Critical Minerals 2025

Who’s got them?

Life in the USA is not normal. It feels pointless and trivial to be talking about small looks at the fascinating natural world when the country is being dismantled. But these posts will continue, as a statement of resistance. I hope you continue to enjoy and learn from them. Stand Up For Science!

The US Geological Survey or the US Bureau of Mines has been collecting and distributing data on mineral production, use, imports, exports, and more since 1882. The methodologies they use are well established and thoroughly documented, and include 40,000 data forms annually from more than 18,000 mineral-related establishments from companies to trade associations to US and foreign government reports.

Consequently, while there are other sources for similar information (which you can find easily) and of course there are some limitations, in my view the data published by the USGS in Mineral Commodity Summaries (and the Minerals Yearbook, and equivalent earlier reports) are by far the best available, not just for the US but for the world. (Disclaimer: I do not and never have worked for the USGS as an employee or contractor. I just admire their work.)

This post is based entirely on the publicly available data in the USGS mineral commodity summaries, the most recent of which was released in January 2025. I don’t have any special secret sources; I just decided to try to portray some of it in geographic displays.

Most of the critical “minerals” are tracked as elements, because in most (but not all) cases that’s how they are made useful, as the element, not the original unrefined minerals. In my maps here, they are abbreviated with their chemical element symbol and a few others. Following is the list of critical elements and the symbol or abbreviation I use in the maps. A few (beryllium, bismuth, scandium, germanium, and others) are omitted from some maps because the USGS has insufficient data for meaningful percentages.

Aluminum, as bauxite, its only significant ore: Al. Antimony Sb. Arsenic As. Barite Ba. Chromium Cr. Cobalt Co. Fluorspar F. Graphite Gr. Indium In. Lithium Li. Magnesium Mg. Manganese Mn. Nickel Ni. Niobium Nb. Platinum-Palladium, Pt or Pd or Platinum Group Elements: PGE. Rare Earths REE. Tantalum Ta. Tellurium Te. Tin Sn. Titanium, as ilmenite, Ti. Tungsten W. Vanadium V. Zinc Zn. Zirconium Zr.

You use every single one of these elements every single day. I spent 312 pages in What Things Are Made Of explaining their uses and some of the geologic settings in which they are found.

Critical Minerals: Who has them?

The first map, at the top of the post, shows which countries rank #1 in reserves of the critical minerals, and in a few cases where #1 does not have a dominating percentage, also #2. The US ranks in the top three of reserves for any of the designated critical minerals for only one: #2 for tellurium.

Note also that reserves are different from resources. A resource is the total amount of a commodity that is known (or reasonably suspected) to exist. Reserves are the portion of the resource that have been discovered AND can be produced economically using technologies available today, at the cost and price in place today. That can be a huge difference.

Potentially huge resources of manganese exist in the nodules on the sea floor, but they may be prohibitively expensive (i.e., uneconomic) to find, mine, and produce, so they are not reserves (but that is changing; China is exploring the sea floor today). The quantity of aluminum contained in feldspar and other extremely common minerals is immense, but you cannot get aluminum out of feldspar in an economic way, so we rely on deposits of bauxite where nature has already concentrated aluminum into more easily refined minerals. And bauxite is distributed around the world in a very irregular way.

Next, who produces them?

Having huge reserves is not the same as turning out the ore or finished product. It typically takes many years to decades to initiate a mine even for a well-delineated deposit (a reserve) that is not already in production. Furthermore, for example, Congo has the greatest cobalt reserves, and also mines the most cobalt ore (reflected in the “production” map above), but produces very little refined cobalt because it has few facilities. China, using ore imported from Congo and Indonesia, is the world’s leading producer of refined cobalt, and is also the leading consumer of cobalt, most of which goes to lithium-ion batteries, such as those that power electric vehicles.

