Where does magnesium come from?

Most big buyers of magnesium metal get nearly all of it from China. In 2024 China supplied between 98.0% and 99.9% of the unwrought magnesium of 99.8% purity or more (HS 810411) imported by South Korea, India and Japan, and 83% of the European Union's imports from outside the EU, all above the 65% benchmark in the supplier exposure report (CEPII BACI, supplier exposure data). The largest single flow in this trade was Israel to the United States. The next eight largest all started in China, which made 73% of world high-purity export value.

The United States buys from the other camp, and its suppliers lean on it in turn. In 2024 it took 64% of its high-purity imports from Israel and 27% from Turkey, while Israel sent 67% of its own exports to the US and Turkey 96% (CEPII BACI, our arithmetic on the corridor table). USGS reports US net import reliance for magnesium metal only as a floor: more than 25% in 2021 and more than 75% in 2025 (USGS MCS 2026, US only; see US import reliance).

Metal from outside China carried a higher declared price per tonne in 2024. In the high-purity line, exports from China averaged $3,021 per tonne, from Israel $3,658 and from Turkey $5,092. On the import side, the United States declared $3,557 per tonne against $2,726 to $2,827 for Japan, South Korea and India, which buy almost only from China (our arithmetic on CEPII BACI value and net weight). The comparison sets export values beside import values, and the customs line cannot show whether grade, form or freight explains the gaps.

This page covers primary magnesium metal, the ingot smelted from dolomite or brine, and not the magnesium compounds such as magnesia, which the source reports in a separate chapter. In 2025 China smelted 950,000 tonnes of primary magnesium, 86% of the world's 1.1 million tonnes (USGS MCS). Russia followed with 5.5%, then Brazil (1.8%), Israel (1.8%) and Turkey (Türkiye) (1.4%). The top five account for 97%, and only 7 countries are reported as smelting any. World output moved +2% on the previous year.

There is no reserves figure for magnesium metal, and the reason is instructive. USGS describes the resources from which magnesium can be recovered as ranging from large to virtually unlimited and globally widespread: dolomite, serpentine and magnesium-bearing evaporite minerals are enormous, brines hold billions of tons, and seawater could be tapped along any coastline. What USGS publishes instead is smelter capacity, because the constraint on magnesium is how much metal the world's furnaces and cells can turn out, not how much rock exists.

Capacity and production are different things, and the gap is large. USGS lists world smelter capacity well above world output, with China's capacity also well above its own production, and its capacity table counts plants that are idle or on standby. The clearest case is the United States, which still shows capacity in the 2025 table but no production, because its only primary smelter, an electrolytic plant on the Great Salt Lake, effectively stopped after equipment failures in 2021 and its operator filed for Chapter 11 protection in September 2025. Capacity on paper is not metal in the market.

Outside China the producers are few. Russia's comes mainly from the Solikamsk Magnesium Works in the Perm region, which has smelted magnesium since the 1930s. Israel's comes from Dead Sea Magnesium, an ICL subsidiary that works by electrolysis from Dead Sea carnallite. Brazil, Turkey, Kazakhstan and Iran add smaller volumes. USGS notes that some Russian and Kazakh figures have included magnesium consumed in making titanium sponge, so part of that output serves a different metal.

China was the largest exporter of unwrought magnesium (HS 810411) in 2024 with 73% of world export value, ahead of Israel (14%) and Turkey (Türkiye) (4.3%), on world trade of $915.8 million (CEPII BACI). United States was the largest importer with 15%, then India (7.9%) and South Korea (6.4%).

Compare China's share of exports with its share of smelting. It exports a smaller share of the world total than it smelts, because much of its output is used at home by its own aluminium and die-casting industries. Israel ranks second among exporters, far above its small share of smelting, and its recorded export tonnage is larger than USGS's estimate of what it smelts, so part of that trade is probably re-exported metal or a difference in reporting.

A second, lower-purity line (HS 810419, mostly alloy) is a separate market worth $553.4 million in 2024, where China supplied 55% of export value, ahead of Czechia (8.6%) and South Korea (7.4%). Its largest importer was United States (16%).

Trade policy shapes who buys from whom. The United States has levied antidumping duties on pure magnesium from China since 1997 and sharply raised its tariff on Russian metal in 2022. USGS reports that American imports of the high-purity metal in recent years came mainly from Israel and Turkey, with Russia and China much smaller, a very different pattern from the world picture above.

This page quotes no magnesium price, because there is no free public series. Magnesium is not traded on an exchange. US and European free-market quotations are assessed by private price reporting services, which is where USGS takes its figures, and Chinese domestic prices are reported separately by other agencies. Publishing a price level would require a licence this site does not hold.

What can be said is how the market works. According to the traders and producers quoted by USGS, nearly all primary magnesium is bought on annual contracts, so the reported spot quotations are not representative of what most buyers pay. Prices also differ by region, because freight, duties and the mix of suppliers differ, and by form: pure ingot, alloy ingot, powder and wrought products each carry their own premium.

The price has moved sharply when supply was cut and eased when it returned. USGS records prices in China and Europe reaching record highs in the last quarter of 2021 after Chinese production was curbed, and the average US spot price more than doubling in 2022 with the American smelter out (USGS Minerals Yearbook). Prices eased later. In 2025 USGS attributes a softer US price to sufficient inventory and weaker demand for primary metal, with secondary magnesium replacing part of it.

