Commodities
Home›Commodities›Energy Transition›Critical minerals leverage shifts from mines to shippi…
Critical minerals leverage shifts from mines to shipping corridors
The article highlights how rerouting around maritime chokepoints can disrupt exports, reinforcing why logistics investments can translate into control over copper and cobalt flows.
A Mining.com op-ed argues that the competitiveness of critical minerals is increasingly determined by logistics rather than by who holds the richest deposits. It points to how a container ship heading toward the Bab el-Mandeb strait rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope after a change in what was “unthinkable” a year earlier, effectively bypassing one of the world’s key maritime corridors.
The piece says narrow chokepoints matter because they can be closed, giving countries that control routes more leverage than those that only own mineral resources. It argues China has built elements of its Belt and Road strategy with that reality in mind, emphasizing mineral control through access to transport networks.
As examples, the op-ed cites the Central African Copperbelt across Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, noting it contains roughly 15% of global copper reserves and most known cobalt resources, but sits far from deep-water ports. It also describes Guinea’s Simandou iron ore, where a reported $20 billion joint venture involving Chinese firms created an integrated logistics setup, including a heavy-haul railway and a deep-water port at Morabaya, to bypass regional bottlenecks that delayed exports.
The author concludes that without the ability to move material to market, deposits amount to stranded capital, while building or financing transport infrastructure can confer de facto control over mineral flows even without owning the orebody itself.
Latest closeCopper $6.711 ▲0.1%