Lithium Supply & Battery Raw Materials

Introduction

Thursday June 26, 2025 marked the conclusion of the 4-day long 17th edition of the Fastmarkets’s Lithium Supply & Battery Raw Materials Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. The conference brought together actors from the 3 main segments of the lithium-ion battery (LIB) supply chain:

• Upstream - extraction and pre-processing

• Midstream - refining, cathode active material (CAM) production and cell manufacturing

• Downstream - pack manufacturing, energy storage system (ESS) integration and recycling

State of the LIB supply chain in North America

The upstream segment of the North American LIB supply chain is experiencing slow growth due to the continued absence of the midstream segment in the region. Lithium concentrates from North American mines are still being sent to South East Asia for refining. Additionally, the perceived risks to electric vehicle (EV) demand, occasioned by factors such as import tariffs and termination of EV incentives, led to the cancelation of ~45 battery and EV factories in the U.S. between August 2022 and May 2025. This contributes to a decline in lithium demand thus lack of investment in the midstream supply chain segment.

ESS vs EV Focus

In line with LIB market status, past Fastmarkets conferences have had a larger emphasis on the EV market segment as the dominant growth driver of the LIB market. This is changing as the ratio of EV battery demand to ESS battery demand declined from 15-to-1 to 6-to-1 between 2020 and 2024.

Data Center Factor

The ESS and EV LIB market segments face similar trade risks namely, tariff and foreign entity of concern (FEOC) risks. However, a factor that tips the growth scale in favor of ESS is the growth of the data center market. The data center industry is expected to be a significant tailwind to the ESS market as new data centers look to deploy onsite renewables plus energy storage plants to meet the growing energy demand and to shorten deployment lead times. Co-located renewables and storage plants are estimated to reduce data center deployment timelines by skipping the permitting and grid interconnection processes associated with utility power supply.

Additionally, the data center industry is expected to be technology-agnostic in their ESS selection process. As such, the industry will aim to deploy the optimal technology for the particular use case which is expected to boost the adoption of some modular emerging storage technologies such as flow and metal-anode batteries.

Other Significant Topics

Growth of the lithium supply market on the African continent: Zimbabwe is becoming a key exporter of lithium concentrates with Chinese mining companies controlling most of the mining concessions.

Headwinds for the recycling industry: planned recycling factories by big actors such as Umicore, BASF, Eramet and Glencore have been cancelled as BRM economics remain elusive amidst depressed commodity prices.

The rise of price risk management techniques for lithium salts: derivatives such as futures and options for lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate salts are now available on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), London Metal Exchange (LME) and Singapore Exchange (SGX).