From Fortune, March 17:
In the 21st century, the most valuable assets aren’t oil wells, factories, data centers, or even AI large language models. The industries of the future require critical minerals. As the world seeks to generate massive amounts of energy, the real money isn’t in mining lithium, nickel, or rare earths—it’s in controlling how they move, process, and scale. A new industrial empire is being built, and just like John D. Rockefeller’s pipelines in the 19th century, the infrastructure behind critical minerals will be an incredible wealth generator.
While most companies race to secure mineral deposits—be they in Greenland, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Uzbekistan—the smartest players see a different opportunity: controlling the entire supply chain. The real bottleneck isn’t finding the necessary and rare minerals—it’s refining, processing, and transporting them. China recognized this early. Though it holds only 36% of the world’s rare earth reserves, it controls over 85% of global refining capacity. That control isn’t accidental. It’s an infrastructure play—one that has made China a dominant force in electric vehicle batteries, among many other things.
The next Rockefeller won’t be a miner; they’ll be a processing systems builder. Consider:
- Processing facilities: The U.S., EU, and allies have massive deposits of lithium, nickel, and rare earths—but lack the infrastructure to refine them. New processing hubs will be the equivalent of 19th-century oil refineries.
- Supply chain control: Just as Standard Oil dominated through pipelines, the companies that master logistics—raw material transport, battery recycling, and AI-driven resource allocation—will control pricing and profits.
- Waste-to-wealth model: Much like Rockefeller turned petroleum byproducts into valuable products, the future’s biggest opportunities lie in recovering and repurposing “waste”—from extracting minerals from mine tailings to scaling battery recycling.
The fragmented nature of today’s mineral market mirrors oil in the 1860s. Mineral prices are volatile, companies operate in silos and are in distress due to lack of processing options outside China, and inefficiencies abound. But soon, the industry will consolidate. The ones who build infrastructure—rather than simply dig—will acquire competitors, dictate pricing, and create empires. China has already been flexing its monopolistic muscle in mineral supply chains to threaten U.S. investments.
Supply chain control
When governments realize that chasing basic sourcing of critical minerals does not automatically yield national mineral security, demand for localized processing and supply chain control will explode. The result? A private sector wealth creation event that could rival the rise of Standard Oil. The next Standard Oil won’t be an oil company—it’ll be one that controls the arteries of the clean energy economy.
Infrastructure plays generate immense wealth by controlling the essential systems that enable industries to function and scale.
Consider today’s tech giants, which create immense wealth via:
1. Control over distribution and logistics: Amazon’s fulfillment and logistics network is comparable to Rockefeller’s pipelines, which controlled how oil moved. Amazon controls how many companies reach customers, making it a backbone of global e-commerce, with nearly two million small businesses using its platform. Over 60% of Amazon’s sales come from third-party sellers.
2. Owning the “toll roads” of industry: Cloud-computing providers (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, AWS) power the internet economy, collecting fees from companies that rely on their infrastructure. Similarly, Standard Oil didn’t just refine oil—it owned the infrastructure that transported and distributed it, ensuring everyone paid a fee....
....MUCH MORE
China is well aware of the bottlenecks in the supply chain:
"China bans export of rare earths processing tech over national security"
Over the years we've attempted to make this exact point:
"Rare Earths: Reminder, Combined Brazilian and Vietnamese Resource Base Approximately Equals China's Proven and Probable Reserves":
Mining the stuff is relatively straightforward. The huge difference is that Brazil and Vietnam do not have the refining and fabricating infrastructure that China does....
"Huge rare earth metals discovery in Arctic Sweden"
They aren't that rare. Just hard to find in the right proportions of the different rare earth elements. And in concentrations high enough to make extraction a paying proposition.
And requiring some technical expertise to fabricate into end products. It's not as if there are neodymium magnets just laying around...
And in 2022's "Huge rare earth reserve discovered in Turkey, but experts caution that ‘grade is king’"
Not just grade. The composition of a deposit, the amounts of the 17 rare earth elements is critical. As one example, the Mountain Pass mine in the U.S. despite its relatively high grade (8% REEs) is actually not as valuable as some lower grade mines with a more profitable mix.
Additionally, exploitation of a REE resource is highly dependent on processing and supply chain factors that can not quickly be brought into being, it's one thing to have the deposit, quite another to have, for example, the end product, a neodymium magnet.