The minerals shaping technology, trade, and energy policy
This dashboard visualizes the global distribution of critical mineral deposits and connects those deposits to major modern use cases, including batteries, electric vehicles, grid infrastructure, renewable energy, electronics, aerospace, magnets, catalysts, and other advanced industrial applications. Rather than treating mineral geography as an isolated mining topic, the project frames these resources as part of a larger system linking geology, technology, industrial strategy, and geopolitics.
The dashboard is especially relevant because critical minerals have become a major international policy issue. The International Energy Agency has emphasized that minerals such as copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and rare earth elements are now central to energy technologies and broader industrial competitiveness, while supply chains remain vulnerable to bottlenecks, price swings, and geopolitical risk. In 2025 and early 2026, critical minerals were not only discussed in energy reports, but also in trade policy, national security, and multilateral diplomacy.
This project is therefore designed as an exploratory educational tool. It helps users see where important minerals are located, how those locations relate to specific technologies, and why certain countries appear repeatedly in conversations about supply-chain resilience, industrial policy, and the clean energy transition.
Users can interact with the dashboard in several ways. A country search allows the map to zoom to a selected country, while the mineral filter narrows the visible deposits to a specific resource. Use-case filters connect minerals to downstream technologies such as EVs, solar, hydrogen, aerospace, and electronics, making it easier to understand that one mineral can matter to several industries at once.
The charts respond to the current map view and the active filters, so the dashboard is meant to be read dynamically rather than as a static map. In practice, that means the story changes depending on what the user selects: zooming into one country, switching to a single mineral, or focusing on a specific industrial use case can all produce a different picture of concentration and dependency.
Users should also keep in mind what the dashboard does and does not show. It is best understood as a deposit- and use-case-oriented overview, not a full model of the entire supply chain. A country may have important mineral deposits without dominating processing, refining, manufacturing, or recycling. That distinction matters because recent research shows that refining and processing remain highly concentrated even when mining becomes more geographically diversified. The IEA projects that by 2035, China is still set to supply over 60% of refined lithium and cobalt and around 80% of battery-grade graphite and rare earth elements. Source
Critical minerals matter because they are foundational inputs for the technologies that increasingly shape both everyday life and long-term economic transformation. Lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, manganese, and copper support battery systems and electric vehicles. Rare earth elements are essential for high-performance magnets used in motors, wind turbines, and defense applications. Silver and tellurium are important for solar technologies, while titanium, tungsten, niobium, and related materials have strategic uses in aerospace and advanced manufacturing.
Their importance is not only technological but also strategic. The European Union's Critical Raw Materials Act explicitly links these materials to renewable energy, digital industries, aerospace, and defence, and sets 2030 benchmarks for extraction, processing, recycling, and diversification in order to reduce dependence on any single foreign supplier. In the United States, the final 2025 critical minerals list added ten more materials, including copper, silver, uranium, phosphate, potash, boron, and silicon, reflecting how broadly these resources now matter for economic security and national resilience. Source 1, Source 2
Recent events have made these vulnerabilities more visible. In 2025, China announced additional export controls affecting rare earth elements and related products, and the IEA warned that such controls could disrupt sectors including energy, automotive, defence, semiconductors, aerospace, industrial motors, and AI data centers. In March 2026, critical minerals were important enough to be discussed at the UN Security Council, where officials described them as central to both the energy transition and the digital economy. Source 1, Source 2
At the same time, the issue is not only about scarcity. It is also about who captures value. UN Trade and Development has noted that Africa accounts for about 12% of global mineral exports but captures only about 4% of the value in green supply chains, showing that extraction alone does not guarantee equitable development. This is one reason why current debates increasingly focus on refining, local value addition, recycling, and responsible governance rather than mining alone. Source
The goal of this project is to make critical mineral systems easier to understand through an interactive geographic interface. Instead of reading separate reports on mining, energy policy, industrial supply chains, and geopolitical risk, users can explore how these themes intersect spatially. The dashboard is meant to help answer questions such as: Which countries are associated with which minerals? Which minerals support multiple technologies? Where might supply concentration create vulnerability?
A second goal is to highlight that the clean energy transition is also a materials transition. The shift to electric mobility, renewable power, grid expansion, and advanced electronics depends not just on innovation in devices, but on reliable access to the minerals inside them. The IEA's 2025 outlook notes that demand and supply for these materials are now central to long-term planning, while recent policy actions by the EU, the U.S., and allied countries show that governments increasingly treat mineral supply chains as strategic infrastructure. Just last week, Canada and Australia announced new critical-minerals agreements tied to the G7 production alliance, underscoring how quickly this issue is moving from resource policy into broader geopolitical coordination. Source
Ultimately, this dashboard aims to support informed public understanding. It invites users to think beyond a single mine or a single commodity and instead view critical minerals as part of a global network of extraction, processing, trade, technology, and power. In that sense, the project is not only about where minerals are found, but about why those locations matter in the first place.
This project's data source comes from the USGS Mineral Resources database. Link: USGS. Specifically, it is the "Global distribution of selected mines, deposits, and districts of critical minerals" dataset. It was cleaned using mapshaper.org to convert the original shapefile into a GeoJSON format. We then completed additional cleaning to standardize the mineral attribute in the dataset.
This dashboard was developed by Group 15: Kenneth Ha, Will Senenko, Li-An Song, and Evan Luong. Our team worked collaboratively to design an interactive dashboard that helps users explore the global geography and strategic importance of critical mineral deposits.
Contributed to project development, dashboard content, design direction, and debugging in general.
Contributed to map development, chart development, dashboard implementation, and technical integration of the interactive features.
Contributed to data preparation, project research on critical minerals and their applications, dashboard structure, and information design.
Contributed to map development, interface support, and project research on critical minerals and their applications.
We would like to acknowledge our instructor and teaching assistants for their guidance, feedback, and support throughout the development of this project. Their instruction helped shape both the technical and design direction of this dashboard.