Mapping the lithium supply chain from mine to battery at the facility level

Lithium-ion batteries support electric vehicles and grid storage, but the facility routes that carry lithium from extraction to battery manufacturing are poorly observed. Standard trade statistics record cross-border movements but not mine-to-plant or plant-to-plant flows, and they omit within-country transfers. We build a facility-level map of the 2023 global lithium-ion battery supply chain, covering mines, lithium carbonate and hydroxide refineries, cathode plants, and battery factories. Because complete shipment data are unavailable, we infer inter-facility flows with a confidence-ranked allocation procedure that enforces feedstock compatibility and stage mass balance. The procedure uses documented trade, ownership, partnership, customs, and literature evidence where available, then applies geographic and ownership heuristics to remaining flows. The mapped system contains 196.9 kt of mined lithium, of which 109.2 kt entered end-use products. It identifies flows absent from trade data: 56.2% of lithium carbonate flows and 42.9% of lithium hydroxide flows remain within national borders. Evidence quality is strongest upstream and weaker downstream, where cathode and battery-stage allocations rely more on residual heuristic matching. Under the baseline allocation, focal-node analysis identifies Chilean and Australian upstream assets as major exposure points for many downstream manufacturers, while manufacturer-level traces show different upstream dependencies among facilities with similar products. We illustrate one use of the map with a six-month China-to-UK export-ban scenario for a UK battery facility. The scenario is conditional, not probabilistic. The contribution is a confidence-labelled facility-level exposure map for subsequent critical-material risk analysis.