Tag: critical minerals

Platinum Group Metals: The Catalysts That Power Every Car and Could Power the Hydrogen Economy

Six elements — platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, ruthenium, and osmium — sit together on the periodic table, occur together in the same ore bodies, are mined together, refined together, and share a set of physical properties that make them collectively irreplaceable in modern industrial chemistry: they catalyze reactions at extreme temperatures without degrading, resist corrosion under conditions that destroy other metals, and can be recycled to 99.95% purity indefinitely. They are the platinum group metals — PGMs — and their defining characteristic in the context of this course is that roughly 80% of global platinum, 40% of palladium, and over 80% of rhodium and iridium come from a geological formation in South Africa called the Bushveld Complex, a two-billion-year-old igneous intrusion covering 66,000 square kilometers — an area the size of Sri Lanka — that contains the largest PGM reserves on Earth. Russia’s Norilsk Nickel is the other major producer, accounting for approximately 40% of global palladium and 10% of platinum. Together, South Africa and Russia supply the overwhelming majority of PGMs consumed by the global automotive, chemical, petroleum refining, and emerging hydrogen industries. The supply chain concentration pattern is familiar from every other lecture in this course. What makes PGMs different is that the concentration isn’t in China — it’s in a country with rolling electrical blackouts and a country under Western sanctions for invading Ukraine.

What they’re inside

The single largest demand sector for PGMs is the catalytic converter — the device bolted into the exhaust system of essentially every internal combustion engine vehicle sold since the 1970s. Platinum, palladium, and rhodium catalyze the conversion of carbon monoxide, unburned hydrocarbons, and nitrogen oxides into carbon dioxide, water, and nitrogen gas. A typical catalytic converter contains 3 to 7 grams of PGMs. Over 55% of total global PGM demand comes from automotive catalyst applications. Palladium dominates gasoline catalysts. Platinum dominates diesel catalysts. Rhodium is required in both and is the most valuable of the three — a single troy ounce of rhodium traded above $29,000 in 2021 before collapsing to roughly $5,000 by 2024 as automotive production normalized.

The second-largest demand sector is industrial catalysis — petroleum refining, chemical manufacturing, glass production, and electronics. Platinum and palladium catalyze cracking, reforming, and hydrogenation reactions in oil refineries. Ruthenium shows up in hard disk drive platters. Iridium appears in spark plugs, crucibles for growing single-crystal sapphire for LED substrates, and — increasingly — in the catalysts for proton exchange membrane water electrolyzers that produce green hydrogen.

The third sector is jewelry — roughly 29% of demand — where platinum’s density, luster, and hypoallergenic properties make it the prestige metal for rings and watches, particularly in China and Japan.

The fourth, and the one that will determine PGM demand in 2035 and beyond, is the hydrogen economy. Proton exchange membrane fuel cells — the type used in fuel cell electric vehicles from Toyota, Hyundai, and others — use platinum catalysts at both the anode and cathode. A typical fuel cell vehicle contains 50 to 80 grams of platinum, roughly 10 to 25 times more PGM than a catalytic converter. The target is to reduce PGM loading to 10-20 grams per vehicle, which would still be 2-8 times more than a catalytic converter. PEM electrolyzers — the machines that split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity — require both platinum and iridium catalysts. If the hydrogen economy develops as its proponents expect, PGM demand from fuel cells and electrolyzers could offset or exceed the decline from catalytic converters as internal combustion engines are phased out. That is a very large “if,” and the fusion companies and the vanadium flow battery developers are betting on alternative pathways for grid power and storage that would reduce the urgency of the hydrogen transition.

The supply problem

Platinum mine supply hit its lowest level in five years in 2025 — 5.51 million ounces — and the market recorded a 692,000-ounce deficit, the third consecutive annual shortfall according to the World Platinum Investment Council. Above-ground inventories have fallen to less than five months of demand coverage. Bank of America raised its 2026 platinum price forecast to approximately $2,450 per ounce.

The deficit is structural rather than cyclical, and the structure has three components. The first is geological decline. South Africa‘s Bushveld Complex mines — operated by Anglo American Platinum (now demerged as Valterra Platinum), Impala Platinum, Sibanye-Stillwater, and Northam Platinum — are among the deepest mines in the world, operating at depths of 1 to 2 kilometers underground. Ore grades are declining. Energy costs are rising. South Africa’s electricity grid, operated by the crisis-plagued Eskom, has subjected the mining sector to years of rolling blackouts (load-shedding) that shut down ventilation, hoisting, and processing operations unpredictably. Mining PGMs in South Africa in the 2020s requires extracting lower-grade ore from deeper underground in a country that cannot reliably keep the lights on. The ARMSCOR post documents a South Africa that could build nuclear weapons in secret; the South Africa that mines PGMs today cannot maintain its electrical grid.

The second is Russian uncertainty. Russia’s Norilsk Nickel produces palladium primarily as a by-product of nickel and copper mining. Western sanctions following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine have not directly targeted PGM exports — the automotive and chemical industries lobbied against it, and Europe’s dependence on Russian palladium was too acute to sever cleanly. But the sanctions environment creates persistent uncertainty: insurance, shipping, and banking complications make Russian PGM supply less reliable even when it’s technically legal to purchase. The antimony and gallium/germanium experiences demonstrate what happens when a concentrated supplier decides to restrict exports. Russia hasn’t restricted PGM exports. The sanctions regime makes continued supply a political decision rather than a commercial certainty.

The third is iridium scarcity. Iridium is the rarest of the PGMs, produced at approximately 7-8 tonnes per year — exclusively as a by-product of platinum mining, with 80-95% of production in South Africa. There is no primary iridium mine. There is no way to produce more iridium without producing more platinum from the Bushveld Complex. If PEM electrolyzer deployment scales to meet green hydrogen production targets, iridium demand could exceed supply within a decade. The element is so rare and so concentrated that it may represent the single tightest bottleneck in the entire hydrogen economy — tighter than the lithium bottleneck, tighter than the copper bottleneck, because at least lithium and copper have multiple producing countries and expansion-stage projects. Iridium has South Africa and essentially nothing else.

The recycling success story

PGM recycling is the one area where the critical minerals recycling story is actually working. Between 21% and 34% of global PGM demand is now satisfied by secondary supply — metals recovered from spent catalytic converters, electronic waste, and industrial process catalysts. Players including Umicore, Johnson Matthey, DOWA, and Tanaka Precious Metals achieve recovery purities above 99.95% using high-temperature smelting, hydrometallurgy, solvent extraction, and selective precipitation. Spent automotive catalysts are expected to provide 71% of all recycled PGMs in 2026, up from 50% in 2010. PGM recycling uses approximately 10 times less energy than primary mining per troy ounce recovered.

The recycling infrastructure works because PGMs are valuable enough to justify the collection and processing costs — a single catalytic converter contains $100-$500 worth of PGMs at current prices, creating a robust scrap market and, inevitably, a catalytic converter theft epidemic that costs vehicle owners roughly $1 billion per year in the United States alone. The economic incentive that makes recycling viable also makes theft viable. That’s a supply chain operating as designed, if you define “designed” generously.

The longer-term recycling story depends on what replaces catalytic converters. If the automotive fleet transitions to battery EVs, the wave of catalytic converter scrap will peak in the 2030s as the installed fleet of ICE vehicles ages out, and then decline. If fuel cell vehicles gain market share, their higher PGM loading per vehicle will generate a new recycling stream — but with a 12-to-15-year lag between vehicle sale and vehicle scrapping. The graphite and lithium recycling infrastructures are being built to handle the battery waste stream that will follow the EV transition. The PGM recycling infrastructure is already built. The question is whether it will have enough feedstock.

Why it’s Lecture 36

Platinum group metals are the final lecture of the Rare Earth Elements course because they are the capstone case study: a class of metals that is genuinely irreplaceable in current applications, produced from a geological formation that exists essentially nowhere else on Earth, in a country whose infrastructure is deteriorating, alongside a co-producer under international sanctions. The substitution research has been ongoing for 50 years. No viable alternative has emerged for high-temperature catalysis. The hydrogen economy — the clean energy pathway that is supposed to complement batteries and grid-scale storage — depends on platinum and iridium catalysts whose supply is controlled by the same concentrated source. The recycling infrastructure works but is dependent on a fleet of internal combustion engine vehicles that the energy transition is designed to eliminate.

Every tension the course has taught — geological concentration, processing concentration, substitution difficulty, geopolitical risk, the timescale mismatch between supply and demand, the gap between legislation and operational capacity — converges on PGMs. The semiconductor supply chain has TSMC in Taiwan. Lithium has Chinese refining. Antimony has Chinese mining. PGMs have the Bushveld Complex — 66,000 square kilometers of two-billion-year-old magma, 1-2 kilometers underground, in a country where the electricity doesn’t always work. That’s the supply chain the hydrogen economy is built on. The course ends here because this is where all the threads meet.

This is the kind of supply chain our Rare Earth Elements course was built to map — where six metals that share an ore body share a chokepoint, the chokepoint is a geological formation the size of a country, and the question that will determine whether the hydrogen economy is viable is whether South Africa can keep its mines running and its electricity on at the same time.
Lithium in 2026: The Battery Metal That Doubled, Crashed, and Doubled Again

Lithium carbonate prices nearly doubled between early December 2025 and late January 2026 — rising from roughly $13,400 per metric ton to $26,278, a 95% increase in under two months. If that volatility sounds familiar, it should. In 2022, lithium carbonate traded above $80,000 per metric ton as EV demand outran supply. By late 2023, it had crashed below $10,000 as new Australian hard-rock mines came online, Chinese lepidolite production surged, and downstream battery manufacturers burned through stockpiles they’d panic-bought at the top. By mid-2024, the market looked oversupplied. Then CATL’s Jianxiawo lepidolite mine in China hit delays. Zimbabwe suspended exports of raw lithium concentrates in February 2026, accelerating a ban that had been scheduled for 2027. Maintenance shutdowns hit multiple producers simultaneously. Speculative buying amplified the move. And lithium — the element whose price chart looks like a heart monitor during a cardiac event — was back above $26,000 before most analysts had finished publishing their “lithium surplus” forecasts from the quarter before. The fundamentals haven’t changed. Global EV sales rose 22% in 2025. Lithium-ion battery demand is forecast to grow at a 14% compound annual growth rate over the next decade. Every phone, every laptop, every EV, every grid-scale battery installation on the planet requires lithium. The planet produces roughly 180,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate equivalent per year. The planet needs more. Whether the planet can produce more fast enough, from mines that take 7-10 years to permit and build, is the question the entire critical minerals supply chain depends on.

How lithium gets out of the ground

There are two established methods and one emerging method, and the tension between them defines the supply chain’s economics.

