A large swath of the East Coast covering Maine, New Hampshire and the Carolinas contains enough untapped lithium — a crucial battery metal — to solve U.S. reliance on imports for hundreds of years, according to a new federal study.
The northern portion of the Appalachian region that runs from the Canadian border to northern Mississippi has vast stores of the slivery-white metal locked in large-grained rocks that would be economic to mine, the U.S. Geological Survey states in a reportpublished in the peer-reviewed academic journal Natural Resources Research.
Specifically, there’s about 1.4 million metric tons of lithium oxide underneath North and South Carolina, and about 900,000 metric tons across Maine and New Hampshire. That’s enough lithium to replace 328 years of imports, based on 2024 levels, and to power 130 million electric vehicles or 1.6 million grid-scale batteries.
The findings shed new light on the United States’ potential to become self-sufficient in producing a metal that’s currently crucial to building EV and grid-storage batteries, as well as computers, phones and other technology. The USGS is projecting that growing demand for lithium will double production capacity by 2029.
