Producers Are Forcing Minerals Processing Onshore

The most consequential development in critical minerals this year is producer governments refusing to ship raw ore at all. In 2026 the Democratic Republic of Congo replaced its cobalt export ban with hard quotas, Zimbabwe banned lithium-concentrate exports and is mandating domestic sulfate plants, Vietnam prohibited raw rare-earth exports, and China showed it can switch rare-earth controls on and off at will. The demand beneath each measure is the same: process it here, or you do not get to export it.

The template every one of these governments is studying is Indonesia. After restricting nickel-ore exports in 2014 and imposing a full ban in 2020, Indonesia converted a raw-material endowment into an industry: nickel-based product exports rose from roughly $2 billion before the ban to about $33.6 billion in 2024, the country drew an estimated $30 billion of smelter investment, and it went from two nickel smelters before 2014 to more than forty. Indonesia now accounts for around 62% of global mined nickel and is targeting $50 billion in annual nickel exports by 2045. Producers drew the lesson that a credible export ban can force downstream investment that decades of incentives never delivered.

Why they can make the threat stick is concentration. The DRC sits on roughly 77% of mined cobalt, China on about 69% of mined rare earths and close to 90% of processing, Indonesia on some 62% of nickel. When a single jurisdiction controls the majority of global supply, an export curb is enforceable. Cobalt cleared $56,000 a tonne in early 2026, roughly double a year earlier, after the DRC moved from glut management to quota enforcement.

The margin does not always follow the process across the border. Indonesia's build-out was financed overwhelmingly by Chinese capital and runs on coal power, which leaves open whose value chain Jakarta has joined. The downstreaming push also helped flood the nickel market and crush prices, squeezing the very investment it attracted. Zimbabwe's lithium-sulfate mandate risks the same trap: it onshores an intermediate, lower-margin step while the high-value battery-grade refining and the ownership can stay offshore.

For the consuming economies and their investment-promotion agencies, the mandates quietly rewrite where downstream capital must land. If refining can only happen in or beside the producer country, buyers are pushed into offtake-plus-investment deals and processing capacity migrates toward the ore. This mirrors the economic-security blocs forming on the consumer side. Both steer where strategic capital is allowed to go.

For practitioners, the implication depends on which side of the ore you sit. Resource-rich jurisdictions now hold a genuine investment-attraction lever, but it works only when sequenced with power, skills, and capital, and only at the rung of the value ladder they can hold. Jurisdictions courting downstream processing investment will increasingly compete on processing-ready industrial land, firm power, and offtake certainty. And anyone advising firms must now price minerals-policy risk directly: quotas and bans move prices violently, and that exposure cannot be hedged away on price alone.