The US Geological Survey's 2024 estimate puts the Democratic Republic of the Congo at 220,000 tonnes of mined cobalt — 75.9% of everything the world pulled out of the ground. Every other producer on Earth, combined, accounts for 13.9%.
Cobalt sits inside most lithium-ion batteries, which puts it inside most electric vehicles, laptops and grid-storage racks. So the question of where it comes from is really a question about how concentrated the supply side of the energy transition is. The USGS answer, in its Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025: extraordinarily concentrated.
World mine production in 2024 was an estimated 290,000 tonnes of cobalt content. DR Congo produced 220,000 t — 75.9%. Indonesia, the fastest riser, produced 28,000 t (9.7%), up 47% on its 2023 figure of 19,000 t. Then the cliff: Russia at 8,700 t is third with 3.0%, and the remaining named producers — Canada, the Philippines, Australia, Cuba, Papua New Guinea, Türkiye, Madagascar, New Caledonia, the United States — each hold roughly one percent or less.
Toggle the chart to reserves and the story shifts rather than softens. DR Congo holds 6 of the world's 11 million tonnes of identified reserves — 54.5%. But second place changes hands entirely: Australia, seventh in 2024 production at just 3,600 t, holds the world's second-largest reserves at 1.7 million t. Today's mining map and tomorrow's are not the same map — though both run through the same first name.
The bars sit on an axis that runs to 100% of world output — not to the biggest value, as ranking charts usually do. That single decision is the chart: DR Congo's bar literally fills three-quarters of the frame, and no annotation has to tell you it dominates. A bracket gathers the long tail into one honest phrase ("every other producer combined: 13.9%"), the hero share is printed inside the bar, and the production ↔ reserves toggle re-ranks the same bars so Australia's leap is something you watch happen. Both the PNG and the SVG export come from a single clean vector poster, so the downloaded file is genuinely editable.
Honest charts audit their inputs. Four things worth knowing sit in the footnotes: every figure is a USGS estimate; the world total is rounded (country figures sum to 288,200 t against the published 290,000 t); New Caledonia's reserves carry no USGS estimate at all — the chart says "no estimate" rather than drawing a zero-length bar; and the USGS lists DR Congo as "Congo (Kinshasa)" and Türkiye as "Turkey". Production here means cobalt content of mined ore — refining is a different, separately concentrated story this dataset doesn't cover.
One row per entity, one value column, plus the published total that serves as the denominator. An optional second metric unlocks the re-ranking toggle.
| country | production_t | reserves_t |
|---|---|---|
| DR Congo | 220000 | 6000000 |
| Indonesia | 28000 | 640000 |
| Russia | 8700 | 250000 |
Novice tip: bring the raw levels, not the percentages — shares are computed against the published world total, so the leader's bar length and the tail bracket always agree with the source. If a value is genuinely unknown, leave the cell empty rather than writing zero; the chart will say "no estimate" instead of drawing a lie.
Supply-chain risk is usually described in adjectives. This is one number: 75.9%. Whether you read the production view or the reserves view, the world's cobalt runs through one country — and a chart whose axis is the whole world makes that impossible to miss.
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