The Democratic Republic of Congo supplies roughly 70% of the world’s cobalt, the essential battery metal that powers electric vehicles and grid-scale storage systems. Yet the Congolese economy captures only a sliver of the value generated by that metal, and communities near industrial mining sites continue to grapple with toxic dust, water contamination, and subsistence poverty. This is not an accident of geography or a temporary market distortion. It is the latest iteration of a structural pattern that has governed resource extraction from the Global South for centuries, now operating under the green banner of decarbonisation.
A recent analysis published on Energy Central makes the uncomfortable but necessary case that the current architecture of critical mineral governance is reproducing the extractive logic of the colonial era. Lithium from Chile and Argentina, rare earths from across Africa and Latin America, nickel from Indonesia — these materials flow overwhelmingly to processing hubs in China and end-use markets in the industrialised North. The countries that host the deposits bear the environmental degradation, the water depletion, and the social disruption, while value creation and technological accumulation happen elsewhere.
The irony cuts deep. Many of these mineral-rich nations have contributed negligibly to historic carbon emissions, and they are disproportionately vulnerable to climate impacts. They are now being asked to shoulder the physical burden of a transition designed primarily to preserve Northern industrial lifestyles. This is not an argument against electrification or renewable energy deployment. It is an argument that the transition itself is being built on a foundation of structural inequality that will ultimately undermine its legitimacy and durability.
For energy professionals and investors, this paradox carries real strategic risk. Supply chain concentration — particularly China’s dominance in mineral processing — has already triggered Western policy responses like the Inflation Reduction Act and the EU Critical Raw Materials Act. But those policies have so far focused on diversifying sources and subsidising domestic processing capacity, not on fundamentally reshaping the value capture mechanisms for producing countries. If left unaddressed, the resentment and instability born of extractive green colonialism could lead to resource nationalism, export bans, and sovereign action that disrupts supply chains far more dramatically than any tariff or incentive can fix.
What is needed is a deliberate shift in governance architecture: local beneficiation mandates, technology transfer requirements, fairer pricing mechanisms, and genuine partnership in processing and manufacturing. Without such measures, the green transition will remain strategically fragile and democratically contested. The industry would do well to read this analysis carefully, because the toughest question it asks is not academic — it is whether our decarbonisation project can succeed if it repeats the sins of the one it seeks to replace.
Read the full report at Energy Central.