The Global Puzzle: A World Built on Critical Minerals

In August 2025, Washington moved to raise tariffs that directly hit Indian exports, even adding a 25 percent surcharge in response to India’s discounted Russian oil purchases. In the same season, the United States signaled a limited thaw with Beijing on rare earths: Chinese authorities began issuing export licenses again, and magnet shipments to U.S. customers rebounded. The contrast is instructive. Where midstream capacity is deep, negotiations get easier; where it is thin, tariffs bite harder.

China did not arrive here by accident. Decades ago, it treated new metals as a target industry, backed refining and magnet manufacturing, and turned midstream scale into bargaining power that others now rely on. India’s lesson is to build that leverage at home.

That advantage was built over decades of policy support and R&D, which concentrated processing in a handful of regional hubs, especially for rare earths and graphite. The International Energy Agency’s latest outlook underscores that upstream mining is not enough if midstream refining remains highly concentrated.

On a Friday in October 2023, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced that graphite products would require export permits. Automakers and battery suppliers felt the jolt immediately because graphite is the anode material in most EV batteries. Earlier in 2023, export controls were imposed on gallium and germanium, both vital for chips and photonics. By 2025, rare earths had also been drawn into the policy crosshairs. Licensing in one hub can ripple across factories an ocean away.

Policy Control Timeline: Critical Mineral Export Restrictions and Licensing Shifts

India’s National Critical Mineral Mission now enters as an early counter-strategy, combining domestic exploration, overseas partnerships, and a strong push on recycling and circularity.

Critical Minerals – The foundations of modern life

Critical minerals are the metals and elements that make modern technology work. Lithium, nickel, cobalt, and graphite store and shuttle charge inside batteries. Rare earths like neodymium and dysprosium enable compact, powerful magnets for EV motors and wind turbines. Copper is the circulatory system of electrification. These materials are not rare in the geological sense, but they are critical because demand is rising quickly. The International Energy Agency projects continued growth in mineral demand across clean-energy scenarios through 2030 and beyond.

A fragile supply chain

Look below the surface, and a pattern appears. Mining is geographically diverse, but the midstream steps that turn ore into battery-ready chemicals and magnet alloys are heavily concentrated, with a few hubs holding dominant positions across lithium, cobalt, graphite, and rare-earth processing. This midstream concentration is why export permits or licensing changes in one jurisdiction can stall factories far away. IEA’s 2024–2025 outlooks underline that refining is where supplier concentration is most acute and has increased in recent years.

Where Concentration Bites: Global Mining vs Processing Hubs

Only after that picture is clear does the Africa angle fully land. The Democratic Republic of the Congo supplies the majority of mined cobalt. Much of that material then moves to China, which leads global refined cobalt output. The combination is a two-step dependency that runs from Central African mines to Chinese refineries before reaching battery makers. Recent datasets put the DRC near three-quarters of global mined cobalt and China near four-fifths of refined cobalt.

A related lesson from recent trade tensions is the role of rare-earth magnets. Because a very large share of processing and magnet output sits in one system, magnets can become a negotiation focal point.

Two crises that intersect

While policymakers debate new mines and trade rules, a second resource story is unfolding in plain sight. The world generated an estimated 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022 and is on track for roughly 82 million tonnes by 2030. Only 22.3 percent was documented as properly collected and recycled in 2022, and the formal rate could drift toward about 20 percent by 2030 without stronger policy.

Global E-Waste vs Formal Collection (2010 - 2030)

For batteries, indicative material intensities let us translate any end-of-life volume into potential secondary metal supply. A modern NMC-rich EV battery contains ~0.10 kg lithium, ~0.65 kg nickel, ~0.08 kg cobalt, ~0.08 kg manganese per kWh, with graphite near 1 kg per kWh depending on design. Pack-level intensities in DOE and Argonne studies fall in the same ballpark.

Worked example: India’s urban-mine lever for cobalt.

NITI Aayog’s analysis indicates roughly 125–128 GWh of lithium-battery material reaching recycling by 2030. If half of that stream is NMC-type chemistry and the rest LFP, gross cobalt in feed is several thousand tonnes per year. With NovaGenesis hydrometallurgical lines achieving >90% cobalt recovery, a meaningful share of imports can be offset.

India's Urban Mine to recoverable Cobalt Potential

The operational takeaway is straightforward. If India ensures predictable collection through EPR systems and runs high-yield, specification-driven processes, recycling can supply domestic refineries and magnet makers while reducing the environmental burden of dumping or informal burning. Recovery performance above 90 percent for cobalt, nickel, and manganese is already demonstrated at scale, and lithium and graphite recovery are improving as anode and lithium routes mature.

India’s early countermove

India has begun to treat minerals policy as an industrial strategy rather than merely a commodity issue. In 2025, the Union Cabinet approved the National Critical Mineral Mission (NCMM) to build a resilient value chain for materials powering clean technologies. Under the mission, the Geological Survey of India is tasked with 1,200 exploration projects (FY 2024–25 to FY 2030–31), alongside measures including recovery from end-of-life products, processing parks, and stockpiles. The approach is clear: accelerate exploration and auctions, secure overseas resources, and develop recycling and processing capacity at home.

This framing matters because India lacks extensive domestic reserves, but it does have a large and growing above-ground stock in end-of-life devices and packs. The urban mine can become a meaningful input to domestic refineries if paired with predictable EPR flows, standards, and offtake.

Visualization: a schematic of NCMM pillars and how e-waste collection and hydrometallurgical processing feed into domestic stockpiles and component manufacturing.

What this means for the reader

If oil once shaped geopolitics, critical minerals now shape industrial bargaining power. The lesson from recent tensions is not to complain about any one country. It is to understand how policy, R&D, and scale created leverage, and to apply those lessons at home. India’s NCMM is a first attempt to combine exploration, international partnerships, and a serious circularity push in one programmatic frame.

Next in Part 2

We will unpack the Indian playbook. That includes where exploration and auctions stand, what overseas assets can realistically deliver, how recycling can scale from pilots to a true above-ground mining ecosystem, and what policy levers can close the collection and processing gaps.