Which minerals does the energy transition depend on, who mines them, and how concentrated is supply?

Batteries, wind turbines, solar panels and grid infrastructure each demand a narrow set of non-substitutable inputs: cobalt, lithium, nickel, copper, rare-earth elements, graphite, silicon, tungsten, manganese, aluminum. The IEA (2024) Critical Minerals Market Review projects demand for lithium, cobalt and nickel to rise 4-6x by 2040 in a net-zero pathway; Bazilian et al. (2020) in Nature warn that the choke-points are on the supply side, because refining and processing are concentrated in a handful of countries that mine-to-market price shocks cannot dislodge. This page tracks the twenty HS6 lines that constitute that basket across BACI bilateral trade, 1995-2024.

World trade in the critical-minerals basket has risen five-fold in thirty years

We sum BACI export value across every HS6 in the basket, each year, 1995-2024. Current-USD values reflect both price and quantity movements; the 2008, 2011 and 2022 peaks align with commodity-price cycles (Deaton & Miller 1995, Jacks, O’Rourke & Williamson 2011). The IEA (2024) Critical Minerals Market Review reports that the market value of energy-transition minerals doubled over 2017-2022 alone, reaching US$320B in 2022 — our basket is broader than the IEA’s six-mineral core but the trajectory tracks.

Single-exporter dominance: where one country accounts for more than half of world trade

Bazilian, Bradshaw, Gabriel, Goldthau & Westphal (2020) in Nature argued that supply concentration, not geological scarcity, is the binding constraint on the energy transition. Filtering the basket to HS6 lines where a single exporter commands more than 50% of world exports in 2022 yields the figure below. The list is not the same as the USGS mining-production ranking: the BACI series captures cross-border trade, so producers that consume domestically (China’s own rare-earth refining, Australia’s domestic lithium chemicals) show up differently in trade than in mined-production statistics.

Concentration trajectory: who is tightening, who is opening up

Supply concentration is not static. For the six family HS6 lines below — cobalt ores, lithium carbonate, nickel ores, copper ores, rare-earth compounds, graphite — the top-1 share has moved in opposite directions since 2000. Lithium and rare-earth compounds have seen concentration rise as Chile’s lithium output and China’s rare-earth refining consolidated; copper and aluminum ores, by contrast, diversified as Chile’s copper share fell and new producers (Peru, DRC, Indonesia) entered. USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries (annual) tracks the mining side of this story; the BACI series below tracks the export side.

Who’s catching up, who’s falling behind: market-share shifts 2015-2024

Across the six family lines, the top-6 producers in each year (by combined 2015+2024 share) show a clear story of reshuffling. Indonesia’s nickel-ore share rose sharply on the back of the 2014 raw-ore export ban and the subsequent build-out of Tsingshan-led smelting capacity (though this also pushed nickel trade toward nickel mattes, HS 750110, which is not shown in this HS6-specific family). The DRC’s position in cobalt ores strengthened further; Chile’s in lithium carbonate consolidated; the copper picture is more diffuse.

Import dependence: how large is the basket in each country’s import bill?

The flip side of exporter concentration is importer exposure. For each country we compute the basket’s share of its total merchandise imports in 2024. Chowdhry & Felbermayr (2023) define strategic dependence as a product-country pair where imports are dominated by one supplier and substitutes are scarce; the share shown below is the aggregate exposure. The European Commission (2023) Critical Raw Materials Act and the US Department of Energy (2023)Critical Materials Assessment each identify countries with elevated exposure and mandate diversification targets.

Geopolitical exposure: concentrated AND distant is the most fragile combination

An HS6 line is maximally fragile when it is both concentrated (few exporters) and distant (the exporters are far from the world’s consumers). Distance raises shipping costs and shipping-lane vulnerability; concentration eliminates redundancy. We plot the Herfindahl index across exporters (HHI) against each mineral’s share-weighted mean export distance, computed from the CEPII Gravity V202411 population-weighted distance between each exporter and its bilateral trading partners (2020 snapshot). Minerals in the upper-right of the chart are both concentrated and long-haul.

The 2015-2024 price record: who moved, who stayed, who spiked

Concentration and distance only matter if prices respond to them. The World Bank Pink Sheet (Commodity Markets Outlook data release) is the longest-running nominal price series for the metals complex. We index ten base- and precious-metal commodities that overlap the critical-mineral basket to 2015 = 100 and read off 2024. Lithium and cobalt are not in the Pink Sheet because the World Bank covers them in a separate series; battery-grade lithium prices collapsed more than 80% from their Nov-2022 peak (Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, Fastmarkets) and are not reproduced here. The visible story is (i) the Ukraine-war spike of 2022 in nickel and aluminum (World Bank, 2022 CMO), (ii) the 2023-2024 softening driven by slower Chinese construction demand, and (iii) the precious-metal rally in gold and silver as central-bank buying and inflation-hedge flows lifted both above their 2015 base. The ten-year cumulative change on the right is the transmission channel from Figures 2-6 concentration into battery-cell, grid-infrastructure and wind-turbine bills-of-materials.

