Who holds the periodic table.
The energy transition is built from a short list of elements, and the United States Geological Survey counts, every year, who actually digs them. The answer is a concentration chart unlike anything else in the world economy: 98.7% of the world's gallium comes from one country. 82.7% of its tungsten. 79.4% of its graphite. 75.9% of its cobalt comes from one other. This report reads the USGS's own world-production and reserves release — one file, every commodity, every country — and draws the ladder of dominance straight from it. And the ground tells a different story than the diggers: Australia mines the most lithium, but Chile holds the most of it still in the earth. Every figure is computed from the release at render time.
published 2026-08-29 · data: Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025 (production est. 2024, reserves 2024) · edition 1 — updated only by a new dated edition · source: USGS
One bar per element. The bar is one country.
Fourteen strategic commodities, sorted by how much of the world's supply the single largest producer controls. Everything above the halfway line is a single-point-of-failure market — and most of the energy transition's shopping list lives up there. The remainder of each bar is everyone else on Earth combined.
Every market, its whole cast.
The same fourteen markets, each with its top eight producers drawn to scale. The shape of each market is its risk profile: gallium is a wall with a crack; lithium is an oligopoly of three; copper — the biggest tonnage on the page — is the healthiest spread on the list, and still half the market is three countries.
Who digs it is not who holds it.
Production is a choice; reserves are geology. For each commodity with a stated reserves table, this view pairs the biggest digger against the biggest holder — and where the names differ, the future has an opinion: Australia mines the most lithium today, but Chile holds the most still in the ground. Zimbabwe holds the chromium. South Africa holds three-quarters of the platinum group.
One release, read whole.
The record. The USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025 world data release — every commodity, every producing country, production for 2023 and estimated 2024, and reserves for 2024, in one public file on ScienceBase. This page's data.json is that file distilled to fourteen strategic commodities; the release is cited whole.
The arithmetic, stated. A share is the country's mine production divided by the release's own World-total row. Where a commodity carries more than one mine-production series, the one with the fullest country table is used — a rule this page adopted after its first pass crowned a one-row series and read 100% where the truth was 75.9%. "Other countries" stays in every denominator and is never ranked.
What this page does not say. Refining and processing concentration — where China's position is often stronger still — is a different table and a future edition; this page is MINE production and reserves only, and says so. Import reliance is in the per-commodity salient releases and joins at a later edition. No forecast, no scenario: the ladder is what the record says the ground did last year.