A synthesis of Magna Bureau’s minerals pages and Concentration Monitor — who controls production, who holds the ground, and why the two are not the same.
Last updated: October 2026
Concentration is the quiet fact underneath the energy transition, the chip industry, and modern warfare. A mineral can be abundant in the Earth’s crust and still be a chokepoint, because mining, refining, and separation are concentrated in a few hands — sometimes in a single country, sometimes in a single plant, sometimes in a single mountain. Magna Bureau’s World Barometer describes its Concentration Monitor as tracking 22 minerals and resources where supply is concentrated in few hands — rare earths, cobalt, lithium, gallium, germanium, oil, gas, and more — showing who controls each resource and how concentrated that control is. The Bureau’s minerals section carries 68 resource pages. This report synthesises them. It adds no new figures: every share, count, and ranking below is taken from those pages.
The minerals pages come in two kinds, and the distinction is the first finding. Twenty-seven pages carry production-share tables: they state, with a source, what share of world output a country holds. Forty-one pages carry holder lists instead: they rank the countries whose factbook entries list the resource among their natural resources, ordered by the Bureau’s national power score. A holder list is a map of who has the resource in the ground and how much weight that country carries. A share table is a map of who actually produces it. The two maps disagree often, and the disagreement is the story: the United States is the highest-ranked holder of copper, oil, uranium, nickel, iron ore, gold, zinc, bauxite, coal, and timber, yet the share tables show China holding about 99 percent of primary low-purity gallium, about 88 percent of bismuth output in 2025, about 70 percent of indium, about 75 percent of refined tellurium, about 60 percent of fluorite, about 60 percent of germanium, and 69 percent of total rare-earth mine production. Holding ground and holding production are different kinds of power, and this report keeps them separate throughout.
The second finding is the byproduct trap. Gallium, germanium, indium, tellurium, hafnium, bismuth, scandium, selenium, and cadmium have no dedicated mines: they are recovered as byproducts of refining something else — gallium from bauxite, germanium and indium from zinc, tellurium and selenium from copper, hafnium from zirconium, bismuth from lead, copper, tin, and tungsten. Supply of a byproduct cannot be expanded by opening a byproduct mine, because there is no such thing. It expands only when production of the parent metal expands, which is why concentration in refining is concentration in the byproduct too.
The third finding is that export controls have become the visible edge of concentration. The Bureau’s pages record Chinese export controls applied to dysprosium, samarium, terbium, and yttrium in April 2025, to europium in October 2025, to fluorite under dual-use controls since December 2023, and to bismuth, whose controls sent prices to a record high. Controls are the moment when a share table becomes a policy instrument.
Seven of the Bureau’s mineral pages — dysprosium, europium, neodymium, praseodymium, samarium, terbium, and yttrium — each carry the same total rare-earth mine production table, headed by China at 69 percent. The pages are careful about what that number is: it is the share of total rare-earth mine production, not a share computed separately for each element. The Bureau’s rare-earths holder page adds the other half of the picture: 14 countries list rare earths among their natural resources, ranked by national power, with the United States the highest-ranked holder at 90.0 out of 100, ahead of China at 88.03 and Russia at 84.29, followed by India, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Vietnam, Egypt, South Africa, Kyrgyzstan, Estonia, Madagascar, and Burundi. The United States holds the ground at the top of the ranking; China holds the production at the top of the share table. Both facts are true, and neither cancels the other.
Within the seven elements, the pages draw out distinct roles. Neodymium is the key ingredient in neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnets, the strongest permanent magnets known, mined from bastnaesite and monazite ores usually alongside praseodymium; China dominates the refining chain and most magnet production, which makes neodymium the most strategically consequential rare earth. Praseodymium is sold and used together with neodymium as NdPr oxide for magnet production; the two are co-produced and co-processed, and praseodymium’s fate is tied to neodymium’s. Dysprosium is added in small amounts to those magnets to preserve their magnetism at high temperatures; it comes mainly from ion-adsorption clays in southern China and Myanmar, China controls the overwhelming majority of heavy rare-earth separation, and its April 2025 export controls cut shipments by about half. Terbium is one of the scarcest of the commercially produced rare earths; United States imports of terbium compounds and metals came 100 percent from China over 2021–24, on United States Geological Survey figures cited by the Bureau, and Beijing applied export controls to terbium in April 2025. Yttrium is chemically grouped with the heavy rare earths for processing; China applied export controls to it in April 2025, and the United States is 100 percent import-reliant for rare-earth compounds and metals. Samarium is used where magnets must keep working at extreme temperatures; in the Geological Survey’s 2025 critical-minerals assessment it carried a probability-weighted gross domestic product impact of nearly 4.5 billion dollars, the highest among rare earths, and China applied export controls to samarium in April 2025. Europium, the most reactive of the rare earths, is best known for the red and blue phosphors that made colour television and fluorescent lighting possible; China added it to its export-control list in October 2025. Scandium, one of the 17 rare-earth elements, is produced exclusively as a byproduct from nickel and titanium process streams and from previously processed tailings; China is the leading producer, and global production was only about 80 tonnes of scandium oxide in 2025.
Gallium is the sharpest single concentration in the Bureau’s minerals pages. It is a soft, silvery metal recovered almost entirely as a byproduct of processing bauxite into alumina and, to a lesser extent, from zinc ores. It has no dedicated mines. China produces 99 percent of the world’s primary low-purity gallium. High-purity refined gallium is more distributed — Canada, China, Japan, Slovakia, and the United States are the known principal producers — and world high-purity refined production was about 320,000 kilograms in 2024. Gallium’s value comes from its compounds, gallium arsenide and gallium nitride, semiconductors that work at higher frequencies, voltages, and temperatures than silicon. The concentration that matters for chips is therefore two-layered: near-total at the primary stage, shared at the refining stage.
