Lithium used to be almost an afterthought — found in small quantities in medicine and tempered glass, and peaking in pop culture fame in the ’90s thanks to an eponymous Nirvana song. Today, the metal is back in the spotlight with a new identity: “white gold.”

That nickname, coined over the past decade, stems from lithium’s extraordinary price spike, soaring to nearly $70,000 per metric ton in 2022 (for reference: In 1991, when Nirvana released “Lithium,” the mineral sold for about $4,200 per metric ton, roughly 6 percent of its recent peak). The boom was hard to ignore, even for billionaire Elon Musk, who suggested on X that Tesla........

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