Cobalt's Supply Chain Has Two Bottlenecks, Not One
Cobalt is concentrated where it is mined and, separately, where it is refined. Those are two different chokepoints, and they sit in two different countries.
Cobalt is the clearest single example on this site of a supply chain with two separate chokepoints rather than one, and treating them as the same risk would miss most of what actually matters.
Chokepoint one: where it comes out of the ground
The Democratic Republic of Congo accounts for the large majority of global mined cobalt production, a direct consequence of the Central African Copperbelt’s geology, covered on this material’s geology page. This is a supply concentration risk in the conventional sense: a disruption to DRC mining (political instability, infrastructure failure, a change in mining law or royalty terms) has an outsized effect on global cobalt availability simply because there is no comparably sized alternative source that could substitute quickly.
Chokepoint two: where it gets turned into battery-grade material
Separately from mining, the refining step, converting mined cobalt ore, concentrate, or hydroxide into the battery-grade chemicals a cathode maker actually needs, is heavily concentrated in China. Much DRC-mined cobalt is shipped as intermediate material specifically to Chinese refineries rather than refined locally in the DRC. This means a country can be the dominant source of raw cobalt and still have essentially no influence over who controls the processing step that turns it into a usable product, a genuinely distinct vulnerability from mine-level concentration, and one that a supply chain map focused only on “where is it mined” will miss entirely.
Policy responses, named honestly
Both the US (through Inflation Reduction Act sourcing requirements for EV tax credits) and the EU (through its Critical Raw Materials Act) have introduced policy specifically aimed at diversifying critical mineral supply chains away from concentrated single-country processing, cobalt refining being a named concern in both. These are real, current policy instruments, still in their early implementation, whose actual effect on cobalt supply chain structure is an open question rather than a settled outcome.
Sources: mine and refining concentration figures reference the production data elsewhere on this site; policy framing reflects the published text of the US Inflation Reduction Act and the EU Critical Raw Materials Act.