How We Tracked the Lithium Rush

There’s a global rush for new sources of lithium to power the green-energy transition, including a major push for mining the critical metal in the U.S. Columbia Journalism Investigations and Inside Climate News teamed up to track this development trend. Here’s how we collected and analyzed data on new lithium projects—and examined which communities may be most affected by them. The Data We Used We built a global dataset of lithium mining projects, including those in operating, planned and early stages, as well as the locations and the companies involved. The dataset was primarily based on information culled from the financial firm S&P Global, which we cross-checked with government databases and company reports, filings, investor presentations and responses to questionnaires we sent to companies. We also used proprietary data from other providers, such as GlobalData. While we compiled most of the data manually, some fields were generated through automated document and web scraping and then verified. We used additional S&P data to identify the shareholders of all companies involved in lithium mines. We manually downloaded company reports and used automated PDF scraping to build a second dataset that shows the largest shareholders, up to 25 per company. Some companies list