What you’re looking at, where the numbers come from, and what they don’t cover.
A snapshot of the 2025 industrial supply chain for the chemical elements: who mines them, who refines them, where reserves sit, what they get used for, and which ones are governed by another commodity’s economics. Every element with non-trivial commercial production has its own page; every country with industrial-element output has one too.
All quantitative figures are anchored to the 2025 reporting year. Where a 2024 figure is the latest available (the typical case for year-end USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries), it is labelled as such on the relevant page. Multi-year price histories run back as far as the underlying source publishes consistent data.
Each element is assigned a tier from 1 (foundational, hundreds of millions of tonnes per year, like iron and aluminium) to 5 (research-only or synthetic). A tier reflects volume and breadth of industrial use; it says nothing about strategic importance. A Tier 3 element can be more critical to a specific supply chain than a Tier 1 element, with cobalt and the rare earths as the canonical examples.
Production and refining concentration is reported using the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index — the sum of squared market shares, scaled to 0–10,000. An HHI above 2,500 is considered highly concentrated; above 5,000 means a single producer dominates. The atlas calculates HHI separately for the mining stage and the refining stage, because the two stages have very different geographies for several commodities (cobalt, rare earths, gallium among them).
The default reference is the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries series, which gives the most consistent year-over-year dataset for global mine tonnages and reserves. For refining-stage figures (which USGS reports unevenly), the IEA Critical Minerals Outlook and BGS World Mineral Production are used as cross-checks. Country-level breakdowns occasionally draw on company filings, national geological surveys, or trade press; those rows are flagged as “secondary reporting” in the per-country notes. Every page lists the sources that fed its specific figures.
Country rows aggregate output without splitting by production mode. Industrial mining, artisanal small-scale mining (ASM), and informal flows are combined into a single number. This matters most for cobalt (DRC: industrial vs. ASM) and tantalum (DRC and Rwanda: ITSCI-traced vs. smuggled), and the relevant element pages flag this explicitly.
Refining-stage country shares are sparser than mining-stage shares. Where USGS does not publish a country-level refining breakdown, the atlas notes the gap rather than estimating one. China’s share of global refining for cobalt, gallium, germanium, and rare earths is acknowledged qualitatively but not quantified at high precision, because the public data itself does not resolve that cleanly.
Recycling and secondary-supply figures are included where USGS or IEA publishes them, but coverage is uneven. End-of-life recycling rates for many minor metals are reported only as ranges or order-of-magnitude estimates; the atlas surfaces those as published rather than smoothing them.
A separate byproduct dependency graph tracks the elements whose supply is governed by another commodity’s economics. Rhenium follows molybdenum follows copper; tellurium follows copper; gallium follows aluminium. These elements cannot meaningfully respond to their own demand, because their production volume is set by the host metal’s market. The graph makes those dependency chains visible.
If you spot a figure that disagrees with the cited source, or a citation that doesn’t resolve, please open an issue against the repo (linked in the footer of every page). The data is intended to be reproducible from the listed sources end-to-end.