The Lithium Triangle and China's Rare Earths: A Narrative Review of the Critical Minerals Geography of the Energy Transition
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: The energy transition replaces a fuel geography with a mineral geography: decarbonization's technologies concentrate their material demands in a handful of brines, clays, and ores whose politics is as concentrated as their geology. This article presents a narrative review of the literature that mapped that geography. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the demand mapping, in which the International Energy Agency's critical minerals report, Ali's resource governance framework, and the availability studies of Yaksic and Tilton and of Gruber and colleagues fixed the scale and timing of the transition's lithium, cobalt, and rare earth demands; the production geographies, in which Houston's and Flexer's brine evaluations, Vera's direct lithium extraction review, and Liu and Agusdinata's community studies documented the lithium triangle's salares --- Chile's Atacama, Argentina's and Bolivia's basins --- and Wuebbeke's analysis traced China's rare earth dominance from ore to policy; and the governance and conflict frame, in which Overland's geopolitics, Church and Crawford's green conflict minerals, and Herrington's mining assessment weighed the transition's dependencies, local impacts, and the recycling and substitution margins that could loosen them. It is concluded that the literature's convergence is cautionary: the mineral geography is not destiny --- availability is not the binding constraint --- but governance is, and the salares' water politics and the rare earths' processing monopoly are the transition's two places where material decarbonization meets political friction.
Authors: Revista, Zen, GEOGRAPHY, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Metals and Alloys
Field: Materials Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204755346