Top Lithium Mining Companies In South Africa

What is Lithium?

Lithium is a chemical element with the symbol Li and atomic number 3. It is a soft, silvery-white alkali metal. Under standard conditions, it is the least dense metal and the least dense solid element.

Top Lithium Mining Companies In South Africa

Below are some of the Top Lithium Mining Companies.

1. Albemarle

Albemarle is one of the largest lithium producers in the world, with 5,000 employees and customers in 100 different countries globally. Besides lithium, Albemarle produces bromine and provides refining solutions and chemistry services for pharmaceutical firms.

2. SQM

SQM has offices in over 20 countries and customers in 110 nations; overall the firm has five business areas, ranging from lithium to potassium to specialty plant nutrition. SQM’s primary lithium business is in Chile. The company has butted heads with Chile’s CORFO over its leases in the Salar de Atacama, where the company’s lithium brine operations are located, but the two parties came to a resolution in January 2018.

3. Ganfeng Lithium

Ganfeng Lithium is an important Chinese lithium producer. It is China’s largest lithium compound producer and one of the world’s largest lithium metal producers in terms of production capacity.

Is there a lithium mine in South Africa?

Africa-focused battery metals investment and exploration company Marula Mining has secured R20-million of new mobile mining equipment for its Blesberg lithium and tantalum mine, in South Africa.

Does South Africa export lithium?

“At the moment, the concentrate produced in Southern Africa’s lithium mines has to be exported to China because the next step – which consists of taking that spodumene concentrate and turning it into a lithium compound that you can sell to a battery manufacturer – currently almost only happens in China.