Hard-rock mining is the fast option. Australia — which accounts for over half of global mined lithium — extracts spodumene ore from open-pit mines, primarily in the Pilbara region. The ore is crushed, concentrated through froth flotation, and then chemically converted into lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide at processing facilities that are, overwhelmingly, located in China. The advantage of hard rock is speed: a mine can ramp production in months rather than years, and output isn’t weather-dependent. The disadvantage is cost — hard-rock processing is energy-intensive, and the spodumene concentrate needs to be shipped across an ocean to Chinese refineries that control the conversion step. When lithium prices crashed in 2023-2024, Australian producers operating at the higher end of the cost curve shut down or curtailed production. When prices rebounded, they restarted. The boom-bust cycle is the business model.

Brine extraction is the cheap option — but slow. The Lithium Triangle — spanning Argentina’s Salta and Jujuy provinces, Chile’s Atacama Desert, and Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni — contains roughly 60% of the world’s identified lithium reserves in the form of lithium-rich groundwater beneath salt flats. Conventional brine mining pumps this groundwater to the surface and spreads it across massive evaporation ponds where it sits for 12 to 24 months while the sun concentrates the lithium content. Recovery rates are 40-60%. The process requires vast tracts of land, specific climatic conditions (hot, dry, windy), and enormous volumes of water in regions that are already among the driest on Earth. Chile’s SQM and Albemarle operate the world’s largest brine operations in the Atacama. Argentina is the fastest-growing brine producer. Bolivia — which has the largest single lithium deposit in the world at the Salar de Uyuni — has produced almost nothing, because the salt flat’s magnesium-to-lithium ratio is too high for conventional evaporation, the government insists on state control of extraction, and the infrastructure doesn’t exist.

Direct lithium extraction — DLE — is the technology that could change the equation. Instead of waiting 12-24 months for the sun to do the work, DLE uses chemical or physical processes — adsorption, ion exchange, solvent extraction, membranes, or electrochemical methods — to pull lithium out of brine in hours or days, with recovery rates above 80-90%. DLE can work on brines too dilute or too contaminated for evaporation ponds, including geothermal brines in Europe and oilfield brines in the United States, which would open entirely new lithium-producing regions. The technology exists. Adsorption DLE is commercially proven in Argentina and China. Ion exchange systems from companies like Lilac Solutions and Standard Lithium are in advanced development. What hasn’t been proven is whether DLE works at the scale the market needs, at the cost the market can absorb, across the full range of brine chemistries the world’s lithium deposits present. DLE is the fusion energy of the lithium industry — the technology that could solve the supply problem, if the engineering catches up to the chemistry.

The refining chokepoint

The part of the lithium supply chain that most coverage skips is the part that matters most: refining. Australia mines spodumene. Chile and Argentina pump brine. But the conversion of raw lithium into battery-grade lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide — the chemical products that actually go into battery cathodes — happens overwhelmingly in China. Chinese facilities process the majority of the world’s lithium into battery-grade material because China invested in the refining infrastructure decades before the rest of the world recognized lithium as a strategic material. The pattern is identical to what our Rare Earth Elements course documents across gallium, graphite, antimony, and the rare earths themselves: you can mine the mineral anywhere, but if the refining capacity is concentrated in one country, the mine doesn’t solve the dependency.

Australia’s Pilbara spodumene is shipped to Chinese ports, refined in Chinese facilities, incorporated into cathodes at Chinese battery factories, and then exported — as finished batteries or battery cells — to automakers in Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. The CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act both include provisions designed to incentivize domestic and allied-nation refining capacity. Albemarle is building a lithium hydroxide conversion plant in Australia. SQM and Codelco are developing lithium processing capacity in Chile under the country’s National Lithium Strategy, which requires that value-added processing happen domestically rather than shipping raw brine to China. The European Union’s Critical Raw Materials Act targets 40% domestic processing of strategic materials by 2030. All of these timelines assume permitting, construction, and commissioning schedules that the critical minerals industry has historically missed. The gap between “legislation passed” and “refinery operational” is measured in years. The market needs the refinery now.

The price chart as diagnostic

Lithium’s price action tells you something that no industry report will say directly: the market doesn’t know how to price this material. The 2022 spike to $80,000 was driven by genuine scarcity — demand outran supply and everyone panicked. The 2023 crash to $10,000 was driven by supply response — Australian mines expanded, Chinese lepidolite production surged, and stockpile-destocking flooded the spot market. The late-2025 rebound to $26,000 was driven by the supply disruptions and speculative positioning that always follow a price crash, because the mines that shut down during the bust take time to restart and the new mines that were supposed to fill the gap haven’t been built yet.

The structural issue is that lithium is caught between two timescales. Demand grows at 12-14% per year, compounding predictably because EV adoption curves and grid storage deployment are policy-driven and structurally irreversible. Supply responds on a 7-to-10-year cycle, because mines take that long to permit, finance, construct, commission, and ramp. Battery manufacturers need to sign offtake agreements 3-5 years in advance to secure material. Miners need price certainty to justify the capital expenditure. Neither side can give the other what it needs, so the price oscillates between “too expensive to buy” and “too cheap to mine,” and the companies in the middle — the battery manufacturers, the automakers, the grid storage developers — absorb the volatility as a cost of doing business.

The vanadium flow battery industry’s leasing model was invented partly to manage exactly this kind of commodity price volatility. The copper shortage creates a different but parallel constraint — a material the energy transition needs in quantities the mining industry cannot produce fast enough. The semiconductor supply chain demonstrated in 2020-2022 what happens when a concentrated supply chain meets a demand shock. Lithium’s version of that demonstration plays out in slow motion, over years rather than quarters, because mines are slower to build than fabs — but the structural logic is identical.

What lithium is actually inside

The chemistry matters because not all lithium demand is created equal. Lithium-ion batteries come in several cathode chemistries, and the chemistry determines how much lithium goes in.

NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt) cathodes use lithium hydroxide and are the dominant chemistry in European and Korean EVs — higher energy density, longer range, but more expensive and dependent on cobalt and nickel supply chains that carry their own geopolitical and ethical risks. LFP (lithium-iron-phosphate) cathodes use lithium carbonate, contain no cobalt or nickel, are cheaper and safer, and have become the dominant chemistry in Chinese EVs and increasingly in Tesla’s standard-range vehicles. LFP’s rise has shifted the demand mix from lithium hydroxide toward lithium carbonate — which matters because the two products require different refining pathways and different raw material specifications. The irony of LFP’s success as a “cobalt-free” battery chemistry is that it increases lithium intensity per kilowatt-hour while reducing cobalt intensity — trading one supply chain dependency for another.

Beyond batteries: lithium hexafluorophosphate is the dominant electrolyte salt in lithium-ion batteries, and its production is concentrated in China and Japan. Lithium is used in ceramics, glass, lubricating greases, and pharmaceutical applications (lithium carbonate is a mood stabilizer prescribed for bipolar disorder). And — in a detail the fusion companies post mentioned — lithium-6 is a critical material for tritium breeding blankets in deuterium-tritium fusion reactors. If fusion works, the battery supply chain and the fusion supply chain will be competing for the same element. That competition doesn’t exist yet. It might within a decade.

Why it’s Lecture 13

Lithium is the Rare Earth Elements course’s anchor lecture because it is the single most important battery material in the world and the one whose supply chain most clearly illustrates every theme the course teaches: geological concentration (the Lithium Triangle holds 60% of reserves), processing concentration (China dominates refining), extraction technology evolution (DLE may transform the supply economics but hasn’t proven it can scale), price volatility driven by timescale mismatch (demand compounds annually, supply responds on a decade cycle), and the policy response gap (legislation targets 2030, the market needs capacity now).

Every other critical mineral in the course — graphite in the anode, cobalt and nickel in the cathode, copper in the wiring, antimony in the flame retardants that keep the battery pack from burning down the car, vanadium in the grid-scale flow batteries that store the electricity the car charges from — orbits around lithium. The battery is the product. Lithium is the element that makes it possible. And the supply chain that delivers it is a 7-to-10-year engineering problem being asked to solve a 12-to-14% annual demand curve, in a market where the price can double or halve in a single quarter, with refining concentrated in a country that has demonstrated — across gallium, graphite, antimony, and rare earth processing technologies — that it will use export controls when it decides the strategic calculus requires it.

This is the kind of supply chain our Rare Earth Elements course was built to map — where the lightest metal on the periodic table carries the heaviest strategic weight, the price chart looks like a seismograph, and the question that matters most isn’t whether there’s enough lithium in the ground but whether anyone can get it out, refine it, and deliver it fast enough to keep the energy transition on schedule.
Vanadium: The Grid Battery That Lasts 25 Years and Nobody’s Heard Of

Lithium-ion batteries have a scaling problem that nobody in the lithium industry likes to talk about. They’re excellent at storing energy for one to four hours — the duration window that covers most smartphone charges, most EV trips, and most grid-scale frequency regulation applications. They’re terrible at storing energy for eight to 100 hours — the duration window that actually matters for running a power grid on solar and wind, because the sun goes down, the wind stops, and someone still needs to keep the lights on. The physics are structural: in a lithium-ion battery, power output and energy capacity are coupled inside the same cell, which means scaling from four hours to twelve hours of storage requires tripling the number of cells — tripling the cost, tripling the materials, tripling the fire risk, and tripling the degradation curve that will eventually kill the battery after 3,000 to 7,000 charge-discharge cycles. A vanadium redox flow battery does something lithium-ion batteries cannot: it decouples power from energy. The power output is determined by the size of the cell stack. The energy capacity is determined by the volume of vanadium electrolyte in the external tanks. Want more hours of storage? Add more tanks. The cell stack doesn’t change. The battery doesn’t degrade. The vanadium electrolyte can cycle more than 20,000 times with minimal capacity loss, operate for 20 to 25 years, and — when the battery is eventually decommissioned — the electrolyte retains its chemical value and can be regenerated, resold, or leased to the next project. It is, in terms of pure longevity, the best grid-scale battery chemistry that exists. The reason most people have never heard of it is that the element it runs on comes from three countries you’d rather not depend on.

What vanadium is

Vanadium is a hard, silvery-gray transition metal — element 23 on the periodic table — discovered in 1801 by Andrés Manuel del Río in Mexico, lost to a misidentification, and rediscovered in 1831 by Nils Gabriel Sefström in Sweden. Its primary industrial use, by volume, has nothing to do with batteries: roughly 90% of all vanadium consumed globally goes into steel production as ferrovanadium, an alloying agent that makes steel stronger, lighter, and more resistant to corrosion. The rebar in Chinese high-rises, the structural steel in bridges, the high-strength low-alloy steel in pipelines and offshore platforms — vanadium is in all of it. This means the vanadium market is dominated by the steel industry, and the price of vanadium pentoxide — the oxide form used in both steelmaking and battery electrolyte production — fluctuates with Chinese construction activity. When China builds, vanadium prices rise. When Chinese rebar production declines, prices fall. Vanadium pentoxide spot prices have historically swung between $4 and $30 per pound, with the electrolyte for a vanadium redox flow battery accounting for approximately 50% of total system cost. That volatility is the single biggest economic risk facing the VRFB industry.

