THE COMING TECTONIC COMPETITION
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Some two hundred and forty kilometres off the coast of Louisiana, beneath two thousand metres of warm Gulf water and another six kilometres of mud and salt and ancient seafloor, there lies a black lake. It is known to geologists as the Thunder Horse Oilfield and at its peak it produced a quarter of a million barrels a day. The reservoir lies within a fold of Miocene sandstone, capped by a stratum of salt that was laid down nearly two hundred million years ago, when the supercontinent of Pangaea was first beginning to crack along the seam that would become the Atlantic.
All the world’s great oilfields are in part the result of ancient tectonic movements. The hydrocarbons of the Persian Gulf were raised towards the surface by the Arabian plate’s collision with Eurasia’s underbelly; the North Sea is a failed Jurassic rift where the crust began to tear apart and then thought better of it, leaving behind the deep grabens that hold the Brent and Forties oilfields;1 the West Siberian basin, the largest hydrocarbon basin in the world, is a Permian-Triassic rift that was for vast swathes of deep time covered over with a sea; the Caspian is a stack of three different oil basins, born of three different tectonic collisions and ruptures.
Oil is not distributed evenly across the globe, a fact which has had profound implications for the geopolitics of the last hundred years; indeed, as recent events have proved it affects us still. The oilfields lie where they lie because of the fickle movements of the earth’s crust in aeons immemorial. Long-vanished oceans and ruptured supercontinents created the conditions for the wars and instability of the Middle East, the ‘New Great Game’ rivalries over the Caspian, and Europe’s grovelling energy dependence on a hostile power.
But the era of oil is drawing to an end, and the dawn of the Electric Age is only just beginning. In 2025, more than a quarter of total global car sales were EVs; by 2030 that figure will be forty percent. Wind and solar are the fastest-growing energy sources in history, and the latter is now by far the cheapest. Exponential improvements in batteries meanwhile are on their way to solving intermittency. Electric motor-driven drones are revolutionising warfare. Despite a few rather loud protestations from certain quarters, the technology stack of electromagnetism has now surpassed that of thermodynamics; battery + motor is both cheaper, denser, and more efficient than the combustion engine. If anything, the ongoing Iran war fuel crisis will only accelerate the trend of electrification, as countries around the world seek to end their energy dependence on a now fragile-looking Gulf. The hydrocarbon century is being supplanted by that of the battery, the magnet, and the photovoltaic cell.
For those looking forward to a world without petropolitics I have some bad news: this new energy paradigm is still just as tectonic-dependent as the one it is replacing. The technologies of the electric stack are forged from a different family of minerals — lithium, cobalt, nickel, the seventeen rare earths, the platinum-group metals, manganese, graphite, gallium, germanium, tellurium — but their distribution across the globe is just as uneven as oil and gas. The world is not finished with the key geopolitical question of the long twentieth century: which countries happen by chance to sit upon the rocks that fuel the global economy. Only the rocks have changed.
To understand the coming competition over these resources, we will first look at the geological hand each region of the world has been dealt. We will then address how China has managed to position itself as the dominant player in the production and refinement of these key minerals, before reviewing how the other powers have reacted to this fact thus far. Finally, we will end with an assessment of where each of China, the US, Russia, and Europe currently sit, and the moves they have available to them, at this vital moment, the dawning of the Electric Age.
I. THE GEOLOGY
The first thing to note about the rare earth elements (REE) is that they are not, in fact, rare. Cerium, the most abundant of them, is more common in the earth’s crust than copper or lead. Even the rarer ones like thulium or lutetium are more common than silver. The name comes from a time when they were all but impossible to separate from the other minerals in which they were encased. What is rare, however, is to find them in deposits concentrated enough to make their extraction economical. Quite where those deposits are is of course a question of plate tectonics.
The rare earths come, principally, from four kinds of geological event. The first is along tectonic rifts, when a plume of magma rises through the widening rack and cools into rocks unusually rich in these elements. The vast pit mine at Bayan Obo, in Inner Mongolia (the world’s largest rare earth element deposit), was formed in this way; as was Mountain Pass in California; Mount Weld in Australia; and the frozen deposits of southern Greenland.
The second event takes place at the surface. In southern China, hundreds of millions of years of tropical rain have eroded the local granite into soft and porous clay, and over that long span of time the rare earth ions in the rock have come loose and been caught on the surface of clay particles, where they can be washed out with a simple chemical rinse. These weathered clays supply something like ninety percent of the world’s heavy rare earths. At the moment, China and Myanmar are the only countries in the world to extract REEs from regolith deposits, as these formations are known, though projects are underway in the US, Malawi, Madagascar, Brazil, Chile, and Australia.
The third kind of rare earth deposit is found, strangely enough, upon sand beaches. In a few places around the world — namely India, Australia, and Brazil — rare earth grains eroded from mountains far inland, and then carried out to sea by rivers, are concentrated on sandy beaches by the waves washing them back onto shore.
The fourth and final place to find REEs are in the deepest parts of the ocean. In a few select places, some four to six kilometres below the waves, the ocean floor is sprinkled with potato-sized lumps of black metallic rock. These polymetallic nodules — concretions of manganese, iron, nickel, cobalt, copper, and rare earths — accrete from seawater at a rate of millimetres per million years. The largest known concentration lies on the abyssal plains of the central Pacific, between Hawaii and Mexico, in a stretch of seabed called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which holds an estimated twenty-one billion of them. There is thought to be more cobalt and manganese in this single stretch of seabed than in all the world’s terrestrial reserves combined.