EU CRMA strategic list: which minerals, which member states, which third-country dependence

The EU Critical Raw Materials Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1252, adopted 11 April 2024) Annex I lists 34 critical raw materials of which 17 are “strategic”. Article 5 sets a binding concentration target: no more than 65 per cent of any strategic raw material’s EU consumption from any single third country by 2030. The heatmap below cross-tabulates the strategic-list HS6 codes in our basket against the ten largest EU-member importers in 2024, with each cell shaded by the world-level top-exporter share (a lower-bound proxy for third-country single-origin concentration since member-resolved bilateral HS6 data is not in this build). Red cells are HS6 lines where world concentration already exceeds the CRMA 65 per cent ceiling, so EU single-origin concentration cannot be below it.

Battery-cell producers: raw-material import dependence by element

Lithium-ion cell manufacturing concentrates in seven economies: China (CATL, BYD, CALB), Korea (LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, SK On), Japan (Panasonic, GS Yuasa), the US (Tesla, LGES, Panasonic JVs under IRA Section 45X), and the three largest European cell-assembly hubs — Germany, Hungary, and Poland (BloombergNEF 2024 Battery Manufacturing Assessment). Their active-material basket is the same six-element set (Li, Co, Mn, Ni, graphite) drawn from eight HS6 lines: lithium hydroxide (HS 282520) and carbonate (283691), cobalt ores (260500) and oxides (282200), manganese ores (260200), nickel ores (260400) and mattes (750110), and natural graphite (250410). The bar chart below reports each producer’s total 2024 import bill across the eight HS6 lines; the composition stacks below show which elements dominate for each producer. Import dependence on these lines is the numerator of the IEA (2024) Critical Minerals Market Review supply-risk index for battery chemistries.

Who buys the basket: top-10 critical-mineral importers

Figure 5 mapped dependence (basket imports as a share of each country’s total imports). Figure 10 shows the absolute scale: the ten largest gross-USD buyers of the same 20-HS6 critical-minerals basket in 2024. Concentration on the demand side determines who sets the marginal price and writes the rules. The IEA (2024) Critical Minerals Market Review stresses that mid-stream refining capacity follows demand-side concentration with a 5-7 year lag (Fig. 3.2), so today’s top buyers are tomorrow’s mid-stream processors absent a deliberate diversification policy. This is the empirical anchor for the EU CRMA Art. 5 strategic partnerships and the US IRA Section 30D free-trade-partner sourcing rules in Figure 8.

Method notes: HHI, CR4, CR8 concentration

Three concentration statistics recur across these figures. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) is Hirschman (1945, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade), with the 0-to-10,000 scaling popularised by Herfindahl (1950). HHI = Σ_i s_i² where s_i is exporter i’s share of world HS6 exports. The US DOJ/FTC (2023) Horizontal Merger Guidelines flag HHI > 2,500 as “highly concentrated” and HHI > 1,500 as “moderately concentrated”. CR₄ and CR₈ are the cumulative share of the top 4 and top 8 exporters, respectively; the IEA (2024) Critical Minerals Outlook chapter 3 reports CR₃ for mined vs refined capacity. For our twenty-HS6 basket in 2022, the median CR₄ sits above HHI 2423, well into the DOJ red zone. Because the monopoly countries differ across minerals (DRC for cobalt, Chile for lithium-carbonate, China for rare-earth compounds) a co-ordinated disruption is not plausible, but any single closure is near-terminal.

Policy read: IRA, CRMA, and the dual-circulation mirror

The figures above are the empirical base behind the latest wave of critical-mineral statecraft. The US Inflation Reduction Act Section 30D vehicle credit makes eligibility conditional on a minimum share of critical-mineral value being extracted or processed in a US free-trade partner; the accompanying Section 45X advanced-manufacturing credit pays producers per kg of battery-grade lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite and rare-earth oxides produced domestically. The US Department of Energy’s 2023 Critical Materials Assessment lists 15 materials as “critical” for energy, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, REEs, Mn and Si. The EU Critical Raw Materials Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1252, adopted 11 April 2024) sets explicit 2030 benchmarks: 10% of annual consumption from domestic extraction, 40% from domestic processing, 25% from recycling, and the binding concentration cap of no more than 65% from any third country for each strategic raw material. China’s 14th Five-Year Plan (2021) and the dual-circulationstrategy mirror the move from the other direction: accelerate domestic consumption of refined outputs and use export controls on gallium, germanium (MOFCOM Announcement No. 23/2023, effective 1 August 2023) and graphite (MOFCOM Announcement No. 39/2023, effective 1 December 2023) as leverage. Figures 2 – 5 say whether each of those instruments is working at the HS6 level.

Caveat on interpretation. BACI captures cross-border trade, not domestic production. DRC’s 74% mining share of cobalt (USGS 2024) does not equal its BACI export share because (i) cobalt hydroxide leaves DRC for China for refining and is re-exported from China under a different HS line (282200); (ii) China’s domestic rare-earth refining is invisible in rare-earth HS6 trade but shows up in downstream magnets and batteries; (iii) spodumene, lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide are three different HS lines tracing the same upstream material through refining. Any policy use of these numbers — diversification targets, stockpile rules, tariff design — must pair BACI with the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries production series and country-level refining capacity data.