Global vanadium production is concentrated in three countries: China (roughly 67% of world output), Russia (approximately 15%), and South Africa (approximately 8%). The supply chain concentration mirrors the pattern our Rare Earth Elements course tracks across dozens of critical minerals — a small number of countries control the upstream, and the downstream industries that depend on the material have limited alternatives when those countries decide to restrict supply. China’s 2023 export quota regime created six-week delivery delays that forced Invinity Energy Systems — one of the leading Western VRFB manufacturers — to pre-purchase 18 months of electrolyte inventory as a hedge. The antimony export controls that quadrupled prices in 2024-2025 demonstrated what happens when Beijing decides a critical mineral needs managing. Vanadium hasn’t been restricted yet. The infrastructure for restricting it already exists.

How the battery works

A vanadium redox flow battery stores energy in two tanks of liquid vanadium electrolyte — one containing vanadium ions in the V²⁺/V³⁺ oxidation states (the negative side) and one containing vanadium ions in the V⁴⁺/V⁵⁺ oxidation states (the positive side). During charge and discharge, the electrolytes are pumped through an electrochemical cell stack where the vanadium ions gain or lose electrons across a membrane, converting electrical energy to chemical energy and back again. The elegance of the chemistry is that both sides of the battery use the same element in different oxidation states — which means cross-contamination between the two tanks, a problem that kills other flow battery chemistries over time, doesn’t permanently degrade a vanadium system. If the electrolyte gets mixed, you rebalance it. You don’t replace it.

The round-trip efficiency — the percentage of energy you get back out relative to what you put in — is 65% to 85%, depending on the system design and operating conditions. Lithium-ion achieves 85% to 95%. That efficiency gap is real and it matters for applications where every kilowatt-hour counts. But for long-duration grid storage — where the value proposition is measured in years of reliable cycling rather than round-trip efficiency on any single cycle — the VRFB’s durability advantage more than compensates. A lithium-ion grid battery loses 20-30% of its capacity over a 10-year operational life and needs replacement. A VRFB loses essentially nothing. Over a 20-year project lifetime, the total cost of ownership favors the flow battery at any duration above four hours, because the lithium system needs to be replaced at least once during the same period.

The installations that matter

The world’s largest vanadium flow battery is China’s 200-megawatt, 800-megawatt-hour Dalian facility — an installation roughly the size of a few city blocks that can power 200,000 homes for four hours. A second Chinese installation, the 175-megawatt, 700-megawatt-hour Wushi project, reached commercial operation alongside a 1-gigawatt-hour facility at Jimsar. These are not pilot projects. These are grid-scale infrastructure assets that have reached commercial operation and passed the bankability thresholds required for utility-scale financing. China’s five-year plan mandates energy storage for solar and wind projects, and VRFBs are a mandated category.

Outside of China, the installations are smaller but accelerating. Invinity Energy Systems — listed on the London Stock Exchange — has deployed or contracted more than 75 megawatt-hours across 70+ projects in 14 countries. In April 2025, Invinity received approval to install a 20.7-megawatt-hour VRFB system in the UK, the largest in the country. Sumitomo Electric Industries installed a 51-megawatt-hour system in Hokkaido, Japan. CellCube received $19 million from the U.S. Department of Defense Innovation Unit for a megawatt-scale VRFB system. In South Africa — where the grid is unreliable, solar resources are abundant, and vanadium is mined domestically — Bushveld Energy deployed a 4-megawatt-hour VRFB paired with 3.5 megawatts of solar as an independent power producer selling energy directly to a mine. That last case is the model that could scale across the developing world: local vanadium, local solar, local storage, local grid.

The vanadium leasing model

The most important financial innovation in the VRFB sector isn’t a battery — it’s a financing structure. Vanadium electrolyte accounts for roughly 50% of a VRFB system’s upfront cost, and the vanadium retains its chemical value over the battery’s entire 20-to-25-year life. That means the electrolyte is more like a durable asset than a consumable — more like the gold in a jewelry store than the gasoline in a car. Largo Physical Vanadium, a Canadian company, created a leasing model where the vanadium electrolyte is owned by an asset fund and leased to battery project developers, reducing upfront capital requirements by 25-30%. In July 2025, Largo validated the model through a 48-megawatt-hour project in Bellville, Texas, partnering with Storion Energy and TerraFlow. The leasing model transforms stored vanadium from a cost into a revenue-generating asset — the electrolyte is collateral, and the battery project pays rent on it.

This is the kind of financial engineering that makes a technology viable when the raw commodity economics alone don’t. The copper shortage creates infrastructure constraints that affect every energy transition technology. The graphite bottleneck constrains lithium-ion anode production. Vanadium’s constraint is price volatility rather than absolute scarcity, and leasing addresses volatility by shifting the price risk from the battery developer to the asset fund — which can hedge vanadium exposure through futures, options, and physical stockpiles more efficiently than a project developer can. Whether the leasing model scales beyond early-stage projects to multi-gigawatt-hour utility deployments is the open question. The South African Bushveld deployment and the Texas Largo project are proof of concept. Proof of concept is not proof of scale.

The competitors within

Vanadium isn’t the only flow battery chemistry, and in 2025-2026 the non-vanadium alternatives have gained credibility. Iron-based flow batteries — all-iron, iron-chromium, iron-vanadium hybrids — use abundant, cheap materials and avoid the vanadium supply chain concentration entirely. ESS Inc. partnered with Energy Storage Industries to build a 3.2-gigawatt-hour iron flow battery manufacturing facility in Queensland, Australia. Organic flow batteries, using carbon-based molecules instead of metal ions, are being developed by startups including Carbo Energy. Zinc-polyiodide flow batteries have achieved energy densities of 320 watt-hours per liter — roughly 20 times higher than conventional vanadium systems — though at laboratory rather than commercial scale.

The competition matters because it reveals the VRFB’s central vulnerability: the technology is excellent, the chemistry is proven, the durability is unmatched — and the entire value proposition depends on a mineral whose supply is controlled by the same countries the gallium/germanium and antimony experiences have shown will use export controls as instruments of state policy. Iron is abundant everywhere. Organic molecules can be synthesized from industrial waste. Vanadium comes from China, Russia, and South Africa. The VRFB industry’s argument is that vanadium’s durability and recyclability outweigh its supply chain risk. The iron flow battery industry’s argument is that supply chain risk outweighs everything. Both arguments have evidence behind them. The grid doesn’t care which chemistry wins. The grid needs storage that works for 25 years.

Why it’s Lecture 33

Vanadium is the Rare Earth Elements course’s energy storage lecture because it demonstrates the course’s central thesis at its most acute: the clean energy transition depends on materials whose supply chains are controlled by a small number of countries, and the technologies that would reduce that dependency are either unproven at scale or years away from deployment. The fusion companies building reactors in Massachusetts and Washington need a grid that can handle their output. The semiconductor fabs that consume enormous amounts of electricity need power that doesn’t go down when the wind stops. The defense installations that the CHIPS Act is trying to onshore need resilient microgrids. All of them need long-duration storage. Vanadium flow batteries are the most proven technology for delivering it. And 80% of the vanadium comes from three countries whose cooperation with Western energy policy cannot be assumed.

The rare earth recycling infrastructure that could eventually close the loop on vanadium electrolyte is, ironically, the VRFB’s strongest long-term argument: unlike lithium-ion batteries, where recycling recovers a degraded product at significant cost, VRFB electrolyte recycling recovers a product that is chemically identical to the original input. The vanadium doesn’t wear out. It circulates. The question is whether the first generation of VRFB installations — being built today with virgin vanadium sourced from concentrated supply chains — can operate long enough for the recycling economics to kick in and the supply chain to diversify.

This is the kind of supply chain tension our Rare Earth Elements course was built to map — where the best grid-scale battery chemistry in existence depends on a metal that 80% of the world gets from China, Russia, and South Africa, the electrolyte costs half the system, and the only reason the battery industry isn’t panicking about vanadium the way it panicked about antimony is that Beijing hasn’t restricted it yet.
Antimony: The Metal in Your Bullets, Your Furniture, and China’s Crosshairs

On August 14, 2024, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced export controls on six categories of antimony-related products — ore, metals, oxide, and gold-antimony smelting and separation technologies — effective September 15. The stated reason was national security. The actual mechanism was the same one China had used on gallium and germanium the year before: require exporters to apply for dual-use export licenses through the Commerce Ministry, approve the licenses selectively, and let the uncertainty do the work. By December 3, China had escalated to a full ban on antimony exports to U.S. military end users. By July 2025, the price of antimony had hit $59,750 per metric ton — roughly a 4x increase from the $15,000-$18,000 range where it had traded through early 2024. A 55-metric-ton shipment of Australian-mined antimony concentrate, routed through a Chinese port on its way to a U.S. smelter in Mexico, was detained at the port of Ningbo for three months, then returned with broken seals and no explanation. The critical minerals supply chain had absorbed another hit, and most of the industries affected — flame retardants, ammunition, semiconductors, batteries, night vision systems — didn’t have a substitute.

What antimony actually does

Antimony is a metalloid — a silvery-white element that sits between metals and nonmetals on the periodic table — and its defining industrial property is that it makes other things harder, more fire-resistant, and more durable. About half of all antimony consumed globally goes into flame retardants, primarily as antimony trioxide, which is mixed into plastics, textiles, cables, and coatings to prevent or slow combustion. Every upholstered piece of furniture that meets fire safety codes, every cable sheath in a data center, every circuit board housing in consumer electronics — antimony trioxide is in the compound that keeps it from catching fire. The other half splits across applications that are individually smaller but collectively indispensable: hardening lead in ammunition and lead-acid batteries, semiconductor compounds, infrared sensors, precision optics, nuclear reactor control rods, and ceramic glazes.