The US and other countries import those batteries, although the primary source of refined cobalt to the US is Norway. But because of Congo’s overwhelming dominance in cobalt mine production (76% of the world’s total), Congolese cobalt certainly ends up in US products, despite our attempt to avoid Congolese products because of their notorious use of child labor, and alleged funding of human rights abuses from sales of ore. The global market for cobalt was thrown into confusion when Congo ceased all exports on Feb. 22, 2025, in an effort to drive the price up. This is just one example of the complexity of the world mineral supply and demand situation, on a planet where mineral resources are anything but evenly distributed. That, as I say frequently, is one of the main points of my book What Things Are Made Of.

The map of producers above is similar but not identical to the map of reserves holders.

US imports

Finally, from which countries does the US import critical minerals? The map above is updated from one I made for 2021 data, with dependency percentages for 2024. Changes since 2021 in the leading sources of imports are indicated with a line through a commodity if that nation is no longer the leader, and the current (2024) leading source is shown in blue. Note that for some commodities, such as chromium, the US may have no production, but import dependency is decreased thanks to recycling (from 100% down to 77% in the case of chromium). In other cases, such as germanium from Belgium, that’s a reflection of the presence there of specialty refineries that process ore from all over the world, not an indication that Belgium has some remarkable resources of germanium.

Import sources are dependent on where the commodity is mined, of course, but also on where it is processed and on geopolitical considerations.

The map below is the USGS map showing US dependence for all the minerals they track, not just the critical minerals I included in my map above.

Ukraine

It is no surprise that the impetus for this post comes from the recent attention to a possible deal with Ukraine for its minerals. You may have seen various maps and data lists touting the reserves (or more likely, resources) of mineral commodities there. I cannot impugn, nor champion, other sources of information – some may be realistic, some may be fantasy. As I said at the start of this post, I trust the 140-year-plus record of the USGS in making these estimates, and therefore the following is presented simply to show what they report.

The chart below shows all, yes, ALL, of the critical minerals that the USGS considers Ukraine to have, in terms of either reserves or production. To clarify the possible impacts of covid and the war, I included the same data for 2018 as well as the most recent (2024) data.

It is not apparent to me why the reserve estimate for manganese for Ukraine went from about 7% (10% in 2018) of the world total in the 2024 report for 2023 (140,000,000 metric tons) to no listing in 2025. The Ukrainian Geological Survey also says they have reserves of 140,000,000 metric tons (a number that has been around for a long time), and that is the probable source for the USGS estimate from 2018-2023. Even as production declined because of the war, there’s no apparent reason why the USGS reserves estimate should have declined; it may be that there was no report received to be included in the USGS estimates. Alternatively, the USGS may have determined that the value is for ‘resources’ rather than ‘reserves.’ As indicated above, the latter can be produced economically; resources are amounts of a commodity that are not economically producible under current conditions. In any case, I cannot explain this discrepancy.

Graphite, Crystal Graphite Mine, Dillon, Montana. Approx. 13 cm wide.

I suppose if the US could import all of Ukraine’s 1,200 metric tons of annual natural graphite production, it might make a difference compared to the 1,270,000 tons produced by China (a commanding 79% of world production), and we could lessen the Chinese portion (43%) of our 100% import dependency. Maybe, maybe not. The United States consumes about 52,000 metric tons of graphite each year, using it in batteries, brake linings, lubricants, powdered metals, refractory applications, and steelmaking. Besides China, we also import natural graphite from Canada, 13%; Mexico, 13%; Mozambique, 13%; and Brazil and several other nations. In December 2024, China banned exports to the US of gallium, germanium, antimony, and graphite, in response to anticipated US trade policies. How this has been implemented and actually impacted these supplies is not clear, but in the long term it would be disruptive to many US industries.

Anyway, the point of this post is to (I hope) heighten awareness of the global complexity of mineral resource distribution and the economics and global politics that strongly affects supply chains. This is an attempt at an overview; I’ve done a post specific to South Africa recently.