Gold's Supply Chain Has No Single Chokepoint, and That Is the Point
Unlike cobalt or lithium, gold's mining, refining, and trading are all genuinely dispersed, a structurally different, lower-risk supply chain shape.
Gold breaks the two-chokepoint pattern documented on cobalt’s, copper’s, and lithium’s supply chain pages, because neither its mining stage nor its refining stage concentrates sharply in one country.
Refining is dispersed too
Large-scale gold refining capacity exists across Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, India, and several other jurisdictions, none holding anything close to the dominant position China holds in cobalt or lithium refining, or the dominant position it holds in aluminium smelting, covered on aluminium’s supply chain page. Recycled gold, recovered from jewellery, electronics, and industrial scrap, also forms a meaningful, ongoing part of supply, a real buffer similar in kind to copper’s and aluminium’s scrap markets.
Why above-ground stock matters here more than anywhere else
Because gold is chemically inert, covered on this material’s materials science page, almost none of it is ever consumed or destroyed: the roughly 210,000 tonnes mined across all of human history are still overwhelmingly in existence somewhere, in vaults, jewellery, or electronics. This means gold’s effective annual “supply” genuinely includes recycling and above-ground stock turnover in a way no other material on this site does to the same degree, current mine output (roughly 3,300 tonnes a year) is a small fraction of the total that could theoretically move to market.
Sources: mining and refining concentration figures reference the production data elsewhere on this site and widely reported industry structure (World Gold Council, LBMA).