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🧭 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.

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processing section

Between the rock and the product

Processing & refining

Mining is only the first step, and usually not the hardest one. The chokepoint in almost every critical-material supply chain is not who digs the ore up — it is who can turn it into something usable.

Great Cobar Copper mine. Interior power house engine room, … · A. Kimbel Photo Studio · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

All Refining · 13 Processing · 7 Component · 5 Product · 2

Chemical plant · 6 Smelter · 4 Separation plant · 4 Refinery · 3 Semiconductor fab · 2 Manufacturing plant · 2 Gigafactory · 2 Port · 2 Magnet plant · 1 Enrichment plant · 1

Scroll the table sideways for the remaining columns.

Plant	Kind	Stage	Country	Operator	Materials
CATL Ningde Plants Ningde, Fujian	Gigafactory	Component	China	Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL)	Copper, Graphite, Lithium, Phosphate Rock
Gigafactory Nevada Storey County, Nevada	Gigafactory	Component	United States	Tesla with Panasonic Energy	Aluminium, Cobalt, Copper, Graphite, Lithium…

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CATL Ningde Plants

CATL's scale is the reason lithium iron phosphate went from a second-tier chemistry to the majority of new cells…

Gigafactory Nevada

Gigafactory Nevada

A cell factory is where materials stop being commodities and become a product: cathode powder, graphite anode, copper…

United StatesComponent