The defense applications are what pushed antimony onto the U.S. Department of Interior’s critical minerals list and what makes the Chinese export controls a national security issue rather than just a commodity market disruption. Antimony hardens the lead in bullets — without it, projectiles deform on impact and lose penetrating capability. It’s a component in armor-piercing ammunition, night vision goggles, infrared missile seekers, and military battery systems. The U.S. consumed roughly 22,000 tons of antimony in 2023. China supplied 63% of U.S. imports. The next largest supplier was Belgium, at 8%. The U.S. has not had a domestic antimony mine in production since the early 2000s. The last significant domestic reserve — the Stibnite mine in central Idaho, now owned by Perpetua Resources — has received Department of Defense funding but isn’t expected to begin production until 2028 at the earliest, and even then its antimony grades average less than 0.5%, which is roughly 50 times lower than the 25% concentrate minimum that roasters need to produce metal and antimony trioxide efficiently. The CHIPS Act’s critical minerals provisions addressed some of these vulnerabilities at the legislative level. The operational reality is that legislation and mine output operate on fundamentally different timescales.

The price chart tells the story

Antimony’s price action in 2024-2025 is one of the most dramatic commodity charts of the decade. Through early 2024, the metal traded between $15,000 and $18,000 per metric ton — already elevated from historical levels due to supply tightness, but within a range that existing procurement budgets could absorb. Between the August announcement and September implementation of the export controls, prices doubled. By the end of 2024, they had tripled. By mid-2025, European antimony prices exceeded $60,000 per metric ton — a roughly 4x increase in under a year. This wasn’t speculative froth. The largest antimony roaster outside of China — an Omani facility that had been supplying much of the Western world’s antimony trioxide and ingots, processing roughly 20,000 metric tons of contained antimony annually — went bankrupt during the same period, unable to secure sufficient raw material at prices its contracts could support. The supply chain lost its single largest non-Chinese processing node at the exact moment it needed it most.

The price spike created a two-tier market that mirrors what happened with gallium and germanium — domestic Chinese prices stabilized and even pulled back as export restrictions reduced outbound volume, while international prices soared. Chinese consumers of antimony — manufacturers of flame retardants, batteries, semiconductors, ammunition — gained a cost advantage over their Western competitors. Whether that cost advantage was an intended consequence of the export controls or a side effect is, at this point, a distinction without a meaningful difference. The structural pattern is the same one China has deployed across rare earths, gallium, germanium, graphite, and tungsten: control enough of the global supply chain that export licensing decisions function as de facto trade policy, without the formal trade-war optics of tariffs or quotas.

Why there’s no quick fix

The antimony supply chain has three structural characteristics that make diversification harder than the “just find another supplier” framing suggests.

The first is geology. Antimony deposits are geographically concentrated. China produces 48% of global output. Russia and Tajikistan are the next largest producers — neither of which solves the geopolitical dependency problem for Western buyers. Bolivia, Turkey, and Myanmar produce smaller volumes. Australia has deposits but limited processing capacity. The global production base outside of China and its strategic allies is genuinely thin, and the thin parts are years away from meaningful expansion.

The second is processing. China controls not just mining but an estimated 74% of global antimony trioxide refining capacity. Even if a Western mining company could produce antimony concentrate tomorrow, it would need a roaster to convert that concentrate into the oxide or metal that downstream manufacturers actually use. The Omani roaster’s bankruptcy removed the largest non-Chinese processing facility from the global supply chain. Building new roasting and refining capacity is a multi-year, capital-intensive process with environmental permitting requirements that vary by jurisdiction and add time in every one of them.

The third is substitution — or the lack of it. For most of antimony’s critical applications, there is no drop-in substitute. Antimony trioxide’s combination of flame-retardant effectiveness, compatibility with a wide range of polymers, and cost has made it the industry standard for decades. Alternative flame retardants exist — aluminum trihydrate, magnesium hydroxide, ammonium polyphosphate — but they require reformulation of the polymer systems they’re added to, requalification testing, and in many cases higher loading levels that change the physical properties of the end product. For ammunition hardening, antimony has no practical substitute at scale. The Department of Defense has recognized this explicitly. The constraint isn’t that alternatives don’t exist in a laboratory. The constraint is that switching materials in industrial and military supply chains is a process measured in years, not months — and the export controls created an immediate shortage, not a multi-year one.

The defense industrial base problem

The antimony shortage intersects with a broader constraint that our Battlefields of the Future course covers in detail: the Western defense industrial base is not built for sustained high-intensity conflict. U.S. foreign military sales reached a record $238 billion in 2023, driven by demand from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Ammunition consumption in Ukraine alone has exceeded production rates across NATO countries for most of the conflict. The loitering munitions and drone warfare revolution has changed the calculus of what modern armies need — but conventional ammunition remains the backbone of ground combat, and conventional ammunition requires antimony.

The irony is structural: the country that supplies the ammunition-hardening material to Western militaries is the same country whose military modernization program — conducted through entities like the China Poly Group and the broader military-civil fusion strategy — those Western militaries are arming against. China controls the supply chain for a material that Western armies need to fight, and has the ability to restrict that supply chain at will. The export controls on antimony are, in that framing, not a trade dispute. They are a capability constraint imposed by a strategic competitor on its adversaries’ defense industrial base, using the commodity market as the delivery mechanism.

What’s happening now

By early 2026, the panic-driven shortage of 2025 has partially eased. Southeast Asian processing capacity has begun coming online. Chinese export license approvals have become more predictable, though still selective. Prices have retreated from the July 2025 peak but remain well above pre-2024 levels — the structural fragmentation Beijing created isn’t reversible through market forces alone. Companies that diversified sourcing in 2025 are paying premiums for supply security. Companies that didn’t are still exposed.

Perpetua Resources’ Stibnite mine in Idaho remains the highest-profile domestic alternative, with DOD investment and a projected capacity that could supply up to 35% of U.S. antimony demand. Production isn’t expected until 2028. The timeline has slipped multiple times. Turkish mines are producing at 1-2% feed grades, struggling to concentrate their output to the 25% minimum that roasters require. The gap between what the Western world needs — reliable, non-Chinese antimony supply at industrial scale — and what the Western world has built is measured in years of mine development, roaster construction, and permitting that hasn’t started yet. The rare earth recycling infrastructure that would eventually allow antimony recovery from end-of-life batteries and flame retardant products is even further behind — the U.S. currently recovers about 18% of its antimony demand through lead-acid battery recycling, which is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise thin domestic supply picture.

Why it matters beyond antimony

Antimony is Lecture 32 of 36 in the Rare Earth Elements course, and by the time you get to it, the pattern is unmistakable. Gallium and germanium: export controls in 2023. Graphite: export controls in 2023. Rare earth processing technologies: export ban in December 2023. Antimony: export controls in August 2024, escalated to a military-end-user ban in December 2024. Tungsten and superabrasives: export controls in early 2025. Each announcement follows the same mechanism — license requirements, selective approvals, price spikes, two-tier markets, downstream industry disruption — and each one reveals the same underlying structural vulnerability: China’s dominance of critical mineral supply chains is not limited to mining. It extends through refining, processing, and manufacturing, at concentrations that give Beijing the ability to impose costs on adversaries through commodity markets rather than military force.

The semiconductor supply chain has its own version of this vulnerability — concentrated in a different geography, dependent on a different set of materials, but structurally identical in the sense that a small number of facilities and a small number of countries control chokepoints that the global economy cannot easily route around. The antimony case is smaller in dollar terms than semiconductors or rare earth magnets. But the pattern it demonstrates — that a $15,000-per-ton metalloid can become a $60,000-per-ton national security crisis in eight months because one country controls both the mine output and the refining capacity — is the pattern that defines the critical minerals landscape of the 2020s.

This is the kind of supply chain vulnerability our Rare Earth Elements course was built to map — where a metal most people have never heard of turns out to be the reason their furniture doesn’t catch fire, their bullets work, and their night vision functions, and the country that supplies 48% of it just decided that continued supply is conditional.
Graphite and the Battery Supply Chain: Why China Controls the Material Inside Every EV

Every lithium-ion battery has two electrodes — a cathode and an anode. The cathode gets the headlines because it contains the expensive metals: lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese. The anode is graphite. It is graphite in your phone, graphite in your laptop, graphite in every Tesla and every BYD and every grid-scale storage installation on earth. Graphite constitutes more of a lithium-ion battery by weight than lithium does. And China controls approximately 77 percent of natural graphite mining, more than 90 percent of graphite refining into battery-grade spherical graphite, and — as of October 2025 — has placed the entire category under export controls that give Beijing licensing authority over every kilogram that leaves the country. The material that makes the energy transition physically possible is more supply-concentrated than any other battery input, and the country that controls it has spent the last two years demonstrating exactly how willing it is to use that leverage.

Why graphite and why now

Natural graphite is mined. Synthetic graphite is manufactured from petroleum coke at extremely high temperatures. Both end up as anode material in lithium-ion batteries, where graphite’s layered crystal structure allows lithium ions to intercalate — slide between the layers during charging and slide back out during discharge. The process is the fundamental mechanism that makes rechargeable batteries work. Without graphite anodes, there are no lithium-ion batteries. Without lithium-ion batteries, there are no EVs, no grid storage, no portable electronics, no energy transition.

The supply chain has three chokepoints, and China dominates all of them. First, mining: China produces roughly 77 percent of the world’s natural graphite, with Mozambique, Brazil, and Madagascar as distant secondary sources. Second, processing: mined graphite must be purified, shaped into spherical particles, and coated to function as battery-grade anode material. China controls over 90 percent of this processing — a concentration tighter than its grip on rare earth refining. Third, anode manufacturing: the finished anode components that go into battery cells are overwhelmingly produced in China or by Chinese companies operating abroad. Japan sources 90 percent of its graphite from China. South Korea sources 93 percent of its anode materials from Chinese suppliers. The United States is better diversified on raw graphite imports — 33 percent from China, 21 percent from Mexico, 17 percent from Canada — but on processed battery-grade material, the dependency is nearly as severe.

The export control escalation

China’s graphite weaponization has followed the same playbook it used with gallium and germanium: announce controls, let the market panic, then selectively enforce to maintain leverage without fully cutting supply. The timeline tells the story.

In October 2023, China imposed export permit requirements on natural graphite — both flake graphite and spherical graphite — citing national security. The move was widely interpreted as retaliation for U.S. semiconductor export controls. Export volumes initially dropped but partially recovered as licenses were granted selectively, demonstrating that the controls were a valve, not a wall.

In October 2025, Beijing escalated dramatically. New export controls effective November 8 expanded the scope to include synthetic (artificial) graphite anode materials, blended graphite anodes, cathode material precursors, high-performance lithium-ion batteries with energy density above 300 watt-hours per kilogram, and — critically — the manufacturing equipment and production technologies required to make all of these things. This wasn’t just restricting the finished product. It was restricting the ability to build the factories that produce the product. Graphitization furnaces, CVD rotary kilns, spray dryers, coating equipment — all now require export licenses. The IEA’s analysis was blunt: these controls “target some critical chokepoints in global battery supply chains” for which “supply options outside China are extremely limited.”

