The export of minerals over the past century has been based on a basic premise: world processing took place in the cheapest place the ore could be mined from, and world mining took place in the cheapest place the ore could be processed. It’s her logic that is coming undone. Countries with lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earths are no longer willing to be raw material mines for another country’s industry as the world scrambles to electrify transport and store renewable energy sources and build the magnets and chips that modern militaries and economies rely on.
Numbers describe the wagering amounts. Under net zero emissions scenarios, the International Energy Agency forecasts lithium demand will grow 40 times higher by 2040 and cobalt and nickel use will rise by 20-25 times as the demand for EVs begins to ramp up. But China has developed about 60 percent of the world’s lithium and cobalt refining capacities and possesses nearly 90 percent of rare earth processing, as one recent study says, “in what amounts to decades of industrial planning, robust state support, and an ability to shoulder the environment’s burden that other countries opted out of.”
The same concentration, which became a lever. Beijing stepped up restrictions on the export of rare earths and related technologies in October 2025 with an extraterritorial application, followed a month later by a suspension of the restrictions as part of a larger trade deal with Washington, but not a retreat, as the agreement remains open to be invoked in the future.
However, the greater move could be taking place within the producer states. In February 2025, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which supplies 65% of the world’s cobalt, banned all exports before introducing strict annual quotas in their place—triggering some companies to announce force majeure for existing contracts and halting a market crucial for the manufacture of batteries worldwide. But Indonesia took it one step further: it banned raw nickel ore exports years ago and has been working to progressively put pressure on the industry, resulting in billions of dollars in investor interest in its downstream operations and a policy that is the subject of study by other resource-rich countries. Vietnam has limited its rare earth industry to only state-sanctioned companies; Chile has maintained its lithium development business through its state-run copper company, and Mexico has even stated that lithium is the property of the state.
This is not the ‘elephant in the room’ version of ‘resource nationalists’ of the 1970s based on price cycles and royalty issues. Instead, a new trend towards industrial statecraft has developed, including export prohibitions, processing requirements, screening investments, and strategic reserves, all in the name of national security but for no reason to generate revenue. The landscape is changing as quickly as it has politically, one legal analysis of the sector said, while the safeguards that kept investors covered in the last commodities boom “appear woefully inadequate for the current one.
Consuming countries are responding likewise. In February 2026, the United States initiated a strategic minerals reserve and called a group of over fifty countries to create a “preferential trade zone” that would prevent China from disrupting supply chains and markets and from cutting prices for key minerals. The Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) in the European Union, as well as the newly announced provision in the UK legislation, both go in the same direction: to create a bloc of trusted buyers and sellers, as far as possible shielded from a single dominant supplier.
The truthful thing behind all this wheel-spinning is that this replacement of countries by the reserves has been done, to a large extent, in the poorest countries in the world. Its estimates suggest that Africa has almost 1/3 of the world’s proven critical mineral reserves, but many African states, such as the DRC, which accounts for the vast majority of global production of cobalt, have historically seen limited benefits of their resources’ value as a downstream product. In part at least, this current wave of export bans and processing quotas is the effort by these states to redress the imbalance: to retain as much as possible of the value in manufacturing as the refining of raw ore moves away from the states and closer to Shanghai or Shenzhen; as the production of nickel makes its way from Indonesia to Japan, for instance.
But it remains to be seen whether that gamble will pay off. Development of processing capacity in the domestic market requires capital, a secure power supply basis, and skills in processing, which many of the mineral-rich states lack, and sudden export bans can equally deter or draw in investment in the development of this capacity. The direction of travel is decided upon when it is settled. Times of critical mineral movement like ordinary commodities, where the primary factor was price, are now behind us. Instead, there’s a new world in which lithium and cobalt are as much weapons of statecraft as oil and semiconductors and in which a switch from fossil fuels and unpredictable geopolitics may just be moving them to a whole new series of minerals and a newly drawn-up set of borders.