Critical minerals: who mines them, and who is on which list

43 commodities on this site appear on at least one of two government critical-mineral lists, and 29 of them appear on both. For the 39 with production data, a single country mines half or more of the world's supply of 19 of them, and the median largest producer holds 49% of world output. China is the largest producer of 18; the most concentrated is gallium, where China mines 99%.

A critical mineral is not the same as a rare one. A government designates a mineral as critical when the economy or national security depends on it and its supply could be disrupted, usually because mining or, more often, processing is concentrated in very few places (see the glossary entry and critical minerals and the energy transition). The two lists below are different instruments built for different purposes, and each is revised from time to time, so a mineral can be on one and not the other. The table is sorted by name; click a heading to sort.

On this page: All 43 minerals · The two lists · Who mines each · How concentrated is the mining? · Everything on the site · Without a page

All 43 critical minerals on this site

Battery metals (4)

• Cobalt
• Graphite
• Lithium
• Rare earths

Minor metals (14)

• Antimony
• Arsenic
• Beryllium
• Bismuth
• Gallium
• Indium
• Magnesium
• Niobium
• Rhenium
• Tantalum
• Tellurium
• Titanium
• Tungsten
• Vanadium

Base metals (7)

• Aluminum
• Bauxite
• Copper
• Lead
• Nickel
• Tin
• Zinc

Precious metals (5)

• Iridium
• Palladium
• Platinum
• Rhodium
• Silver

Steel inputs (2)

• Chromium
• Manganese

Industrial minerals (8)

• Barite
• Boron
• Feldspar
• Fluorspar
• Helium
• Silicon
• Strontium
• Zirconium

Fertilizer minerals (2)

• Phosphate rock
• Potash

Nuclear fuel (1)

• Uranium

Each link goes to the mineral's own page: producers, reserves, trade, prices where a free series exists, and what the lists say about it.

The two lists

• United States, 2025. 60 minerals, published by the US Geological Survey in November 2025. The update added ten minerals to the 50 on the 2022 list: boron, copper, lead, metallurgical coal, phosphate, potash, rhenium, silicon, silver and uranium. This site takes each commodity's US status from USGS's own flag in the Mineral Commodity Summaries data. 54 of the 60 named minerals are covered here (the rare earths page covers the fifteen rare earth elements the list names individually).
• European Union, Critical Raw Materials Act (2024). 34 critical raw materials, of which 17 are also designated strategic. Copper and nickel are on the list as strategic materials. Benchmarks for 2030: 10% of annual EU consumption from EU extraction, 40% from EU processing, 25% from recycling, and no more than 65% from a single third country. The Act's entries are sometimes broader or narrower than a commodity page (bauxite, alumina and aluminium are one entry; the Act lists titanium metal, not titanium ore), and the table notes where.

Lists read on 6 October 2026: Final 2025 List of Critical Minerals, Federal Register notice 2025-19813 (90 FR 50494), 7 November 2025; Regulation (EU) 2024/1252 of 11 April 2024 establishing a framework for ensuring a secure and sustainable supply of critical raw materials: Annex I (strategic) and Annex II (critical).

Who mines each of the 43

Production: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 (uranium has no mining figure here: its production series on this site is nuclear generation, so it is left out of the mining statistics); exports: CEPII BACI, each commodity's primary customs line, so for some minerals the exporter is of ore and for others of a processed form (the commodity page shows every line). Reserves: USGS, where it publishes them. "Free price series" means the World Bank Pink Sheet or IMF publish a benchmark; 28 of the 43 have none, so their pages explain how prices are set instead of quoting one.

How long reserves last, and what prices have done

The same minerals through the lens of the how much is left page and the century of real prices: years of reserves at the latest output, the year world output peaked, and how the latest ten years' real price compares with the first ten years on record (US unit values in constant 1998 dollars). A dash means the data cannot be joined or does not exist for that mineral.

How concentrated is the mining?

Each bar is the largest producer's share of world production in the latest year on file. A high bar means a single country dominates the mine; it says nothing about refining, which for several of these minerals is the narrower step.

Where the chain is narrower than the mine

For critical minerals the vulnerable step is often processing, not mining. These are the processing notes from each commodity page; the pages carry the trade tables for the processed lines.

Aluminum

Guinea exports bauxite, Australia exports both bauxite and alumina, China smelts more metal than the rest of the world combined but exports little primary metal.

Antimony

Little antimony is traded as ore; most of the trade and the value is in the oxide and the unwrought metal, which is where processing capacity, not mining, decides who supplies the world.

Arsenic

USGS says arsenic may be obtained from copper, gold and lead smelter flue dust, from roasting arsenopyrite and from minerals such as orpiment and realgar; Morocco's output comes from a cobalt-arsenide ore. USGS reports it in only a few countries.

Barite

Barite is cheap per tonne and heavy, so it is ground close to where it is used and traded mainly by sea to oil-producing regions.

Bauxite

Guinea ships raw bauxite; Australia ships both bauxite and alumina; China imports bauxite and refines alumina at home for its smelters.

Beryllium

Beryllium ore is converted to hydroxide and then to metal and alloys in a handful of plants; the trade line here is the unwrought metal, not the ore.

Bismuth

Bismuth is not mined for itself; it is recovered as a by-product at lead, tungsten and zinc operations, so its supply follows those metals.

Boron

Boron moves in three steps: borate ore or brine is mined, concentrated or refined into borax and other borates, and part of that is converted to boric acid. The customs lines separate the three, and the countries that lead in one are not the ones that lead in the next.

Chromium

South Africa holds most of the world's chromite but exports much of it as ore rather than alloy; China smelts the ferrochrome, and electricity prices decide where smelting happens.