Then, in November 2025, Beijing temporarily suspended the stricter end-user verification requirements for graphite shipments to the United States, valid through November 2026. The suspension aligned with bilateral trade consultations and followed the pattern China has established with rare earths: tighten, negotiate, offer temporary relief, preserve the structural leverage for future use. The November 2026 expiration date isn’t a formality. It’s a countdown.

The IRA collision

The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act created an additional problem that China’s export controls have now weaponized. To qualify for the full $7,500 EV consumer tax credit, manufacturers must demonstrate that critical minerals in their batteries meet “foreign entity of concern” (FEOC) rules — effectively limiting Chinese content in qualifying battery supply chains. The FEOC requirement for graphite was initially exempted until the end of 2026 because the supply chain was so concentrated that enforcing it immediately would have disqualified virtually every EV sold in America.

Manufacturers scrambled for compliant sources. Several identified BTR — a Chinese graphite company planning to source from Indonesia or Morocco — as a workaround. In January 2025, the Department of Energy classified BTR as a foreign entity of concern and extended that designation to its overseas subsidiaries. The workaround collapsed. The result is a policy that simultaneously demands non-Chinese graphite (via FEOC rules) while operating in a market where non-Chinese processed graphite barely exists at commercial scale.

What the U.S. is doing about it

The CHIPS Act critical minerals pivot and the Defense Production Act investments are part of the response, but graphite-specific capacity is further behind than rare earths or lithium. The National Defense Stockpile issued requests for information on graphite in 2025, acknowledging that the U.S. has known deposits but essentially zero commercial production capacity for battery-grade material. Syrah Resources operates a graphite mine in Mozambique and a processing facility in Vidalia, Louisiana — one of the only non-Chinese anode material plants in the Western world — with Department of Energy loan support. Nouveau Monde Graphite in Quebec is developing an integrated mine-to-anode operation. Westwater Resources broke ground on a processing plant in Alabama. But these projects collectively represent a fraction of global demand, and each faces the same timeline problem that haunts every domestic critical minerals play: permitting, construction, commissioning, and ramp-up take years, and China’s export controls take effect immediately.

The friend-shoring strategy fills part of the gap. Turkey holds 27 percent of global natural graphite reserves. Brazil holds 22 percent. India, Canada, and Mexico are all potential alternative sources for raw material. But the processing bottleneck — converting raw graphite into battery-grade spherical graphite — is the constraint that raw material diversification doesn’t solve. Building a graphite processing facility takes three to five years. China built its processing dominance over three decades.

The honest picture

Graphite is the most supply-concentrated critical battery material, more concentrated than lithium, more concentrated than cobalt, more concentrated than nickel. It is in every lithium-ion battery ever manufactured. China controls the mining, the processing, the equipment, the technology, and — since October 2025 — the legal right to restrict all of it. The temporary suspension of enhanced export controls to the United States expires in November 2026. What happens after that depends on the state of U.S.-China trade relations, which at this point is like forecasting the weather on a planet with no atmosphere — the models exist but the inputs are chaos.

The copper shortage, the helium crisis, the semiconductor supply chain — each teaches the same structural lesson: the materials that modern technology depends on are sourced from fewer places, processed through fewer facilities, and controlled by fewer governments than most people realize. Graphite is the purest expression of that lesson because it’s in everything and nobody talks about it. We cover the full critical minerals landscape — from neodymium magnets to gallium export controls to graphite supply chain concentration — across our Rare Earth Elements course, where the question isn’t whether the supply chain has a single point of failure but how many single points of failure it has simultaneously.
Critical Minerals and the CHIPS Act: How the US Is Trying to Build a Domestic Supply Chain

The CHIPS and Science Act was signed into law in August 2022 to rebuild American semiconductor manufacturing. By 2025, the Trump administration had redirected at least $2 billion of its funding toward something the original legislation barely mentioned: critical minerals. The pivot tells you everything you need to know about where the actual bottleneck sits. You can build a semiconductor fab in Arizona — and the U.S. is building several — but if the neodymium magnets in the fab’s equipment, the gallium in the compound semiconductors, the germanium in the fiber optics, the cobalt in the tooling alloys, and the rare earth elements in the electric motors all come from China, then you’ve built a factory that runs on your adversary’s supply chain. The CHIPS Act started as a semiconductor bill. It’s becoming a critical minerals bill because the people implementing it realized the two problems are the same problem.

The scale of the dependency

China controls approximately 90 percent of global rare earth processing, 80 percent of gallium production, 98 percent of gallium metal output, 60 percent of germanium, and dominant shares of graphite, manganese, and cobalt refining. The United States has exactly one operational rare earth mine — MP Materials’ Mountain Pass facility in California — and until recently had zero domestic capacity to separate rare earth oxides into individual elements, zero capacity to produce rare earth metals from those oxides, and zero capacity to manufacture the neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnets that go into everything from F-35 fighter jets to MRI machines to wind turbine generators to EV motors. The U.S. mined the ore and shipped it to China for processing. That’s like growing wheat and sending it abroad to be turned into bread.

When China imposed export controls on gallium and germanium in July 2023, exports dropped 97 percent in three months. European prices doubled. The demonstration was unambiguous: China could turn the valve on materials that the defense industrial base requires and the U.S. has no domestic alternative for. The semiconductor supply chain runs through a handful of chokepoints. The critical minerals supply chain runs through fewer. And unlike chips, where TSMC’s advantage is technological, China’s advantage in minerals processing is infrastructural — built over three decades of sustained investment that the U.S. chose not to match.

What the government is actually doing

The response since 2025 has been the most aggressive federal intervention in mining and materials processing since the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was established. The Department of Defense’s Office of Strategic Capital deployed over $4.5 billion in capital commitments by January 2026, closing six major critical mineral deals in a single year. The scale and structure of individual deals illustrate how far the government is willing to go.

MP Materials — the Mountain Pass operator and sole U.S. rare earth miner — received a $400 million equity investment from the Pentagon plus a $150 million loan to build heavy rare earth separation capacity in California. The Pentagon also established a price floor of $110 per kilogram for neodymium-praseodymium oxide — effectively guaranteeing MP Materials a minimum revenue regardless of market fluctuations. That’s the government acting as both investor and customer, de-risking a market that private capital alone won’t enter because Chinese producers can dump prices below any Western competitor’s cost of production.

Vulcan Elements and ReElement Technologies secured a $1.4 billion public-private partnership — $620 million in Pentagon loans, $50 million from the Department of Commerce under the CHIPS Act (with the government receiving an equivalent equity stake), and $550 million in private capital — to manufacture up to 10,000 metric tons of NdFeB magnet material domestically. USA Rare Earth announced a $1.6 billion debt and equity package with the government taking a 10 percent ownership stake. In Alaska, the Pentagon invested $35.6 million for a 10 percent stake in Trilogy Metals’ Upper Kobuk project. In Louisiana, Ucore Rare Metals received $18.4 million from the Army for a commercial-scale rare earth separation facility.

The National Defense Stockpile, a strategic reserve created in 1939 and largely neglected for decades, received $2 billion in new funding through the One Big Beautiful Act. The Pentagon announced intent to procure up to $1 billion in stockpile materials, issuing requests for information on scandium, tungsten, graphite, samarium, dysprosium, and terbium — minerals for which the U.S. has known deposits but essentially zero commercial production capacity.

The permitting acceleration is the other half. A March 2025 executive order expanded Defense Production Act authorities, reduced approval requirements, and directed streamlined permitting for mineral projects. The Department of the Interior published a new Critical Minerals List in November 2025, expanded from 50 to include additional materials based on updated methodology. In January 2026, Section 232 tariff actions targeted processed critical minerals alongside semiconductors — not yet imposing duties on minerals, but establishing monitoring frameworks and requiring Commerce to report on whether future restrictions are warranted.

Why it might not work fast enough

The money is real. The policy intent is clear. The problem is time. The average timeline from mineral discovery to production in the United States is 17 to 29 years. Environmental review, permitting, judicial challenge, construction, commissioning, and ramp-up each take years. China didn’t build its mineral processing dominance through a single piece of legislation. It built it through three decades of sustained investment, deliberately subsidized production, environmental shortcuts that no Western democracy would permit, and strategic acquisition of mining assets worldwide — an estimated $57 billion invested in copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium, and rare earth mines and processing facilities from 2000 to 2021.

The CHIPS Act-funded investments will take years to produce operational output. Vulcan Elements’ 10,000-ton magnet facility hasn’t been built yet. MP Materials’ heavy rare earth separation capacity is under development. The Thacker Pass lithium project in Nevada — the largest lithium deposit in the U.S. — had its Department of Energy loan restructured in October 2025 to include debt service deferrals, which tells you the economics remain fragile. The Pentagon’s price floor mechanism for rare earths is an admission that the market alone won’t sustain domestic production against Chinese competitors who operate at lower cost, lower environmental standards, and with direct state subsidy.

There’s also a geographic diversification play that acknowledges the U.S. can’t do everything domestically. MP Materials announced a joint venture with the Pentagon and Saudi Arabia’s Ma’aden to build a rare earth refinery in Saudi Arabia — expanding non-Chinese separation capacity outside U.S. borders but within allied supply chains. The Export-Import Bank’s Supply Chain Resiliency Initiative finances upstream projects in allied countries where U.S. manufacturers have signed offtake agreements. The strategy is “friend-shoring” — building mineral processing capacity in countries that won’t weaponize it against the U.S. — because building it all domestically would take longer than the threat allows.

The honest assessment

The U.S. went from zero critical mineral strategy to $4.5 billion in deployed capital in roughly 18 months. That’s fast by government standards. It’s not fast by supply chain standards. China’s rare earth monopoly wasn’t built in 18 months, and it won’t be unwound in 18 months. The investments are necessary. They are not sufficient. And the fundamental constraint — that opening a mine in the U.S. takes longer than a presidential term — means the strategy requires continuity across administrations, which is the one thing American mineral policy has never had.

The CHIPS Act’s evolution from semiconductor legislation to critical mineral funding vehicle is the clearest illustration of a lesson the copper shortage, the helium crisis, and the gallium export controls all teach independently: the energy transition, the AI buildout, and the defense industrial base all depend on the same materials, sourced from the same places, processed through the same chokepoints. We cover the full critical minerals landscape — from neodymium magnet manufacturing to China’s processing monopoly to the CHIPS Act response — across our Rare Earth Elements course, where the question isn’t whether the U.S. has the money to build a domestic supply chain but whether it has the time.
The Copper Shortage in 2026: Why the Energy Transition Can’t Work Without It

Copper hit $13,240 per metric ton on the London Metal Exchange in January 2026 — a record. The price had risen nearly 40 percent in 2025 alone, its largest annual gain since 2009. And the deficit hasn’t started yet. BloombergNEF projects that the copper market enters structural deficit in 2026, meaning global demand permanently exceeds the ability of mines to supply it. S&P Global’s January 2026 study, “Copper in the Age of AI,” projects demand will reach 42 million metric tons by 2040 — a 50 percent increase from current levels — while production peaks at 33 million metric tons in 2030 and then declines. The resulting shortfall: 10 million metric tons by 2040, roughly 25 percent below projected demand. J.P. Morgan forecasts a refined copper deficit of approximately 330,000 metric tons in 2026, pushing prices potentially above $12,000 per metric ton. The market for the metal that makes electrification physically possible is about to run out of the metal.

