orecastThere is lithium in your phone — just under half of it from Chile, a quarter from China. Yet the US Geological Survey ranks Germany sixth in the world for lithium resources, at 8.9 million tonnes. The amount mined here: none. The new episode tells the story of why, and why geology has little to do with it.
What is in the phone, and where it comes from
A smartphone holds around thirty metals: lithium and cobalt in the battery, neodymium in the magnets, indium in the touchscreen, gold, silver and copper in the circuitry. Almost none of it is mined in Europe — most comes from five countries, for a continent of 450 million people switching to electric cars.
For lithium, a Deloitte analysis shows dependence shifting rather than shrinking: in 2013, 76 percent of German imports came from Chile and one percent from China; ten years later it is 47 percent Chile and 24 percent China. And the supply has a price: in the Atacama Desert, brine evaporates for months in huge ponds while companies, authorities and indigenous communities argue over groundwater. How much water that consumes is disputed even in the scientific literature — the honest answer: a lot.
The strange career of an element
In 1817, a young chemist named Arfwedson takes apart a stone from the Baltic island of Utö and finds an unknown element, named after the Greek word for stone: lithos. The punchline: he cannot isolate the metal — his battery is too weak. Lithium then had a bizarre career: it went into an American soft drink until the authorities banned it in 1948; in 1949 a psychiatrist found it eased mania — a standard treatment ever since. Today, 88 percent of world production goes into batteries.
Of the roughly 290,000 tonnes produced worldwide in 2025, the entire EU contributed 380 tonnes from one Portuguese mine — 0.13 percent. And the price rides a rollercoaster: around 11,700 dollars per tonne of lithium carbonate in 2021, 63,700 a year later, 9,000 in 2025. Planning a mine for decades on curves like these takes nerves. Or subsidies.
Zinnwald: the village that gave a mineral its name
The first German location sits in the eastern Ore Mountains, right on the Czech border. The lithium mica zinnwaldite was named after the village of Zinnwald in 1845. Mining here goes back over 600 years: first mentioned in 1378, tin first, tungsten from 1839 — and in the late nineteenth century lithium mica mining begins, making Zinnwald one of the world's earliest lithium mining sites.
In the Second World War the mine was Germany's only source of lithium: around 7,700 tonnes of mica greisen for the armaments industry, extracted in part by prisoners of war — a chapter the episode tells soberly. Mining ended on the German side in 1945; in Cínovec across the ridge it ran until 1990, and since 1992 the old mine has been open to visitors.
Yet the mountain is not empty: the current estimate is around 2.7 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent — the EU's third-largest lithium project. The plan is a purely underground mine with a 9.1-kilometre conveyor tunnel to the processing plant at Liebenau — no lorry convoys through the villages. Production start: planned for around 2030. Planned.
One deposit, two countries, two speeds
Then politics enters: the European Commission declined to recognise Zinnwald as a strategic project — while Cínovec, on the Czech side of the same deposit, is an approved strategic EU project with up to 360 million euros of state support. The border on the map tells the whole story.
There is local resistance here too: a citizens' initiative in Bärenstein and conservationists in the eastern Ore Mountains are fighting the processing plant and waste facility on their doorstep — over water, traffic and landscape. Remember this pattern. It is about to return.
The rift valley that lifts its lithium to the surface
Change of scene, 400 kilometres west. Hot springs have bubbled up in Baden-Baden since Roman times, carrying around 40 kilograms of lithium chloride to the surface every day — unused, for 2,000 years. Deep beneath the Upper Rhine Graben, at three to five kilometres, thermal water of 150 to more than 200 degrees circulates, leaching lithium from the rock over millennia: 160 to 190 milligrams per litre.
This is where Vulcan Energy comes in: geothermal energy plus direct lithium extraction, electricity and lithium from the same well. The pilot plants have produced battery-grade lithium hydroxide at the tonne scale since late 2024. But the episode also tells the thriller behind it: Renault and Volkswagen deals celebrated in 2021, production promised for 2025 — then a short-seller attack, a financing poker and three delays. Both carmakers are gone from the buyer list.
Since late 2025, though, it has become concrete: in December the 2.2-billion-euro financing closed, and in March 2026 the mining authority granted the first commercial lithium production licence in the Graben's history. The target: 24,000 tonnes a year from 2028 — a target, not a date. The risks remain: Landau saw a magnitude 2.7 quake in 2009, very probably triggered by geothermal operations; near Strasbourg a project was halted after earthquakes; and the extraction technology is still unproven at industrial scale. The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has run the numbers: geothermal lithium can cover two to twelve percent of German demand. A supplement, not a miracle.
What it really comes down to
The EU has set itself targets: by 2030, ten percent of demand mined domestically, 40 percent processed and 25 percent recycled — and the European Court of Auditors is already warning the targets may be missed. Time is short: in April 2026 the OECD counted export restrictions hitting up to 70 percent of the world's cobalt and manganese — a fivefold increase since 2009.
Three places show what acceptance means in practice: Jadar in Serbia, Europe's biggest project, is on ice after mass protests. Barroso in Portugal was stopped by a court. Keliber in Finland, meanwhile, actually starts this year. So far, Europe's lithium is not failing on geology but on time, trust and acceptance. The honest bottom line: there is no clean lithium, only honest and less honest trade-offs. And recycling? BASF and Mercedes have made a start, but the big battery streams arrive only once today's electric cars grow old.
To close, a look at our own data: orecast holds 8,924 documented lithium sites worldwide, 582 of them in Germany, each with its source — even the Zinnwald mining field is drawn in as a real, active mining right. The app also tells you what the data does not know: whether a deposit pays off is decided by drilling, not databases. And what is documented beneath your own region, the map will show you.