Strategic Intelligence Feed
Real-time analysis of the resources and power shifts redefining global sovereignty
The Stockpile Sold the One Rare Earth It Had
In 1998 the United States sold its entire holding of yttrium. It was the only rare earth element the national stockpile contained. Twenty seven years later yttrium is on China's export control list, and American imports fell roughly ninety five percent in the eight months after those controls...
The Smelters Are Paying for the Privilege
A zinc smelter earns its living from a fee called the treatment charge. A mine sells it concentrate at a discount to the metal content, and that discount is the smelter's revenue. For as long as anyone has kept records the number has been positive, because turning rock
Finding Five and Burning Fifty
The world consumes something like thirty billion barrels of oil a year and roughly the same again in natural gas on an energy equivalent basis. Call it fifty four billion barrels of oil equivalent burned annually. Conventional discoveries have averaged about 5.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent a year
Not One Coal Unit Retired This Year
American utilities planned to close 6,354 megawatts of coal fired generating capacity in 2026. Through August not a single coal generator had retired. Not one. The year before was almost as striking. Eight gigawatts of coal closures were scheduled for 2025 and 2.6 gigawatts actually happened, across four
The Buyer of Last Resort Resigned in 1999
Rough diamond prices have roughly halved since their peak in early 2022, and the Bloomberg measure of natural diamond prices reached the lowest level in its history this April. Global production is at its weakest since 1987. Anglo American bought its controlling stake in De Beers for close to thirteen
The Price the World Once Paid a Cent a Pound to Defend
Cocoa traded near 5,580 dollars a tonne in New York this week, down about twelve percent on the year. In December 2024 it reached roughly 12,900 dollars, the highest price ever recorded for the commodity. Measured against that peak this is a collapse, and it is reported as
Sixty Five Thousand Tonnes Mined, Thirty One Thousand Allowed
The Democratic Republic of the Congo produces about seventy three percent of the world's cobalt. In February of last year it stopped exporting the metal altogether, and in October it replaced the ban with a quota: 96,600 tonnes for this year, of which 87,000 is allocated
The Largest Wildfire Loss on Record and Rates Fell
Owning a physical asset is half a position. The other half is whether anyone will insure it, and at what price. That second half repriced violently between 2017 and 2024, and it is now repricing back. Insured catastrophe losses worldwide came to 107 billion dollars last year on 220 billion
The Reserve Was Sold and Then the Strait Closed
The United States government finished selling the Federal Helium Reserve in June 2024. The buyer was an industrial gas company; the assets included the Cliffside field outside Amarillo and 423 miles of crude helium pipeline, and 460 million dollars went to the Treasury that December. The United States Geological Survey
The Premium for Water Is Exactly Double
Nebraska publishes the cleanest number in American agriculture. As of the first of February, centre pivot irrigated cropland in the state averaged 8,515 dollars an acre. Dryland with the potential to be irrigated averaged 6,070. Dryland with no irrigation potential averaged 4,395. The same soil, the same
Two Nutrients and Only One of Them Is Scarce
Diammonium phosphate sold for 800 dollars a tonne in September, forty six percent above its 2024 average and the highest the World Bank series has recorded since 2022. Muriate of potash sold for 367 dollars, down from 405 in May and thirty five percent below where it stood in August
The Quota Was Cut and the Price Went Down Anyway
Indonesia produces about sixty percent of the world's nickel. This year it cut the ore tonnage its miners are permitted to dig from a ceiling of 379 million tonnes to somewhere between 250 and 260, a reduction of roughly a third. It moved royalties on nickel ore from
The Rule That Was Suspended and the Rule That Was Not
On the tenth of November a Chinese suspension expires. Six export control announcements issued last October, including an extraterritorial rule that would claim jurisdiction over any product anywhere in the world containing as little as a tenth of one percent by value of Chinese rare earth material, were put on
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