Why copper is different from every other critical mineral

Copper isn’t rare. It’s the third most-used industrial metal on earth after iron and aluminum. It exists in economically extractable concentrations on every continent. There is no geographic monopoly — Chile, Peru, the DRC, China, the United States, and Australia all produce significant quantities. The copper shortage in 2026 is not a concentration problem the way gallium (98 percent China) or rare earth processing (90 percent China) are concentration problems. It’s a volume problem. The world needs more copper than it can produce, and the gap between the two is widening.

An electric vehicle uses 80 to 100 kilograms of copper — three to four times what a conventional car uses — concentrated in the motor, battery, power electronics, and charging system. A single large offshore wind turbine contains roughly 8 metric tons of copper in its generator, transformer, cabling, and grid connection. A Level 3 fast-charging station requires substantial copper for high-voltage connections and power conditioning. Solar installations, grid-scale battery storage, power distribution networks, and the transformer substations that connect renewable generation to the grid all run on copper. An AI data center requires over 1,000 metric tons of copper per facility. Grid expansion alone — the wiring that connects everything — accounts for the largest single category of copper demand growth through 2050.

Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global, summarized the problem in the study’s opening: copper is the great enabler of electrification, but the accelerating pace of electrification is an increasing challenge for copper. EVs, grid expansion, renewables, AI data centers, digital infrastructure, and defense spending are all scaling simultaneously. Supply is not on track to keep pace. The question is whether copper remains an enabler of progress or becomes a bottleneck.

Why supply can’t respond

The average timeline from copper discovery to production is 17 years. In the United States, it averages close to 29 years. Chile has 13 new copper projects valued at $14.8 billion in the pipeline — most won’t produce meaningful output until 2028 or 2029. Opening a copper mine in a developed country requires exploration, feasibility studies, environmental impact assessment, permitting, judicial review (often multiple rounds), construction, commissioning, and ramp-up. Each step takes years. Environmental opposition and community resistance add additional years.

Ore grades are declining. The average copper ore grade has fallen from roughly 1.5 percent in the 1990s to below 0.6 percent today, meaning miners move more than twice as much rock per ton of copper produced. Rising energy costs, labor costs, and water scarcity in major mining regions (Chile’s Atacama, Peru’s highlands) compound the cost escalation. Indonesia’s Grasberg mine — one of the world’s largest — is undergoing the transition from open pit to underground block caving, which temporarily reduces output during the transition. Indonesian export policy changes and domestic processing requirements further constrain material available for international markets.

Mining companies are responding by extending existing mines rather than developing new ones. Capital for exploration and new mine development peaked at $26 billion in 2013 and roughly halved since then. BHP, Anglo American, Rio Tinto, Glencore, and Zijin have shifted capital expenditure toward copper — BHP’s copper revenue share rose from 27 percent to 38 percent between 2020 and 2024 — but the spending is going into optimizing existing operations, not building greenfield mines. The M&A activity is enormous: Glencore committed $16 billion to projects in Argentina, BHP’s attempted acquisition of Anglo American was motivated primarily by copper exposure. But buying existing mines doesn’t create new supply. It consolidates control over supply that already exists.

Recycling helps but doesn’t close the gap

Recycled copper currently contributes roughly 4 million metric tons annually — about 16 percent of total supply. S&P Global projects recycling will more than double to 10 million metric tons by 2040. That’s genuine progress. But the doubling of recycled supply is already factored into the 10-million-ton shortfall projection. Without the recycling increase, the deficit would be 16 million metric tons, not 10. Recycling is a structural supplement. It isn’t a substitute for mining, and it can’t close a gap measured in millions of metric tons per year.

The copper in an electric vehicle motor won’t be available for recycling for 12 to 15 years. The copper in grid infrastructure has a lifespan measured in decades. The copper in buildings lasts longer than the buildings. The feedstock problem is the same one that constrains rare earth recycling: the products containing the material haven’t reached end of life yet, so the recyclable supply won’t arrive for years.

The AI demand nobody modeled

The demand driver that makes the copper shortage in 2026 categorically different from previous copper deficits is artificial intelligence. A single large AI data center requires over 1,000 metric tons of copper — power cabling, cooling systems, server racks, transformer connections, UPS systems, grid integration. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are collectively building hundreds of these facilities. The electricity demand from AI computation is projected to grow faster than any other category of electricity consumption through 2040, and every megawatt of AI power consumption requires copper to deliver, condition, and distribute.

The S&P Global study explicitly identifies AI as a new demand vector that previous copper forecasts did not account for. Defense spending is another: guided weapons systems, electronic warfare equipment, naval vessels, and military communications infrastructure all have rising copper intensity. Grid expansion to support both AI data centers and electrified transport is the multiplier — the infrastructure that connects new demand to new generation capacity is itself copper-intensive.

The price signal problem

Copper prices above $12,000 per metric ton should, in theory, incentivize new mine development. They do — eventually. But the response time is measured in decades, not quarters. A mine that receives approval today won’t produce copper until the 2030s. The price signal is operating on a timeline that is structurally mismatched with the investment cycle. Miners want sustained high prices before committing multi-billion-dollar capital. Investors want certainty that demand projections will hold. The projects themselves take 15 to 29 years to develop. The deficit builds during the interval.

There is also a narrative problem. BloombergNEF’s Kwasi Ampofo calls the copper shortage structural, not cyclical. But some analysts push back: copper mining companies have been effective at promoting a long-term shortage narrative, and markets may have priced in future scarcity prematurely. Nearly one million metric tons of copper are reportedly parked in U.S. warehouses, partially driven by tariff hedging rather than genuine physical tightness. The 2025 price surge was driven as much by the “EV-AI-energy transition” investment narrative as by immediate supply scarcity. Both the shortage forecast and the concern that the forecast is self-serving exist simultaneously, which is the kind of epistemic situation the critical minerals space generates constantly.

What it means

Six countries produce roughly two-thirds of mined copper. The supply chain isn’t as concentrated as gallium or rare earths, but it’s concentrated enough that disruptions in Chile (strikes, water policy), Peru (political instability), Indonesia (export rules, mine transitions), or the DRC (conflict, as the cobalt post documented) cascade through global markets. The U.S. designated copper a critical mineral in 2025. The Inflation Reduction Act directed over $30 billion toward critical mineral supply chains. None of this changes the fundamental constraint: opening new mines takes longer than the demand growth projections allow.

The copper shortage in 2026 is the clearest case of a material where the energy transition creates the demand that the energy transition depends on, and the supply chain that served a 28-million-ton-per-year world is not structured to serve a 42-million-ton-per-year world. The gap between those two numbers is where the transition either succeeds or stalls.

We cover the copper shortage alongside gallium export controls, the helium crisis, and the full landscape of critical materials that modern technology depends on across our Rare Earth Elements course — including why the most abundant critical metal on earth is the one most likely to constrain everything else.
Uranium Supply Chain 2026: Nuclear Renaissance Meets Mining Reality

The United States operates 93 nuclear reactors — the largest fleet on earth — and cannot fuel a single one with domestically sourced uranium. The country has essentially no primary uranium production. The mines that once operated in Wyoming, Texas, and the Colorado Plateau shut down decades ago when prices collapsed, and the supply chain that supported them — the skilled labor, the processing infrastructure, the regulatory pipelines — dissolved with them. In 2026, spot uranium is approaching $92 per pound. Analysts project prices reaching $100 to $120 per pound, with some upside scenarios targeting $135 if supply fails to respond. The U.S. government has committed up to $80 billion to build new reactors and reinvigorate the nuclear industrial base. The USGS added uranium to its 2025 Critical Minerals List for the first time in years. The IEA forecasts annual nuclear investment rising from over $70 billion today to approximately $210 billion by the mid-2030s. Roughly 65 reactors are under construction worldwide.

The demand story is real. The supply story is the problem.

Where the uranium comes from

Global reactor demand runs approximately 67,500 metric tons of uranium per year. Mine production has historically met only 74 to 90 percent of that, with the deficit covered by drawdowns from government and commercial inventories, recycled material, and secondary supply. Those secondary sources are depleting. The market is transitioning from an inventory-driven system to a production-driven one, and production isn’t keeping up.

Kazakhstan dominates. Kazatomprom, the state-owned producer, is the world’s largest uranium miner, operating primarily through in-situ recovery — a technique that pumps acidified solution into uranium-bearing rock formations underground and extracts the dissolved uranium without conventional mining. Kazakhstan accounts for roughly 40 percent of global production. Canada’s Cameco operates McArthur River and Cigar Lake in Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin — two of the highest-grade uranium deposits on earth, with licensed capacity of 25 million pounds annually and proven reserves exceeding 457 million pounds. Australia, Namibia, Uzbekistan, and Niger round out the major producers. Russia controls a significant share of global uranium enrichment and conversion — the processing steps between mining raw uranium and fabricating reactor fuel.

The concentration is the vulnerability. A large proportion of uranium production sits in non-Western jurisdictions. Sanctions, export bans, and the war in Ukraine are constraining the nuclear fuel cycle. Niger — historically a significant supplier — produced no uranium at all in 2025 after a military junta seized power and disrupted operations at the SOMAÏR facility. Kazakhstan has announced lower production targets for 2026. McArthur River reduced its 2025 output due to development delays. In the United States, several in-situ recovery restarts have ramped up more slowly than planned. The net effect: tighter global supply for reliable primary production, at precisely the moment when demand forecasts keep getting revised upward.

The demand surge

Three forces are converging on uranium demand simultaneously.

The first is reactor life extensions and restarts. Existing nuclear plants that were scheduled for retirement are getting new operating licenses instead. Plants that were shut down are being evaluated for restart. The economics shifted when natural gas prices spiked, renewable intermittency proved harder to manage than projected, and carbon-free baseload generation became a policy priority rather than a political liability. Nuclear went from a technology that governments were phasing out to one they’re subsidizing.

