Germany has spent the better part of a century being extremely good at building cars. BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Porsche: if automotive engineering has a home address, it sits somewhere between Munich and Stuttgart. But every time one of those companies bolts a battery pack into an EV, the lithium inside it arrives from somewhere else. Commercial lithium production inside Germany currently rounds to zero.<\/p>\n
Which is what makes the news out of the Altmark so quietly absurd. The Altmark is a rural corner of Saxony-Anhalt in northern Germany where Neptune Energy and its predecessor companies have been pumping natural gas since 1969. In September 2025, the company published an independent assessment by Sproule ERCE<\/a> confirming that the deep brines under that very gas field hold 43 million metric tons of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE), a figure Neptune describes as “one of the world’s largest project-based lithium resources.” The metal German automakers import by the shipload has been sitting directly beneath German gas wells for the entire 55 years anyone has been drilling there.<\/p>\n So why talk about it in June 2026? Because the pilot phase testing whether that lithium can actually be extracted at battery grade is scheduled to wrap up right about now. The next decision, a full demonstration plant, is the one that turns a geological trivia fact into an industry.<\/p>\n The Altmark has been gas country for generations. Neptune Energy and the companies that came before it have produced natural gas there since 1969, and the region counts more than 55 years of mining tradition built around those wells. That history matters more than it sounds, because it means the boreholes, pipelines, processing sites and decades of geological data already exist. Nobody has to build the boring, expensive parts from scratch.<\/p>\n The lithium itself sits dissolved in deep brines within the Rotliegend formations, the same geology the gas came from. Neptune received formal approval to extract lithium in the region from Saxony-Anhalt’s State Office for Geology and Mining back in April 2024, and it now holds the “Jeetze-L” production license plus three exploration licenses: Milde A-L and Milde C-L, awarded in 2024, and Milde B-L, added in August 2025.<\/p>\n That same August, the company commissioned Sproule ERCE, an independent international valuation agency, to size up the resource under the CIM\/NI 43-101 standard, the framework used to assess mining projects worldwide. The answer came back at 43 million metric tons of LCE. Fifty-five years of drilling straight past all that lithium to get at the gas underneath is either rotten luck or excellent foreshadowing, and the Altmark is about to find out which.<\/p>\n If your mental image of lithium production involves a giant open-pit mine or those turquoise evaporation ponds in the Chilean desert, this is the opposite of that. Neptune is committed to direct lithium extraction, or DLE<\/a>: brine gets pumped up from depth through existing infrastructure, run through processing plants where filter materials grab the lithium, and the leftover water goes straight back down into the reservoir. The company explicitly contrasts the approach with the open-cast mines and evaporation ponds you find in Australia, Chile and China.<\/p>\n The pilot record so far is short but genuinely encouraging. The first test ran in November 2024 with French technology firm Geolith, pulling small quantities of lithium from the brine via ion exchange. The resulting lithium chloride was then converted into lithium carbonate at 99.9% purity, battery grade, in Neptune’s own laboratory in Steinitz and by Kellogg Brown & Root in Bad Homburg.<\/p>\n Pilot two scaled the idea up. Lilac Solutions<\/a>, a DLE company out of Oakland, California, parked its containerized extraction unit directly on the field and ran it from June to August 2025, producing battery-grade lithium carbonate on site. According to Lilac, the campaign tested both hydrochloric and sulfuric acid flowsheets, feeding data into Neptune’s engineering studies for the demonstration and commercial stages.<\/p>\n A third pilot, evaluating an adsorption process, has been running since mid-September 2025. Neptune is testing all three filter families (ion exchangers, membrane technologies and adsorption media) before committing to one. Three pilots, three chemistries, one decision.<\/p>\n Here’s the scale Neptune is sketching. If the project reaches commercial production, the company estimates up to 25,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate per year could come out of the Altmark, enough battery material for roughly 500,000 electric cars annually. Neptune told Newsweek<\/a> that works out to supplying half a million cars by the 2030s.<\/p>\n In April 2026, Neptune published a socio-economic study it commissioned from IW Consult<\/a> that puts numbers on what that would mean: \u20ac6.4 billion in gross value added across Germany between 2025 and 2042, up to 1,500 jobs a year at peak, and roughly two thirds of the value landing in the Altmark region itself. The study’s own timeline is sobering in a useful way. It sketches a research-heavy phase through 2028, an investment phase from 2028 to 2032, and actual extraction beginning in 2033.<\/p>\n The same study is blunt about why Germany cares this much. IW Consult analyst Benita Zink notes the country is currently “highly dependent on imports for lithium” and the products built from it, lithium-ion batteries included, while International Energy Agency forecasts cited in the study see global lithium demand rising between 240 and 490 percent by 2035, depending on the scenario.<\/p>\n Now the cold water. A resource figure tells you what’s down there; it tells you nothing about what comes up, at what cost, at what purity, at what speed. The 43 million tons are a resource estimate, not proven reserves and not production, and DLE has never been operated at full commercial scale on this brine. The demonstration plant itself still needs further mining permits before anyone pours concrete.<\/p>\n Battery chemistry also has a habit of moving while permits get stamped. The world’s biggest battery maker is already hedging its lithium bets with sodium-ion cells<\/a> built from, essentially, the stuff in your salt shaker. None of that kills a project this size. It does mean the 2033 spreadsheet carries more variables than the press release.<\/p>\n If this plot feels familiar to you, it should. Six weeks ago, the U.S. Geological Survey announced an estimated 2.3 million metric tons of economically recoverable lithium oxide sitting under the Appalachians<\/a>, enough to cover 328 years of American imports at current levels and power some 130 million EVs. Different country, different geology, same punchline: the battery metal everyone kept importing was under home soil all along.<\/p>\n And the same catch applies on both sides of the Atlantic. Finding lithium is chapter one; turning it into something a battery plant will accept is the part China currently dominates. Elaine Dezenski of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies told Newsweek that loosening Beijing’s grip on the lithium supply chain depends on how the German resource gets processed, a step performed predominantly in China today. The Altmark pilots have at least produced finished battery-grade carbonate right on site, which skips a boat trip. Doing it at 25,000 tons a year is another matter.<\/p>\nThe lithium spent 55 years under a working gas field<\/h2>\n
No open pits, no evaporation ponds, no new holes<\/h2>\n
Half a million EVs a year is the target, not the promise<\/h2>\n
America just ran the same story, with the same catch at the end<\/h2>\n