zimbabwe 6,000
For China, while some of the new production comes from lepidolite, due to the crackdown and the suspension of the CATL mine for most of last year, the majority of the new production is from brines.
Zimbabwe’s output is expected to decline this year due to required updates to mine processing plans and temporary restrictions on concentrate exports, which will reduce production for a few months, but by the end of the year I do not expect this to significantly affect their overall output.
Demand has seen steady growth around 25-30%, while production has been half of that or even lower. This was achieved through China’s overcapacity in refining, which created surpluses early in the boom bust cycle over the last few years, allowing China to pull from stockpiles while lithium prices were high, then rely on imports when prices fluctuated near breakeven, and for some hard rock, even below breakeven.
As we can see from the latest numbers, China has been successful in using this strategy to replace production with projects it directly controls. While foreign production has increased, China is becoming less dependent on those countries.
For production to continue to increase in Canada, they will need the demand from domestic and US manufacturing, a process that has somewhat stalled. Companies and investors are betting that growing demand for ESS will drive this expansion. This is also why some are looking unfavorably on the Canadian government allowing the import of Chinese EVs at a much lower duty rate, as it is seen to discourage domestic manufacturing.
The reason Canada has to look for demand in North America and possibly Central America is that countries in the EU have not seen the same slowdown in EV adoption as the US has since President Trump took office. This makes investment in the entire lithium industry, from production to manufacturing to recycling, more attractive. How much of that investment will come from China-based companies is yet to be seen.
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