Germanium is a brittle, silvery-white metalloid recovered as a byproduct of zinc ores and, to a smaller extent, copper ores, plus recycling. There are no germanium mines. China is the leading global producer and exporter of germanium metal, with about 60 percent of world output, and control of germanium is leverage over fibre optics, infrared systems, and space solar cells. Indium is recovered as a byproduct of zinc processing, with no indium mines; China produces about 70 percent of world output, and control of indium is leverage over the transparent coatings in every screen, touchscreen, and solar panel. Tellurium is recovered as a byproduct of copper refining, from copper anode slimes, with no tellurium mines; China produces about 75 percent of world refined output, and control of tellurium is leverage over thin-film solar manufacturing. Hafnium is recovered during the refining of zirconium, where nuclear-grade zirconium is required; without a nuclear industry, it would almost never be recovered, there are no hafnium mines, and global supply is just 70 to 75 tonnes a year, concentrated in France, the United States, China, and Russia. Five metals, five byproduct chains, one pattern: the country that refines the parent metal inherits the byproduct.
Bismuth is the most dramatic mover in the set. It is recovered as a byproduct of lead, copper, tin, and tungsten processing, and bismuth minerals rarely occur in quantities sufficient to mine as a principal product. China produced 88 percent of world output in 2025 — 14,000 tonnes of 16,000 tonnes — against 81 percent in 2024, on Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries figures cited by the Bureau, and its export controls sent prices to a record high. Fluorite, the ore of fluorine behind Teflon, refrigerants, and lithium battery electrolytes, is mined roughly 60 percent by China, which has restricted its export under dual-use controls since December 2023. Boron is mined as borate salts from dried lake beds; Turkey produces roughly 40 percent of world output through a single state-owned company, Eti Maden — the closest thing the borate market has to a national champion. Palladium is recovered mostly from nickel and platinum mines in Russia and South Africa, which together produce roughly three-quarters of world mine output, and its fate is tied to one product, the catalytic converter. Selenium is recovered almost entirely as a byproduct of refining copper; China refines roughly 40 percent of world output — not because it mines selenium, but because it refines more copper than anyone else. Cadmium, a byproduct of refining zinc, sees China refining roughly a third of world output. Talc sees China mining roughly a third. Silica sees China making roughly 70 percent of the world’s silicon metal, while the purest quartz — the kind that holds molten silicon in every chip fab — comes overwhelmingly from one place, Spruce Pine. Aluminum sees China smelting roughly 59 percent of the world’s primary aluminum, which makes the metal a story about energy as much as about mining. Limestone sees China quarrying roughly 28 percent, driven by its cement output, but limestone is dug locally everywhere because it is heavy and cheap, and no one can weaponise it. Clay sees the United States as the largest producer at roughly 18 percent, with no country dominating, and no one has ever fought over clay. Beryllium sees the United States producing roughly two-thirds of world mine output, almost all of it from a single mountain in Utah. The share tables, read together, sort the mineral world into three kinds: concentrated and weaponisable, concentrated but too heavy or too local to weaponise, and unconcentrated by nature.
The forty-one holder-list pages rank countries by the Bureau’s national power score, and their top holders repeat a pattern. The United States is the highest-ranked holder of oil (78 countries list it), natural gas (65), coal (46), copper (67), iron ore (74), gold (65), zinc (48), bauxite (37), lead (42), silver (29), uranium (29), nickel (29), mercury (8), molybdenum (10), tungsten (21), potash (14), phosphates (30), and timber (65). China is the highest-ranked holder of cobalt (11 countries list it), lithium (5), manganese (25), magnesium (5), tin (23), titanium (7), tantalum (9), vanadium (4), antimony (15), and hydropower (78). France is the highest-ranked holder of gypsum (25) and niobium (6). Turkey is the highest-ranked holder of chromium (9), barite (4), marble (16), and sulfur (8). India is the highest-ranked holder of diamonds (23) and mica (5). Egypt is the highest-ranked holder of asbestos (7). Brazil is the highest-ranked holder of platinum (6). South Korea is the highest-ranked holder of graphite (8) — and the Bureau’s page notes that China does not appear on the graphite holder list at all. The United Kingdom is the highest-ranked holder of salt (43). Two cautions belong with every holder list. First, the ranking reflects national power, not production volume: the pages say so themselves, and the Bureau does not publish a specific percentage for China’s control of cobalt, lithium, or the other holder-list minerals. Second, the counts are counts of factbook entries that list the resource, not geological surveys: they show where the Bureau’s factbook records the resource, which is a different claim from a reserve estimate.
This report is a synthesis of Magna Bureau’s 68 minerals pages and its World Barometer’s Concentration Monitor description, as published in October 2026. It introduces no new measurements, no new estimates, and no new sources. Two kinds of page are synthesised, and they are not interchangeable: production-share tables, which state sourced shares of world output, and holder lists, which rank factbook holders by national power score. Where a Bureau page states that it does not publish a specific percentage — as its cobalt, lithium, and other holder pages do for China’s control — this report says so rather than supplying one. Source attributions given in the text (United States Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries, the 2025 critical-minerals assessment, and similar) are those printed on the Bureau’s pages. The underlying pages are listed in Sources below.
