Déjà Vu, But Darker

The parallels to petroleum’s rise are hard to miss. Starting in the late 19th century, access to oil became synonymous with national power. Today, cobalt, lithium, nickel, and rare earth elements are filling that same role. These materials are essential not just for electric vehicles and clean energy, but for the digital infrastructure and advanced weapons systems that define 21st-century power.

The numbers are staggering. According to the International Energy Agency, lithium demand surged nearly 30% in 2024 alone — roughly three times its average annual growth rate during the entire 2010s.

Cobalt, graphite, nickel, and rare earths each climbed six to eight percent. Prices for heavy rare earths like dysprosium and terbium — the materials inside EVs and advanced weaponry — have more than tripled since 2020. By 2040, the IEA projects lithium demand will be five times what it was just a few years ago.

That's not a trend. That's a boom.

The Curse Returns

This minerals rush is driving exploration across the developing world and with it comes a familiar and troubling playbook. We’ve seen this movie before: resource wealth floods into countries without the institutions to manage it, elites capture the windfall, economic diversification stalls and the broader population sees little benefit.

Economists call one version of this "Dutch disease", when export revenues from a resource boom drive up a country's currency, quietly strangling every other industry that tries to compete globally.

Oil-rich nations have struggled with this for decades. Mineral-rich nations are next in line.

Where the Comparison Breaks Down

Here’s the critical difference and it's not a small one.

When oil rose to geopolitical dominance, the world had scaffolding in place: functioning multilateral institutions; a dominant reserve currency and a superpower, however imperfect, that was willing to underwrite a basic set of global rules. The oil age was volatile, but within a recognizable framework.

The critical minerals era has no such scaffolding. The uncertainties here are structural, geopolitical, technological and institutional — all at once, all overlapping. Supply chains are concentrated in ways that create serious chokepoints. China controls refining capacity for many of the most critical materials. Smaller, resource-rich nations lack the governance capacity to manage sudden wealth responsibly. And the geopolitical competition for access to these materials is accelerating faster than any international framework for managing it.

Don't Mistake "Green" for "Stable"

There's a tempting narrative that a renewables-dominated energy future will be less conflict-prone than the fossil fuel era. Less drilling, less pollution, less dependence on volatile petrostates — what's not to like?

But that narrative is dangerously incomplete. The clean energy transition doesn’t eliminate resource geopolitics. It relocates them. Instead of fighting over oil fields in the Middle East, the competition shifts to lithium deposits in South America, cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo and rare earth processing facilities in China. The stakes are just as high. The institutions managing those stakes are far weaker.

The Bottom Line

The oil age brought us embargoes, price shocks, waves of nationalization and resource wars. It was messy and costly. But at least the world had some experience managing it.

The critical minerals era is arriving faster, with higher demand growth, in more fragile geopolitical terrain and without the institutional infrastructure to handle the turbulence. Countries and companies that assume the risks are simply "oil problems in a new jacket" are dangerously underestimating what's ahead.

The preparation required in governance, international coordination and supply chain resilience is enormous. And right now, almost no one is ready.