The second is new reactor construction. The $80 billion U.S. government commitment includes Westinghouse AP1000 deployments and GE Hitachi BWRX-300 small modular reactors. Canada has broken ground on SMRs at the Darlington nuclear station with combined funding commitments of roughly CAD 3 billion and a target completion around 2030. The U.S. and Japan announced a framework totaling $550 billion, with up to $332 billion directed to energy and AI-linked infrastructure including new nuclear capacity. China continues building reactors at a pace no other country matches and purchasing uranium in large quantities to stockpile for its future fleet.

The third is AI data centers. This is the demand driver that didn’t exist in anyone’s forecast five years ago. Hyperscale computing facilities require baseload power — reliable, 24/7 generation that doesn’t depend on weather or time of day. Nuclear fits that requirement better than any other carbon-free source. More than 63 percent of investors surveyed by Uranium.io believe AI-related electricity consumption will become a material factor in nuclear planning over the next decade. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have all explored or announced nuclear power agreements for data center operations. The AI demand signal is being treated as structural rather than cyclical — permanent new load on the grid that requires permanent new generation.

Why supply can’t respond quickly

This is the constraint that the nuclear renaissance runs into. Uranium mining is not a faucet. Mine restarts require years, not months. The lead time from decision to production involves permitting (often multi-year regulatory processes), environmental review, workforce recruitment (specialized uranium mining labor that largely doesn’t exist anymore in the West), facility construction or refurbishment, and ramp-up testing. A mine that was shuttered in 2012 can’t resume production in 2026 just because the price is right.

Beyond mining, the fuel cycle has its own bottlenecks. Mined uranium (yellowcake) must be converted to uranium hexafluoride, enriched to increase the concentration of fissile U-235, fabricated into fuel assemblies, and delivered to the reactor. Russia controls a significant share of global enrichment and conversion capacity. The U.S. ban on Russian uranium imports — signed into law in 2024 — created a scramble for alternative enrichment services. Centrus Energy is the only licensed producer of High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) in the Western world — the next-generation fuel that advanced reactors and many SMR designs require. Centrus is expanding its Piketon, Ohio facility, but scaling enrichment infrastructure is measured in years and billions of dollars, not quarters.

The structural reality: even sustained high prices may not resolve supply deficits within typical investment horizons. Producers have signaled that three-digit prices per pound — above $100 — are the minimum necessary to incentivize new mine development at a scale that reflects actual capital costs, permitting timelines, and supply chain risk. The market is in a standoff. Utilities want to buy at current prices. Producers want higher prices before committing capital to new production. China, meanwhile, continues buying at whatever price the market offers, building strategic reserves while Western utilities defer purchases and hope prices stabilize.

The SMR fuel problem

Small modular reactors are the technology that’s supposed to make nuclear faster, cheaper, and more deployable. The first SMRs won’t be operational until 2030 or 2031. The World Nuclear Association projects SMR capacity could account for roughly 7 percent of global nuclear power generation by 2040. But many advanced SMR designs require HALEU — uranium enriched to between 5 and 20 percent U-235, compared to the 3 to 5 percent used in conventional reactors. HALEU production capacity in the Western world is essentially nonexistent outside of Centrus’s pilot-scale operations. Russia was the primary commercial supplier of HALEU before sanctions disrupted the trade.

Building the SMR fleet without the fuel to power it is the kind of sequencing error that turns a technology roadmap into a bottleneck cascade. The reactors require enrichment capacity that requires enrichment facilities that require regulatory approval that requires years. Cameco’s $2.8 billion ten-year supply agreement with India and Centrus’s $1.2 billion in convertible note offerings and $2 billion in contingent utility purchase commitments represent the financial architecture being constructed to close these gaps. Whether the construction finishes before the demand arrives is the open question.

The investment case and the honesty test

Uranium is one of the few commodities where there is essentially no substitution potential. A nuclear reactor runs on uranium. Nothing else does the job. Demand is inelastic — utilities will pay whatever the market requires because the cost of uranium is roughly 5 to 7 percent of a reactor’s total operating budget. A doubling of uranium prices is a rounding error in the cost of nuclear electricity. This means utilities will eventually buy at higher prices because they have no alternative. The question is when, not whether.

Long-term contract prices have risen to $86 per pound, indicating that utilities are accepting elevated costs even as they resist spot purchases. The World Nuclear Association has revised its uranium demand growth forecast to a 5.3 percent compound annual growth rate through 2040, up from 4.1 percent previously. Analysts project a supply deficit building over the next decade as mine production continues to lag reactor requirements. More than 85 percent of surveyed investors anticipate higher prices into 2026.

The honesty test: every part of this demand story — reactor restarts, new construction, SMRs, AI data centers — requires uranium, and the supply chain to deliver it doesn’t exist at the scale the demand forecasts imply. The nuclear fuel supply chain is being rebuilt in real time, by governments writing checks and producers scaling operations, against a backdrop of geopolitical disruption, depleted inventories, and a workforce that needs to be reconstituted essentially from scratch in the West. The nuclear renaissance is real. The mining and enrichment infrastructure to fuel it is years behind.

We cover the uranium supply chain alongside gallium and germanium export controls, the helium shortage, and the full landscape of critical materials that modern technology and energy systems depend on across our Rare Earth Elements course — including why the largest nuclear fleet on earth can’t fuel itself, and what that means for a planet betting on reactors to keep the lights on.
Gallium and Germanium: China’s Newest Export Control Weapons and Why Chips Need Them

In July 2023, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced export controls on gallium and germanium—two metals most people have never heard of, both of which are essential to semiconductor manufacturing, fiber optics, infrared optics, solar cells, and military hardware. Exporters were required to apply for licenses, disclose end-use information, and identify the final destination of every shipment. The result was immediate: Chinese gallium exports dropped from 6,876 kilograms in July 2023 to 227 kilograms in October 2023. Germanium fell from 7,965 kilograms to 590 kilograms in the same period. European prices for both metals nearly doubled within a year. By May 2025, the Rotterdam price of gallium had hit $687 per kilogram—an increase of over 150 percent from pre-control levels. Meanwhile, gallium prices inside China fell, because domestic oversupply had nowhere to go. Beijing was sitting on cheap material it refused to sell, watching the rest of the world scramble.

In December 2024, China escalated to an outright ban on gallium and germanium exports to the United States, along with antimony and superhard materials—a direct retaliation for the Biden administration adding 140 Chinese semiconductor companies to the Entity List. The ban was suspended in November 2025 as part of bilateral trade negotiations, with general licenses issued through November 2026. But the legal framework remains intact. The controls can be reactivated at any time. The message was delivered: China controls 98 percent of global gallium production and 60 percent of germanium, and it’s willing to use that leverage the same way OPEC uses oil—as a strategic instrument with a valve.

What gallium and germanium actually do

These aren’t rare earth elements—they’re critical minerals with their own supply chain vulnerabilities and their own reasons for mattering.

Gallium’s primary semiconductor application is gallium nitride (GaN), a wide-bandgap material that handles higher voltages, operates at higher temperatures, and switches faster than silicon. GaN-based chips are more efficient and more durable than their silicon equivalents, which is why they’re displacing silicon in power electronics, fast chargers, 5G base stations, radar systems, and military communications hardware. Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is the backbone of radio-frequency chips in smartphones—the components that connect your phone to a cell tower use gallium, not silicon. Every 5G phone on earth contains gallium-based semiconductors. LED lighting runs on gallium compounds. The photovoltaic industry uses gallium in high-efficiency multijunction solar cells for spacecraft and concentrated solar installations.

Germanium’s niche is narrower but equally non-substitutable. Its high electron mobility makes it essential for high-speed transistors. It’s the material of choice for infrared optical components—night vision goggles, thermal imaging cameras, missile guidance systems, satellite sensors. Fiber-optic cables use germanium-doped silica to minimize signal loss over long distances, which means the physical infrastructure of the internet—the glass cables that carry data between continents—depends on a material that one country dominates. An F-35 fighter jet’s infrared targeting system, the fiber-optic backbone connecting data centers, and the night vision goggles worn by infantry all share a supply chain vulnerability that runs through Beijing.

How China got here

Gallium doesn’t occur in nature as a primary ore. It’s a byproduct of aluminum smelting—extracted from bauxite processing residues at concentrations so low that recovery is only economical if you’re already running an aluminum smelter at scale. China produces more aluminum than any other country on earth, which means it generates more gallium-bearing waste streams, which means it dominates gallium production not because it set out to corner the market but because it cornered the upstream industry that gallium falls out of. The same pattern: whoever processes the most bauxite gets the most gallium, and China processes the most bauxite.

Germanium is slightly more distributed—China controls 60 percent rather than 98 percent—but the refining infrastructure is similarly concentrated. Global annual demand for gallium is below 700 metric tons, a fraction of markets like copper (25.9 million tons) or nickel (3.1 million tons). The small market size is itself a strategic advantage for Beijing: it’s easier to manipulate a 700-ton market than a 25-million-ton market. Small disruptions in supply produce large price swings, which gives China leverage that’s disproportionate to the tonnage involved.

The controls weren’t random. They were calibrated responses to specific American actions. The August 2023 licensing requirement answered the initial rounds of U.S. chip export controls. The December 2024 ban answered the Entity List expansion. The November 2025 suspension was part of a broader negotiated pause. Each escalation was timed, proportional, and reversible—designed to demonstrate capability without triggering a full decoupling. China has been explicit that the controls are not permanent policy. They’re a deterrent. The message: if you restrict our access to advanced chips and lithography equipment, we restrict your access to the materials those chips are made from.

The rerouting problem

The ban is leakier than it looks. Stimson Center analysis of Chinese customs data found that in 2024, the quantity of germanium exported to the United States fell by approximately 5,900 kilograms—almost exactly the amount by which germanium exports to Belgium increased (6,150 kilograms). The combined total to both countries was essentially flat across 2023 and 2024. The material appears to be flowing through third-country intermediaries that reimport it to the United States without Chinese end-use restrictions applying.

For gallium, the picture is more complicated because Canada and Germany have secondary gallium production from their own aluminum smelting operations, making it harder to distinguish genuine non-Chinese supply from rerouted Chinese material. The U.S. Census Bureau records imports by the country that produced the material unless it underwent “substantial transformation” in a third country—a classification that creates ambiguity about whether Belgian-processed germanium originally sourced from China counts as Belgian germanium.

The rerouting doesn’t eliminate the vulnerability. It adds cost, uncertainty, and transit time. It creates a supply chain that depends on Beijing’s tolerance of the workaround, which can be withdrawn. And it doesn’t address the fundamental concentration: if China decided to enforce end-use controls across all destinations—not just the United States—the third-country channels would close.

What the West is building

The response has been faster than for rare earths but still measured in years rather than months.

