Critical Minerals: Physical Chokepoints, Concentration Risk, and Disruption Scenarios
Maps single points of failure across mining, processing, and maritime logistics for 20 critical minerals, then stress-tests cutoff scenarios by commodity and geography to quantify supply gaps and price transmission.
China controls refining capacity for 19 of 20 strategic minerals at an average 70% share, a concentration that rose between 2020 and 2024 and is resistant to near-term diversification. The DRC accounts for over 70% of cobalt mine output from a handful of sites, and China's sequential export controls on gallium, germanium, antimony, and graphite between 2023 and 2025 showed that processing monopolies are operational weapons, not theoretical risks. Strategic stockpile coverage in the US and EU is thin and uneven, with no binding minimum days-of-supply standard outside petroleum. This report establishes which minerals face the shortest time-to-shortage under plausible disruption scenarios and the price and substitution dynamics that follow.
What's inside
- 01Executive Summary: Shortest Time-to-Shortage by Mineral
- 02Concentration Metrics: Mining, Processing, and Refining by Mineral
- 03The N-1 Stress Test: Supply Gaps When the Largest Supplier Is Removed
- 04Maritime Exposure: Chokepoints, Rerouting Costs, and Cargo Routing
- 05China's Export-Control Playbook: Gallium, Germanium, Antimony, and Graphite
- 06DRC Cobalt: Site-Level Concentration and Political Triggers
- 07Rare Earth Processing Bottlenecks: Separation Capacity Outside China
- 08Lithium: Mine Concentration in the Lithium Triangle and Midstream Dependence
- 09Strategic Stockpiles: Days-of-Supply Coverage Across the US, EU, Japan, and Korea
- 10Disruption Scenario Matrix: Six Cutoff Pathways and Their Consequences
- 11Substitution Ceilings and Implications by Mineral Tier
- 12Data Sources, Methodology, and Concentration Index Construction
- ↳Critical Minerals trend dashboard (historical + forward scenarios)
- ↳Country risk heatmap and ranking changes
- ↳Sanctions and trade-restriction timeline
- ↳Export-route dependency map
- ↳Policy-event probability and impact matrix
- ↳Sensitivity matrix: price, cost, and policy variables
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