A ‘Geologic Freak’ in Arkansas Is Big Oil’s New Lithium Bet

Résumé détaillé

The world is electrifying at an unprecedented pace, and it’s only going to keep speeding up. COP 31, the latest iteration of the United Nations’ annual climate conference, kicked…

Turkey Wants COP31 to Focus on Electrification Instead of Fossil Fuel Cuts

Haley Zaremba is an energy journalist and researcher with more than a decade of professional experience covering global energy systems, land and natural resources, and…

The world is electrifying at an unprecedented pace, and it’s only going to keep speeding up. COP 31, the latest iteration of the United Nations’ annual climate conference, kicked off today in Antalya, Türkiye, and achieving 35 percent global electrification by 2035 is going to be one of the event’s most central agenda items. Until extremely recently, this target likely would have seemed overly ambitious, but experts say that a number of factors, including volatile oil and gas markets stemming from the war in Iran, paired with enormous advances in clean energy technologies, have now put that goal within “striking distance.”

All of that electrification is going to require a whole lot of lithium. Over the course of this decade alone, lithium demand has already skyrocketed by more than 400 percent on a global scale to top 1.5 million metric tons per year. Projecting out to 2035, the year featured in COP 31’s proposed electrification pledge, global demand could reach approximately 4 million tons. In the International Energy Agency’s Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026, no mineral is expected to see bigger demand growth.

This is leading to increased competition over global lithium supply chains as nations rush to shore up their own future supplies to ensure long-term energy security in a rapidly changing energy landscape. But even as a diverse array of countries try to establish homegrown lithium production and refining sectors, one nation is expected to maintain an extreme degree of control over global supplies: China.

Beijing controls an estimated 72 percent of the global lithium-ion market, and Chinese companies control a quarter of the world’s lithium mining capacity.

“Lithium production and lithium ownership are increasingly…

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