The other key minerals for the ongoing electrification of the world are similarly uneven in their distribution. Lithium has accumulated in the salt flats of the high Andes, where rising mountains have starved the land of rain and trapped lithium-rich brines in basins with no outlet to the sea. It has also concentrated in a type of igneous rock called pegmatite in Western Australia, Canada, and the United States. The overwhelming share of the world’s cobalt meanwhile is infamously sourced from a single belt that stretches from northern Zambia (where I used to live) to southern DRC, where the slow collision of two African plates squeezed cobalt dissolved in hot, salty water out of the basement rock half a billion years ago. The vast majority of the world’s platinum is concentrated in a single sheet of crystallised magma beneath the Highveld of South Africa, while nickel has been made easily accessible by the tropical weathering of rocks in Indonesia and Brazil, with smaller quantities also found in Australia, Canada, and Siberia.
As you can see, geology has not been generous. The raw materials of the future are scattered like pearls across a few select locales. Just as with the oilfields, there are a few large prizes in a few specific places, but there are plenty with none at all.
II. THE DRAGON
So far we have looked only at the distribution of the deposits of these key minerals. But they are of no value where they are in the ground. They must be extracted and processed until they have been separated and refined into sufficient quantities before they become useful. The current map of the world’s production (i.e. the percentage mined by each country per year) looks as follows.
As of 2025, mineral mining is even more concentrated than the reserve deposits. Despite holding only half of the world’s cobalt, the DRC is currently responsible for three-quarters of global production, while Indonesia supplies 67% of the world’s nickel despite having only 44% of the world’s reserves. The story is even starker in rare earths. Despite their noteworthy deposits, neither Brazil, Myanmar, India, Vietnam, or Greenland extract them in any great quantity. Meanwhile China, the US, Canada, and Australia all extract a disproportionate amount of the minerals compared to their global share of reserves — though the later three are utterly dwarfed by the former. But these are just the numbers for extracting the raw ore; when we consider the refining of the minerals into a usable product the concentration becomes severer still.
Unlike with oil and gas, China has been reasonably well-endowed with the mineral reserves of the future, in the form of rare earths and lithium deposits. But it is in its dominance over refinement that the superpower holds its leverage over the raw materials of the Electric Age. It dwarfs every other nation in its refining capacity of rare earths, cobalt, and lithium, and is not far off rivalling Indonesia in nickel, despite having no great reserves of the mineral of its own. By way of comparison, at its peak Saudi Arabia controlled only about a third of the world’s oil reserves and thirteen percent of its production. China’s grip on the rare earths, lithium, and cobalt supply chains are in a different category altogether.
This dominance is no accident, but a deliberate policy decision taken by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1980s. He identified the unique opportunity offered by the reserves at Bayan Obo, then leveraged China’s cheap labour and lax environmental rules to become the industry’s world leader.2 Deng is often quoted in Western media as saying, “the Middle East has oil, China has rare earths,” giving the impression of grand strategic plan, but in truth he would have had no way of knowing back in 1987 quite how important these minerals would be in the 21st century.
Lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, and manganese are the constituent parts of rechargeable batteries — those that power our phones, laptops, drones, and electric vehicles, and which increasingly store the energy generated by solar panels and wind turbines. The rare earths, meanwhile, particularly neodymium and dysprosium, are used to make the extremely strong permanent magnets which drive the motors of every modern EV, every wind turbine generator, as well as the guidance systems of fighter jets, and propulsion systems of submarines. Gallium and germanium are core ingredients in the semiconductor industry, used in radar systems, fibre optics, LEDs, and solar cells. Tellurium is the active ingredient of thin-film solar panels, while platinum and palladium are essential catalysts in fuel cells.
Without these minerals, the modern world simply does not function. And it is no coincidence that the country that dominates their global supply should also dominate the manufacture of all the technologies just mentioned. Chinese factories now produce over seventy percent of global EVs, eighty percent of its solar panels, sixty percent of its wind turbines, seventy percent of its drones, eighty percent of its lithium-ion batteries, and the overwhelming share of its consumer electronics.
However, there has been a cost. China’s dominance in these critical minerals has come at the expense of their environment. Rare earth extraction and refining is an incredibly polluting industry.
The chemical makeup of the rare earth metals makes their separation exceedingly difficult. Their atoms differ from one another only in their innermost electron shells, which makes them very hard to separate. To do so, plant operators must run liquid solvents through hundreds of stages of mixer-settler tanks, decanting and remixing in long counter-current cascades, each stage achieving only a tiny enrichment in the desired element. A full heavy rare earth separation circuit can require more than a thousand stages. Per tonne of separated oxides, the process produces around twelve thousand cubic metres of waste gas, seventy-five cubic metres of acidic wastewater, and a tonne of low-level radioactive residue. Before a clean-up program taken in the early part of this decade, Bayan Obo’s tailings pond had covered eleven square kilometres, and held something like one hundred and eighty million tonnes of waste, which was migrating slowly toward the Yellow River. The toxic waste products resulted in an “epidemic of cancer” in the villages near the refineries. With such lax regulation, and droves of cheap labour to work in the truly horrendous working conditions, China was able to outcompete Western producers, many of whom had to leave the market in the early 2000s.
