Albemarle (NYSE: ALB) Critical Minerals Exposure

Albemarle is one of the world's largest lithium producers, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. Lithium sits at the heart of the business, supplying battery makers with carbonate and hydroxide, while separate divisions make bromine-based chemicals and refinery catalysts. Drawing on brine as well as hard rock gives it a broader supply base than most of its peers, and it sells into electric vehicles, energy storage and a long list of industrial markets.

Lithium is Albemarle's critical mineral, and the company produces it in two very different ways. It pumps brine from the Salar de Atacama in Chile and from Silver Peak in Nevada, while it mines spodumene through its interests in Greenbushes and Wodgina in Western Australia. Conversion plants in Chile, Australia, China and the United States then turn that raw material into the carbonate and hydroxide that battery cathodes need, most of it ending up in electric vehicles and grid storage.

Albemarle's lithium resources sit in Chile's Salar de Atacama, at Silver Peak in Nevada and in Western Australia, where it holds interests in Greenbushes and Wodgina. Its conversion network includes La Negra in Chile, Kemerton in Western Australia and several plants in China, and it has been developing the Kings Mountain lithium deposit in North Carolina, a former mine with a long history.