MTM Critical Metals is building a facility in Texas to extract gallium from industrial scrap, scheduled to begin operations in early 2026—an unusually fast timeline for critical mineral projects. The company is reportedly negotiating binding agreements with Indium Corporation that include minimum price floors designed specifically to protect against Chinese market manipulation. Canada’s 5N Plus and Germany’s PPM Pure Metals have secondary production from domestic aluminum operations. Japan has invested in recycling infrastructure to reduce import dependence.

The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act targets reducing dependency on single-source suppliers. The CHIPS Act allocated funding for domestic semiconductor material infrastructure. But the structural problem is the same one that affects rare earth diversification: building new supply takes years, the markets are small enough that Chinese pricing can undercut new entrants at will, and the byproduct economics mean you can’t produce gallium at scale without producing aluminum at scale, which means diversifying gallium supply requires diversifying an entire upstream industry.

Gallium prices inside China are lower than international prices because the domestic surplus can’t be exported. If China eventually lifts all controls, the price crash could make every Western diversification project uneconomic overnight—the same dynamic that has killed rare earth mining ventures outside China for two decades. Beijing doesn’t need to maintain the export ban permanently. It just needs the threat of reimposing it, combined with the ability to flood the market with cheap material if Western alternatives get too close to viability. The weapon isn’t the embargo. It’s the optionality.

What it tells you about the next decade

Gallium and germanium are test cases for a broader pattern. China identified that its dominance of bauxite processing gave it accidental control of a small but critical material, weaponized that control in response to American technology restrictions, calibrated the escalation to demonstrate capability without provoking full decoupling, and then suspended the controls as a negotiating chip—while keeping the legal framework active for reimposition. Every element in the critical minerals portfolio—antimony, graphite, rare earth processing technology, medium and heavy rare earths—has been subject to the same playbook in sequence since 2023.

The progression: rare earth processing dominance (established over decades) → gallium and germanium controls (2023) → antimony controls (2024) → rare earth processing equipment and technology controls (October 2025, suspended November 2025). Each step expands the scope. Each suspension is temporary and conditional. The architecture for comprehensive export controls across the entire critical minerals supply chain is built. It’s just not fully activated—yet.

We cover gallium and germanium alongside the helium shortage, rare earth recycling, and the full landscape of critical materials that underpin modern technology across our Rare Earth Elements course—including why the most strategically important metals in the semiconductor supply chain are ones most people can’t name, produced as byproducts of industries most people don’t think about, and controlled by a country that knows exactly what it has.
Cobalt, Coltan, and Conflict Minerals: The State of Play in 2026

In January 2025, the M23 rebel group—backed by Rwanda and approximately 10,000 Rwandan troops, according to UN investigators—seized Goma, the capital of North Kivu province in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. More than 3,000 people were killed in less than two weeks of fighting. An estimated 2,400 Congolese soldiers surrendered en masse. Over 150 female inmates were raped and burned to death during a jailbreak in the chaos. M23 then advanced south and captured Nyabibwe, another mining hub, less than a year after seizing Rubaya—a site that harbors one of the world’s largest deposits of coltan and supplies roughly 15 percent of global tantalum production.

In February 2026, landslides collapsed several artisanal coltan mines at Rubaya, killing at least 227 workers. It was the fourth deadly landslide Global Witness had documented at the site in 18 months. The miners were working in territory controlled by M23. The coltan they extracted was being transported into Rwanda—more than 120 tonnes per month, according to UN experts—where it was laundered and exported as Rwandan product to China, Europe, and the United States. Some of it is in the device you’re reading this on.

That last sentence isn’t rhetoric. It’s supply chain arithmetic. The DRC produces approximately 70 percent of the world’s cobalt and holds roughly 60 percent of global coltan reserves. These minerals are essential components in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles, smartphones, laptops, and advanced weapons systems. The International Energy Agency projects that global cobalt demand will quadruple by 2030. The connection between a mine collapse in North Kivu and a phone in your pocket is not metaphorical. It is three to four intermediaries long, and nearly a billion dollars vanishes from the legal supply chain annually through the middlemen who mix illegally sourced minerals with certified ones.

What conflict minerals actually are

The term “conflict minerals” refers to tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold—the “3TGs”—mined in conditions where the proceeds finance armed conflict or the minerals are extracted through forced labor. The designation originates from Section 1502 of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which required U.S.-listed companies to disclose whether their products contained minerals sourced from the DRC or adjoining countries. Cobalt was not included in the original definition, though it arguably should have been—the same armed groups, child labor networks, and supply chain opacity that characterize 3TG extraction apply to cobalt with equal or greater force.

Coltan—short for columbite-tantalite—is processed into tantalum, a heat-resistant metal used in capacitors for mobile phones, computers, medical equipment, and aerospace components. Cobalt is essential for the cathodes in lithium-ion batteries. Together, these two minerals account for a disproportionate share of the DRC’s strategic value and a disproportionate share of its human suffering. Of the estimated 255,000 Congolese mining cobalt, approximately 40,000 are children, some as young as six, working with hand tools for less than $2 per day.

The 2025 escalation

The M23 offensive that captured Goma in January 2025 represented the most serious military escalation in the DRC’s eastern provinces in over two decades. The fall of the provincial capital—home to over a million people—triggered a humanitarian crisis that displaced at least 100,000 from camps in the volatile east on top of the millions already displaced by decades of conflict. M23 and allied forces now control North and South Kivu, bordering Rwanda and Burundi, and much of Ituri province with its lucrative gold mines bordering Uganda.

The mineral dimension of the conflict is not incidental. A UN official told the Security Council that coltan trade from Rubaya’s mines generates an estimated $300,000 per month in revenue for M23. Updated estimates from other UN reporting suggest the figure may be closer to $800,000 per month. “It’s not a coincidence that the zones occupied by the rebels are mining areas,” said Patrick Okenda, a researcher at Global Witness. “It takes money to wage war. Access to mining sites finances the war.”

Rwanda’s role is particularly complicated. President Paul Kagame has acknowledged that minerals flow through Rwanda from the DRC but frames it as smuggling rather than state-sponsored extraction. A 2024 UN report documented that Uganda falsely labels DRC-sourced minerals as domestic exports. Between 2020 and 2021, Uganda exported $2.25 billion in gold despite minimal domestic production. The U.S. Treasury Department reported in 2022 that over 90 percent of the DRC’s gold was being smuggled to regional states, particularly Rwanda and Uganda, before being refined and exported to international markets through the UAE.

The Washington Accords

The Trump administration intervened directly in the conflict under the framework of securing critical mineral access. In June 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted DRC and Rwandan officials to initial a preliminary accord. In December 2025, the Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity were signed at a presidential summit, witnessed by the leaders of Angola, Kenya, and Burundi.

The accords explicitly tied peace negotiations to mineral access for U.S. corporations. The Modern War Institute at West Point published an analysis describing the arrangement as a potential “cobalt quagmire,” warning that Washington risked being drawn into a proxy war in some of Africa’s deadliest terrain. The DRC’s President Tshisekedi had solicited a formal security pact—effectively trading mineral access for American military support—and the analysis noted that “factors that make [the DRC] an attractive node in a critical mineral supply strategy, such as resource abundance and a transactional head of state, also make it a risky place to do business.”

European private military contractors had already failed in the theater. Several hundred Romanian contractors deployed across eastern DRC from 2022 to 2025. When M23 captured Goma, nearly 300 of them were surrounded and captured, paraded before media, and eventually repatriated through Rwanda.

The export quota system

In February 2025, the DRC government suspended cobalt exports for four months to address market oversupply—cobalt prices had been depressed by overproduction and reduced demand from battery chemistry shifts toward lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cathodes, which use no cobalt. In October 2025, the government introduced export quotas: companies were allocated specific monthly export volumes, with a 10 percent royalty plus a 5 percent strategic minerals levy. A 9,600-tonne “strategic reserve” was placed under the control of ARECOMS, the DRC’s new mineral regulation authority. Companies that don’t use their full allocations lose them to the government reserve starting January 2026.

The quota system represents the DRC’s most aggressive move to control its mineral wealth. Industry analysts at CRU Group described it as “a fundamental shift from market-based supply to government-controlled allocation.” The system also mandates electronic tracking of all mineral exports through the Better Sourcing Program, a partnership with RCS Global. Whether the tracking system can actually distinguish legally sourced cobalt from conflict-sourced cobalt in a country where “legal and illegal cobalt quickly mingle,” as the Institute for Security Studies’ Oluwole Ojewale described it, is the question on which the entire framework depends.

The supply chain problem nobody has solved

The DRC captures approximately 3 percent of the value in the battery and EV supply chain despite supplying 70 percent of the cobalt. Almost all cobalt mined in the DRC is shipped to China for refining—China processed 77 percent of the world’s cobalt in 2022. The DRC sells raw material. China sells batteries. The value multiplier between the two ends of the chain is roughly 20 to 1.

The DRC has ambitions to move up the chain. A Bloomberg study identified the DRC as a favorable location for battery precursor production—building a plant there would cost three times less than in the U.S. or China, cut supply-chain emissions by 30 percent, and keep more value in-country. The EU signed strategic partnerships with the DRC and Zambia on critical raw material value chains in 2023. The U.S., DRC, and Zambia signed a memorandum of understanding in 2022 to develop integrated EV battery production. None of these initiatives has yet produced a functioning refinery at scale in the DRC. The infrastructure gap—roads, electricity, skilled labor—remains enormous, and the security situation in the eastern provinces makes investment in processing capacity a proposition that requires either extraordinary risk tolerance or the kind of military guarantee that the Washington Accords are attempting to provide.

Alternative cobalt sources are in development. Jervois Global’s Idaho Cobalt Operations targets 1,500 tonnes per year with a restart planned for Q2 2026. Fortune Minerals’ NICO Project in Canada has an estimated capacity of 1,728 tonnes per year. Global cobalt production is approximately 130,000 tonnes annually, overwhelmingly from the DRC. The alternative sources represent rounding errors.

Battery chemistry is shifting. LFP cathodes—which contain no cobalt—are gaining market share, particularly in Chinese EVs and Tesla’s standard-range vehicles. But high-performance applications, particularly long-range EVs and consumer electronics, still require nickel-cobalt-manganese (NCM) or nickel-cobalt-aluminum (NCA) cathodes. Cobalt isn’t going away. The question is whether the supply chain that delivers it can be made less dependent on a country where 227 miners die in a landslide at a site controlled by a rebel militia backed by a neighboring government, and the coltan they extracted still makes it into your phone.

The honest answer, in 2026, is no. Not yet. Possibly not soon.

We cover the full geopolitics and chemistry of cobalt, coltan, lithium, and 33 other critical elements across our Rare Earth Elements & Critical Minerals course—including why the supply chain for the green energy transition runs through the deadliest conflict zone on earth.