The Mineral Map: Critical Commodities, Tech Supply Chains and the New Geopolitics of Innovation

By Evander Knoxley

The twentieth century was mapped in oil. The twenty-first is being mapped in minerals most people cannot name-lithium, cobalt, rare earths, gallium-and that map is already determining which nations lead and which are left dependent on those who do.

Behind every battery, chip, and wind turbine lies a story of supply chains, chokepoints, and geopolitical rivalry that rarely makes headlines but shapes everything. The Mineral Map traces that story, showing how geology, technology, and statecraft intersect to determine who holds power, one element at a time.

Inside, you will discover:

Why critical minerals have replaced oil as the defining resource contest of great power competition
How supply chains running from Congolese cobalt mines through Chinese refineries to Silicon Valley create strategic leverage and structural vulnerability
Why China controls the most decisive stage of the mineral processing chain and what the United States and Europe are doing to respond
How Africa, Latin America, and the Global South can either capture value from their resources or lose it to more powerful actors
What the green energy transition actually demands from the earth and why clean technology is not resource-free
How the race to control mineral processing infrastructure, not geological deposits, will determine who holds strategic power in the decades ahead

Written for readers who want to understand the resource contest reshaping global power before it reshapes the world they work in.

The Mineral Map is Book 1 of The Geopolitics of Critical Materials series by Evander Knoxley. Continue with The Elements of Power for a deeper analytical framework on how mineral dependencies shape strategic competition between the world's most powerful states.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FQ5CDG9T
• ISBN13: 9798264267437
• Release Date: September 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 46 Pages
• Weight: 0.13 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 5.5" x 8.5"