Resource Geopolitics
The Metal That Runs the World Is Stuck in a Few Very Complicated Places
The rechargeable battery in your pocket contains cobalt, and more than 70% of the world's cobalt comes from a single country that has never once had a peaceful transfer of power.
The Idea
For most of modern history, the resource that shaped geopolitics was oil. Nations built alliances, fought wars, and drew borders around it. But quietly, over the past two decades, a different category of resource has become just as consequential — the minerals required to build the technologies we've decided will replace fossil fuels. Lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, rare earth elements: these are the materials inside electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, and the chips running everything from missiles to smartphones. The uncomfortable irony is that the green energy transition, designed to free wealthy nations from petrostate dependency, has created a new and equally fraught form of dependency — this time on a handful of countries in Central Africa, South America, and China. China, specifically, is not just a consumer of these minerals; it has spent two decades quietly acquiring mining rights across the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere, processing the majority of the world's refined rare earths, and embedding itself at every chokepoint in the supply chain. This is not accidental. It is strategy. What makes this different from oil geopolitics is that the leverage is less visible — it operates through processing facilities and corporate structures rather than pipelines and embargoes. But when a government in Beijing decides to restrict exports of gallium or germanium, as happened in 2023, the entire global semiconductor industry feels it within weeks.
In the World
In August 2023, with little fanfare, China announced export controls on gallium and germanium — two obscure metals used in semiconductors, radar systems, and solar cells. China produces roughly 80% of the world's gallium and 60% of its germanium. The announcement sent immediate shockwaves through defence ministries in Washington, Brussels, and Tokyo, not because the restrictions were catastrophic yet, but because they revealed how exposed the world had become. This was a shot across the bow. The deeper story runs through the DRC's Lualaba province, where artisanal miners — sometimes children — dig cobalt by hand from shallow pits, and where Chinese state-affiliated companies own or have stakes in the majority of industrial mining operations. When the tech industry discovered around 2015 that cobalt was essential to the lithium-ion battery chemistries powering the electric vehicle revolution, demand exploded. The price of cobalt tripled in two years. Glencore, a Swiss-British commodities giant, and CMOC, a Chinese state-linked firm, raced to lock up long-term supply. By the early 2020s, the DRC's cobalt was flowing overwhelmingly to Chinese refineries before being sold onward to battery manufacturers in Asia supplying Western car companies. The entire chain, from the mine to the vehicle in a European showroom, passed through Beijing's sphere of influence. That is not a trade arrangement. It is a structural dependency that took less than a decade to construct.
Why It Matters
Resource geopolitics used to feel like something that happened in distant deserts and affected petrol prices at the pump. This version is different — it is woven into the objects that define modern life and the technologies that are supposed to solve climate change. Understanding this changes how you read the news. When you see a headline about a new trade agreement with an African nation, or a government subsidising domestic battery manufacturing, or a diplomatic spat between the US and China over tech exports, you are likely looking at the resource competition playing out beneath the surface. It also complicates the moral narrative around green technology. The transition away from fossil fuels is genuinely necessary. But the supply chains enabling it are often exploitative, geopolitically dangerous, and controlled by actors with very different ideas about governance and human rights. Holding both of those truths at once — that the transition is urgent and that its current shape is deeply problematic — is the beginning of actually thinking clearly about energy, power, and the world being built around us.
A Question to Ponder
If the technologies meant to free us from one form of geopolitical dependency are quietly creating another, what would a genuinely independent energy future actually require — and is any country currently building it?
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