China and Critical Minerals: The Bottleneck the Market Still Underestimates

Source: CritpoTendencia Original Title: China and Critical Minerals: The Bottleneck the Market Still Underestimates Original Link: Markets tend to focus on the immediate: prices, interest rates, monetary policy decisions. However, the dynamics that truly define the balance of global power often operate in the background. Today, one of the most relevant is almost unnoticed: China dominates the refining of critical minerals that support the global energy transition.

According to projections toward 2030, China will control more than 60% of the world’s refining of lithium, cobalt, and graphite, and nearly 85% of rare earths. This is not a temporary anomaly nor a circumstantial advantage. It is the result of a long-term industrial strategy, executed consistently and without improvisation.

The true value is not in the mine

For years, much of the West assumed that diversifying mineral extraction was enough to reduce strategic dependence. New projects in Africa, Latin America, or Australia were seen as signs of future balance. The problem is conceptual: extraction is not the same as refining.

Refining is the link that turns a raw resource into a key industrial input for batteries, electric vehicles, energy grids, and advanced technological systems.

China understood early that this intermediate step was where real power would concentrate. While other countries left this stage to the market or slowed it down due to environmental and regulatory costs, Beijing built an integrated, subsidized, and strategically protected industrial capacity.

The paradox of the energy transition

The energy transition is often presented as a path toward greater autonomy and sustainability. However, in its current form, it is based on an extremely concentrated structural dependence. Lithium, cobalt, graphite, and rare earths are indispensable for almost all clean technologies, and their refining largely depends on a single country.

This does not imply an immediate disruption or a collapse of supplies. Flows continue, contracts are fulfilled, and prices do not reflect extreme tension. Precisely because of this, the risk goes unnoticed. Markets tend to react late when the threat does not manifest as a visible shock but as a silent accumulation of power.

A risk not priced in

Rebuilding refining capacities outside China is not a quick process. It requires intensive investments, clear regulatory frameworks, social acceptance, and, above all, political continuity over years. So far, responses have been fragmented and reactive, more rhetorical than structural.

The result is an imbalance that does not appear in traditional indicators but conditions the pace and viability of the global energy transition. It’s not a problem for tomorrow, but it is a factor that will shape the next decade.

The underlying message

China does not control critical minerals by accident. It does so because it understood that whoever dominates strategic inputs influences growth, industry, and global stability. The energy transition will not only be a technological race but a silent contest over the industrial nodes that sustain this transformation.

Markets still do not seem to have fully internalized this reality. But history shows that structural imbalances do not disappear: they manifest when it is too late to ignore them.

Because power in markets rarely announces itself. It is simply exercised.