Today we hear about lithium batteries ad nauseum. Everyone is anxious to achieve a bright battery-powered electric future for happy motoring. Mineral exploration has revealed a few new sources of lithium and mines are increasing production. Battery factories are ramping up and R&D keeps turning out tweaks in battery technology. Many are betting on or prophesying the eventual phase-out of hydrocarbon fueled motor vehicles.
Lithium is quite scarce and is the 25th most abundant element on earth with about the same crustal abundance as chlorine although this may vary with the source. For the most part, lithium is fairly widely dispersed in the earth’s crust but it is subject to concentration by hydrothermal transport, forming evaporite deposits or briny ground water. Lithium is also a component of the mineral spodumene which can be found in pegmatites within some host formation. An uncommonly rich site was at the Foote Company Mine in the Kings Mountain Mining District of North Carolina. This operation produced lithium carbonate, Li2CO3. This is a common finished product because it can be removed from a solution of lithium chloride by treatment with sodium carbonate to precipitate the poorly soluble lithium carbonate.
This light metal has many chemical uses apart from batteries. For instance, organolithium reagents are a vital part of the chemical industry clocking in at about $1 billion per year in sales. Organolithium reagents are an indispensable part of organic synthesis. Switching to a reagent with a different metal usually does not work well, giving poor results or the wrong reactivity.
Today we’re seeing organolithium prices rise dramatically with little expectation that it will ever come back and no clue of how it plays out in the future. If a few select lithium reagents, e.g., LiAlH4 or n-butyllithium, go off the market, it will be a bad day for the organic synthetic industry as well as for chemical R&D in general. It is an unexpected consequence of the switch to reduced carbon EVs.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Lithium is quite scarce and is the 25th most abundant element on earth with about the same crustal abundance as chlorine. Unfair comparison. We don’t get our chlorine from salt mines. And there is an unlimited amount of chlorine in sea water.
I got my information from the graph at this link-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust#/media/File:Elemental_abundances.svg
There is some discrepancy from source to source I’ve noticed.
Thank you for the link to the chart. It presents, on a somewhat confusing scale the abundance of the elements “in Earth’s upper continental crust” which is different from abundance on the planet.
According to this website:
https://sciencenotes.org/abundance-of-elements-in-earths-crust-periodic-table-and-list/
chlorine is 145 mg/l and lithium is 20 mg/l. Personally I find mg/l an awkward unit of measure but at least it covers both solid earth and liquid ocean in the same unit.
That being said, it’s worthwhile to look at the actual commercial sources of these elements as they are produced for industrial use.
Chlorine is produced by the electrolysis of brine in the so-called “Chlorine/Caustic Process” since the byproduct (co-product really) is caustic (NaOH) and hydrogen gas.
Worldwide, nearly 100 million tons are produced annually.
As for Lithium, mines produce about 100 thousand tons. I haven’t located good statistics on lithium recycle but I know there is some and its contribution to the lithium market is growing.
Chlorine is too abundant to recycle.
And I agree with you about the importance of lithium reagents for chemical synthesis. That’s a small volume but high value added use for Li. I’ve used my share myself in times past.