From city streets across Europe to highways in China and the United States, the global soundscape of traffic is changing – as petrol engines are replaced by electric vehicles (EVs) amid governments’ efforts to cut carbon emissions.
At the heart of this transition are China’s lithium refining hubs. Inside chemical plants, hard rock minerals like raw spodumene ore and brine-based intermediates are stripped and transformed into battery-grade compounds that determine whether an EV battery lasts eight years – or dies out in three.
China is now the world’s largest EV maker, accounting for around 60 per cent of global EV sales in 2025, according to data from London-based price reporting agency Benchmark Mineral Intelligence (BMI) specialising in lithium-ion battery and EV supply chain.
And nearly all electric cars run on lithium-ion batteries.
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