With most of the world's magnesium smelted in a few Chinese provinces, electricity and emissions policy there acts on world supply. In September 2021 power curbs shut or cut back smelters in Shaanxi and Shanxi, and USGS reports further shutdowns of local semicoke producers on environmental grounds in 2022.

Chinese smelters burn coal-derived fuel, with many using waste gas from semicoke production, and consume ferrosilicon and calcined dolomite as raw materials. A disruption anywhere in that chain reaches the smelter; USGS reports that COVID-19 outbreaks at places producing dolomite and ferrosilicon slowed Chinese output in 2022.

Magnesium is consumed mainly by the aluminium and die-casting industries, so demand follows vehicle production, packaging and construction. When supply from the only American smelter stopped in 2022, an aluminium rolling mill that makes can sheet declared force majeure until it found other sources.

The few smelters outside China are single plants, and one failure removes a country's output. USGS records the American share of world capacity falling since 1998, with two of the three producers closing, and the last has been idle since 2022. In Norway, Hydro closed its primary plant in the early 2000s.

Antidumping duties on Chinese pure magnesium and tariffs on Russian metal push American buyers toward Israel and Turkey, while Europe has relied heavily on Chinese supply. Trade policy decides which customers a smelter serves, independent of its cost.

Aluminium and zinc can replace magnesium in castings, though they are heavier, and calcium carbide can replace it in steel desulfurization. Secondary magnesium recovered from scrap is a large source in the United States.

Magnesium metal is made by two quite different routes. The silicothermic route, known as the Pidgeon process after the Canadian chemist Lloyd Pidgeon, who developed it in the early 1940s, starts with dolomite calcined to drive off carbon dioxide. The calcined dolomite is mixed with ferrosilicon as the reducing agent, pressed into briquettes and heated in sealed retorts under vacuum. Magnesium comes off as a vapour, condenses at the cool end of the retort, and is remelted and cast into ingot. China's industry is built mainly on this process.

The electrolytic route starts from magnesium chloride. Brine or a mineral such as carnallite is processed to anhydrous magnesium chloride, which is melted and split by an electric current into magnesium metal and chlorine gas. This is how the American plant on the Great Salt Lake, working from lake brine, and the Israeli plant at the Dead Sea make or made metal. It needs a concentrated magnesium chloride source, cheap electricity and heavy capital investment, which is why few such plants exist, and the chlorine by-product has to be managed.

The routes differ in what they depend on. The Pidgeon process uses an abundant mineral and a purchased reductant but burns a great deal of fuel, which is why Chinese output rises and falls with coal, power and environmental policy. Scaling electrolysis is not trivial either: USGS reports that a large Chinese electrolytic smelter at Golmud in Qinghai struggled with product contamination and was halted in 2019.

Aluminium alloying and die casting are the two biggest uses worldwide, and they are of broadly similar size. Magnesium alloys readily with aluminium to make products that are stronger and easier to machine, and the alloys go into beverage cans, vehicles, building products and packaging. Die casting uses magnesium as the structural metal itself, chiefly in automotive parts. It is the lightest structural metal in common use, and USGS notes that this weight advantage over aluminium and zinc is its selling point, with higher cost the drawback.

The mix differs by region. In the United States, USGS reports that castings, principally for the automotive industry, take the largest share of primary consumption, with aluminium alloying second and iron and steel desulfurization third, so American figures should not be read as the world pattern.

Steel mills use magnesium to remove sulfur from molten iron and steel. USGS says it is preferred to calcium carbide because carbide produces acetylene in the presence of water.

Magnesium is also a reducing agent. Its strong affinity for chlorine and fluorine makes it the reductant in the Kroll process, the long-standing commercial route to titanium sponge, in which titanium tetrachloride reacts with molten magnesium and the magnesium chloride by-product is recycled by electrolysis. USGS lists the same role for beryllium, hafnium, uranium and zirconium.

The chain runs from dolomite or brine, through smelting, to ingot, alloy and casting, and the concentrated step is the smelter. Nothing is scarce at the front of the chain. The bottleneck is turning raw material into metal at competitive cost, which takes cheap power or fuel, a reductant or a cell design, and permits for a plant that emits.

That makes magnesium a critical minerals story with an unusual shape. The US 2025 list from USGS includes magnesium, and the EU Critical Raw Materials Act names magnesium metal among its strategic raw materials. Both reflect concentrated processing, not rare rock, which is the distinction explained under critical mineral. The dependence sits on one stage, smelting, as described more generally in producing, exporting and processing.

The customers that depend on the metal are the aluminium and automotive industries and, to a lesser extent, steel. In 2021 European aluminium producers warned that Europe's near-total reliance on Chinese supply put production at risk after Chinese smelters cut output to meet power curbs, and in 2022 an American rolling mill lost its supply and later found other suppliers. Both episodes were acute and temporary, and neither is evidence of a lasting shortage. They show how little slack exists when one supplier has to stop.

Some resilience exists in scrap and in substitution, and Israel, Turkey, Russia, Brazil and Kazakhstan supply buyers who need to avoid Chinese metal, but that supply is small beside China's. Related markets are aluminum, which takes much of the magnesium, steel and coal, which powers the smelters.