Companies building electric vehicles, batteries, and power grids now face a tightening vise: governments that control the largest deposits of copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and rare earths are restricting exports at the same time that global investment in new mines is falling. The International Energy Agency flagged both trends in its Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026, reporting that critical-mineral investment declined in 2025 amid price swings and geopolitical friction. China’s export controls on graphite, Indonesia’s ban on nickel ore exports, and a steady accumulation of trade barriers tracked by the OECD have combined to shrink the pool of freely traded supply, while the European Union has responded with its own Critical Raw Materials Act setting domestic extraction and recycling targets. The result is a supply chain that is growing more concentrated and less resilient at the very moment clean-energy demand is accelerating.
How falling investment and rising trade barriers are colliding
The IEA’s latest assessment makes the connection explicit: supply concentration, export restrictions, and declining investment are jointly putting critical-mineral security at risk. The agency’s analysis in the outlook report covers copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and rare earths, and it documents a drop in spending on new projects during 2025. Price volatility and policy uncertainty discouraged miners from committing capital, even as demand projections for energy-transition minerals continued to climb.
The investment decline matters because critical-mineral mines take years to permit and build. A project that loses funding today will not produce ore until well into the next decade. When that delay coincides with governments pulling supply off the open market through export controls, the squeeze intensifies. Automakers sourcing battery-grade nickel, grid operators buying copper conductors, and electronics manufacturers dependent on rare earths all face longer lead times and fewer alternative suppliers. The hypothesis that rising export restrictions and the 2025 investment drop will produce measurable delays in new mine permitting outside China and Indonesia by late 2027 rests on a straightforward mechanism: less capital and less freely traded material mean fewer viable projects reaching final investment decisions, regardless of where spot prices land on any given day.
That mechanism is already visible in corporate behavior. Developers are shelving marginal projects, focusing instead on brownfield expansions or assets in jurisdictions with clearer permitting rules. At the same time, buyers are signing longer-term offtake agreements and prepaying for future deliveries to lock in supply. These strategies can keep individual projects alive, but they do not fully offset the system-wide effect of lower aggregate investment and tighter trade rules. In a market where demand is rising for nearly every listed mineral, even modest delays compound into structural shortfalls.
IEA data, OECD tracking, and government actions driving the squeeze
Three bodies of evidence anchor the tightening-supply story. First, the IEA’s outlook and its related news release establish that investment fell in 2025 and that supply remains heavily concentrated in a small number of producing countries. For several minerals, a handful of mines in a few jurisdictions dominate global output and processing, leaving consumers vulnerable to policy shifts or disruptions in any one of those locations.
Second, the OECD’s inventory of export measures on critical raw materials tracks policies covering the period from 2009 through 2024 and highlights growing exposure for cobalt, manganese, graphite, and rare earth elements. The database records a rising count of restrictions over that span, applied by multiple exporting nations through tariffs, quotas, licensing requirements, and outright bans. While each measure may be justified domestically as a tool for industrial policy, environmental protection, or security, the cumulative effect is a more fragmented global market.
Specific government actions fill in the picture. China’s Ministry of Commerce and General Administration of Customs issued Announcement No. 39 in 2023, adjusting export controls on certain graphite items and requiring exporters to obtain licenses. Beijing framed the move as a matter of national security and nonproliferation, but the practical effect was to give Chinese authorities discretion over how much processed graphite reaches foreign battery makers. For downstream manufacturers trying to forecast costs and capacity, that discretion translates into uncertainty.
Indonesia, meanwhile, has maintained a ban on raw nickel ore exports to force downstream processing inside its borders. The European Union challenged that ban through WTO dispute DS592, arguing that Indonesia’s measures violate trade rules. The case remains in the WTO system, and Indonesia has continued enforcing the restrictions throughout the dispute. For global nickel supply, the policy has redirected investment toward smelting and refining in Indonesia, but it has also constrained the ability of foreign refiners to source unprocessed ore.
On the demand side, the EU adopted Regulation 2024/1252, the Critical Raw Materials Act, which sets benchmarks for domestic extraction, processing, and recycling of strategic minerals. The law also establishes permitting timelines and a framework for designating strategic projects. It represents a direct policy response to the supply risks the IEA and OECD have documented, but its targets will take years to translate into actual mine output or recycling capacity on European soil. In the interim, European industries remain deeply exposed to external suppliers and the trade policies that govern them.
Gaps in the data and what to watch through 2027
Several pieces of the puzzle are still missing. The IEA’s aggregate finding that critical-mineral investment declined in 2025 does not break out spending by individual mineral, region, or company. That makes it difficult to pinpoint whether the shortfall is concentrated in lithium projects in Australia, copper exploration in Latin America, or rare-earth processing capacity in Africa. Without mineral-by-mineral and country-level detail, policymakers and firms must infer where the greatest bottlenecks may emerge.
There are also limits to what export-restrictions data can reveal. The OECD inventory captures formal measures such as tariffs, quotas, and licensing rules, but it cannot fully account for informal practices, opaque administrative delays, or ad hoc decisions that can slow or divert shipments. Nor does it measure how companies adapt through stockpiling, long-term contracts, or shifting supply routes. As a result, the true tightness of the market may only become apparent when a shock-such as a mine outage or diplomatic dispute-tests the system.
Between now and 2027, several indicators will be critical. One is whether the decline in investment recorded for 2025 proves to be a one-year dip or the start of a longer downturn. Another is the pace at which new export restrictions are introduced or existing ones are tightened. A third is how quickly projects designated as strategic under frameworks like the EU Critical Raw Materials Act move from announcement to construction. Together, these signals will determine whether the world enters the late 2020s facing manageable tightness or severe shortages.
For companies, the strategic response will likely involve diversifying suppliers where possible, investing directly in upstream projects, and expanding recycling to reduce primary demand. Governments, for their part, face a balancing act between securing domestic advantages and maintaining a functioning global market. If too many countries pursue restrictive policies simultaneously, they risk undermining the very energy-transition goals that depend on abundant, affordable critical minerals.
What is clear from the IEA and OECD evidence is that the era of assuming ever-cheaper, ever-more-available raw materials is over. The collision of falling investment and rising trade barriers is turning critical minerals into a central fault line of the clean-energy economy. How policymakers and industries respond over the next few years will shape not just the pace of decarbonization, but also the distribution of its economic gains and vulnerabilities.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