Cobalt

DR Congo mines most of the world's cobalt as a copper by-product and exports hydroxide; China refines the majority of it into battery chemicals.

Copper

Chile and Peru export concentrate; China imports it to smelt. Refined copper (HS 7403) is led by Chile, DR Congo and Japan.

Feldspar

Most feldspar is used in the country that mines it; a few producers, notably Turkey, export most of their output.

Fluorspar

Most fluorspar is converted into hydrofluoric acid close to its customers, so the trade flows follow chemical and aluminum capacity rather than the mines.

Gallium

Gallium is not mined for itself: it is recovered predominantly from the liquors of alumina refineries and in part from zinc-processing residues, so its supply follows those industries; low-purity output is further refined to high purity for electronics.

Graphite

China both mines the most flake graphite and dominates the spheroidizing and coating steps that turn it into anode material, so downstream concentration is higher than mine concentration.

Helium

Helium is a by-product of processing natural gas from fields that contain it: it is separated as crude helium, then purified, and for some uses liquefied, so its supply depends on gas processing plants.

Indium

Indium is recovered, mostly from sphalerite, at zinc smelters and refineries rather than mined for itself, so its supply depends on zinc processing and on each smelter choosing to recover it.

Iridium

Iridium and ruthenium are recovered at platinum-group metal refineries. The customs line covers iridium, osmium and ruthenium together, so the trade table cannot separate them.

Lead

More than half of world lead supply is recycled from batteries rather than mined, so the mine table understates where refined lead comes from.

Lithium

Australia mines spodumene concentrate and ships it to China, which refines most of the world's battery-grade chemicals; Chile exports finished carbonate directly.

Magnesium

Magnesium metal is made by energy-intensive smelting, so the supply follows cheap coal and power; the raw materials (dolomite, magnesite and brine) are abundant almost everywhere.

Manganese

South Africa, Gabon and Australia ship ore; China smelts most of the world's manganese alloys for its own steel industry.

Nickel

Indonesia banned ore exports in 2020 and built smelters, so its ore export line collapsed while its refined and intermediate exports grew.

Niobium

Niobium ore has no customs line of its own (it shares a heading with tantalum and vanadium ores), so trade here is the ferroniobium that is the main commercial product.

Palladium

Russia's Norilsk and South Africa's Bushveld supply most primary palladium; the United Kingdom and Switzerland dominate the export table because they refine and trade rather than mine.

Phosphate rock

Morocco, China and the United States mine the most, but China and the United States convert nearly all of it into fertilizer at home, so Morocco dominates the rock trade.

Platinum

South Africa's Bushveld Complex and Russia's Norilsk deposit supply most primary metal; the United Kingdom and Switzerland export refined and traded metal.

Potash

Potash geology is concentrated: Canada, Russia and Belarus hold most of the mineable deposits, and sanctions on Belarus reshaped the trade after 2021.

Rare earths

Mining is less concentrated than separation: China refines and separates the great majority of world oxide and makes most of the world's sintered magnets, so the mine map understates its position.

Rhenium

Rhenium is recovered from molybdenite roasting and from some copper-processing streams, needs special recovery equipment, and is produced only where those operations exist; USGS notes the Chilean figure includes rhenium from roaster residues of several countries.

Rhodium

Rhodium is not mined for itself. It is recovered at the refineries that separate platinum-group metals, so the countries that export it are refining and trading centers as well as mining countries.

Silicon

Metallurgical-grade silicon is further purified to polysilicon for solar cells and chips; that step, not the smelting, is the narrow part of the chain.

Silver

The United Kingdom, Switzerland and Hong Kong appear high in the export table because they vault and trade silver rather than mine it.

Strontium

Strontium minerals are mined in only a few countries; some celestite is ground for drilling fluids and some is converted to strontium carbonate and other compounds.

Tantalum

Tantalum comes mostly from tantalite ores, partly as a by-product of tin mining and from tin slags, recycling and synthetic concentrates; its ores share an HS code with niobium and vanadium ores, which is why this site shows no trade table.

Tellurium

Tellurium is recovered mainly from the anode slimes of copper refineries (more than 90% according to USGS) and the rest from lead-refinery skimmings and smelter flue dusts, so its supply follows copper refining.

Tin

Indonesia restricts unrefined exports and ships refined metal; Myanmar's Wa region supplies concentrate to Chinese smelters, so mine and metal maps differ.

Titanium

Most titanium minerals become titanium dioxide pigment, and only a small share is made into titanium metal, so the two uses (paint and aircraft) have very different supply chains from the same ore.

Tungsten

Concentrate is converted to ammonium paratungstate and then to oxide and metal powder; that conversion, concentrated in China, is where the supply chain is narrower than the mining.

Uranium

Kazakhstan, Canada, Namibia and Australia mine most uranium; conversion and enrichment are concentrated in Russia, China, France and the United States, and that step is the real chokepoint.

Vanadium

USGS mine production counts only primary vanadium; a large part of the world's vanadium is also recovered from steel-making slag, which is not mine output and is not in these tables.

Zinc

Australia and Peru ship concentrate; China, South Korea and Canada run the smelters that turn it into slab zinc.

Zirconium

Most zircon is used as the mineral itself; only a small share is converted to zirconium metal and, after separating hafnium, to nuclear-grade alloys.

Critical minerals without a page here, and why

7 minerals named on a list have no page of their own. A page needs country-level production or a clean customs line, and then written analysis checked against it. Where the free data holds neither, a page would only restate a definition, so the reason is given here instead. Each is added when the data allows it.

Read against the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 data release and CEPII BACI customs lines on 14 October 2026.

Lists read on 6 October 2026.