Graphite's Chokepoint Is Sharper Than Cobalt's, Not Looser
China mines 78% of graphite and processes 90%, but spherical anode material, the battery-ready form, is 99% Chinese, the tightest chokepoint on this site.
Graphite shows the same mining-versus-processing split documented on cobalt’s and lithium’s supply chain pages, except each successive processing step concentrates further, not less, ending in the tightest chokepoint of any material on this site.
Each processing step concentrates further
Unlike cobalt, where mining concentration (DRC) and refining concentration (China) sit in different countries at similarly high levels, covered on cobalt’s supply chain page, graphite shows a single country’s share rising at every single step from ore to battery-ready material: mining at 78%, general processing at 90%, anode material at 93%, and spherical graphite, the specific particle form a battery anode actually uses, at 99%. This is a genuinely more extreme and more specifically terminal concentration than cobalt’s two-stage split.
Why spherical graphite specifically is the hard part
Turning flake graphite into the rounded, uniformly sized particles a battery electrode needs, covered on this material’s mining page, requires specialised milling and shaping equipment and know-how that has, so far, concentrated almost entirely in China, more a matter of accumulated processing expertise and capital than of geology or policy alone.
Sources: concentration figures at each processing stage reference this project’s own verified production data (USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence).