Magnesium's Concentration Rivals Cobalt's, With No Geological Excuse
86% of world magnesium comes from one country, not because the resource is scarce elsewhere, but because production capacity consolidated there.
Magnesium’s supply chain concentration is, in percentage terms, close to cobalt’s, covered on cobalt’s supply chain page, but the mechanism behind it could not be more different: there is no DR-Congo-style geological lock-in here at all.
A production-capacity concentration, not a resource one
Because dolomite, brines, and seawater are all globally available feedstocks, covered on this material’s geology page, magnesium’s concentration exists purely because China built and sustained a large number of cost-competitive Pidgeon process plants, covered on the mining page, while equivalent Western capacity largely closed for cost reasons over recent decades. This means the concentration could, in principle, be unwound by building competing capacity anywhere with suitable dolomite and cheap energy, a genuinely different, and arguably more tractable, problem than cobalt’s fixed geological endowment.
Why magnesium is still treated as a critical material
Despite the lack of a geological excuse, the 2021 European magnesium shortage, triggered by energy curtailments at Chinese plants, showed the concentration is a real, binding constraint in practice regardless of the underlying resource abundance: European automakers faced genuine production risk within weeks, a documented, not hypothetical, disruption.
Sources: concentration figures reference this project’s own verified production data (USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025); the 2021 European magnesium shortage is widely reported (Reuters, industry press).