Critical minerals for the energy transition

node · earth · global; processing concentrated in China

The set of materials whose supply is judged both economically essential and vulnerable to disruption — in the energy context principally lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, copper and the rare earths, above all neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium for permanent magnets. Three properties define the problem and each is routinely misdescribed. First, criticality is about concentration and substitutability, not geological scarcity: rare earths are not rare, and the binding constraint is that separating and refining them is done in very few places. Second, the concentration is overwhelmingly in *processing* rather than mining — cobalt is mined mostly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and nickel increasingly in Indonesia, but refining and the manufacture of battery-grade and magnet-grade material is dominated by China across almost every material, with rare-earth separation and graphite anode material the most concentrated of all. Third, mineral markets are cyclical and the transition's demand signal is not: lithium prices rose roughly an order of magnitude into late 2022 and then collapsed through 2023 and 2024 as new supply arrived, a swing that shut mines and cancelled projects while long-run demand projections barely moved. The strategic consequence was demonstrated rather than argued during 2023–2025, when China imposed successive export controls on gallium, germanium, graphite, antimony and then rare earths and their magnets. Not a place.