Reading options

🧭 Guided View New to this — ore grades, concentrate, refining, by-products? We explain every term as you browse, in plain English. Same data, with the help built in.

⚡ Expert View You already know the industry. Just the data — clean, fast and compact, with no extra explanations. This is the default view.

Theme

Interface language

Depth Material pages are written at four levels. Pick one on any material page and it is remembered.

★ Saved Research & data

Chemical plant · China

Huayou Cobalt Refineries

One of the largest producers of battery-grade cobalt sulfate.

Pueblo Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant Cooling Tower… · PEO ACWA · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

RefiningChemical plant

What happens here

Roughly three-quarters of world cobalt refining is in China, regardless of where the ore was mined. Refining, not mining, is the real chokepoint.

In and out

Goes in

Cobalt Nickel

Comes out

Outputs for this site are not itemised in the atlas.

Operator

Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt

One of the largest refiners of battery-grade cobalt and nickel chemicals.

Refiner

Journeys that pass through this plant

Congolese cobalt to a battery cathode A metal almost nobody mines on purpose, carried out of a landlocked country by truck. Indonesian laterite to a battery cathode A country that banned raw ore exports and built the processing industry instead.

Chains that pass through here

Nickel to Battery Cathode

Two ore types, two processing routes, and a wall between them that took twenty years to break.

Supply chain

Huayou Cobalt Refineries

What happens here

In and out

Operator

Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt

Journeys that pass through this plant

Chains that pass through here

Nickel to Battery Cathode

Materials

The ground

The economy

Learn

About us