Manganese rarely makes headlines. It has none of the geopolitical drama of rare earths or the investor attention of lithium. Yet it sits in virtually every ton of steel produced worldwide; it is increasingly central to battery cathode chemistry, and the United States produces none of it.
That last point is not an approximation. The U.S. remains 100 per cent reliant on imports for manganese, a status that has held consistently across successive USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries. For a material with no practical substitute in steelmaking, that is a structural exposure worth understanding rather than assuming away.
Why Manganese Is Difficult to Replace
Manganese performs two jobs in steel that nothing else does as cheaply. It acts as a deoxidiser and desulfurizer during smelting, removing impurities that would otherwise make the finished product brittle. It also contributes directly to hardness and tensile strength in the alloy itself. There is no economically viable substitute at scale, which is precisely why it appears on the critical minerals list despite being relatively abundant in the Earth’s crust.
Abundance and availability are not the same thing. The constraint is not geological scarcity. It is where the ore sits, who processes it, and how few links exist in the chain between mine and manufacturer.
The Concentration Problem, Quantified
Global manganese ore production is concentrated to a degree that would alarm most procurement teams if the material were more visible in their cost structure. South Africa, Australia, and Gabon collectively produce over 70% of global manganese ore, with South Africa alone contributing about 40%. Gabon’s output comes primarily from the Moanda mine, the world’s largest manganese-producing operation.
Mining concentration is only half the picture, and arguably the less important half. Refining is where the real chokepoint sits. China currently controls over 85% of global refining, especially for High-Purity Manganese Sulfate Monohydrate, which is vital for EV battery cathodes, and consumes nearly 70% of the seaborne manganese ore market. Refining capacity is far more concentrated than mining, creating major supply chain dependencies for the U.S. and Europe.
This is the pattern that repeats across critical minerals generally. Ore can be sourced from multiple friendly jurisdictions. Processing capacity cannot, because it was built where energy was cheap, environmental permitting was fast, and industrial policy subsidised it for two decades.
Recent Disruptions Are Not Hypothetical
The fragility here has been tested repeatedly in the last three years, and the results are instructive.
In April 2024, manganese prices leapt upward in the second quarter after Tropical Cyclone Megan significantly damaged the Groote Eylandt Mining Company manganese mine in Australia. Operations were suspended in March 2024, with a phased resumption only beginning in May 2025 and full capacity expected during 2026. A single weather event at a single mine moved global pricing for months.
Simultaneously, the suspension of mining at Kazakhstan’s Kazmarganets mine since December 2023 due to resource depletion, combined with ongoing geopolitical disruptions affecting production in Ukraine, has tightened supply from non-African regions. Labor strikes in South Africa and port delays in Gabon have compounded the picture.
The policy risk is escalating alongside the operational risk. Gabon’s newly elected president announced that manganese ore exports would be banned by 2029 in order to promote local beneficiation, an announcement that took its main ore producer, Eramet Comilog, completely by surprise. Resource nationalism of this kind is spreading, and it changes the calculus for any buyer assuming stable ore flows from African producers.
There is also direct precedent for weaponised export policy. China’s Ministry of Commerce has placed controls and outright bans on exports of several mineral commodities, including antimony, gallium, and germanium,m to the United States. Nothing structurally prevents the same approach from being applied to refined manganese products.
What This Means at the Purchase Order Level
For a domestic manufacturer, this concentration translates into three concrete operational exposures.
Price volatility that cannot be hedged conventionally. Manganese lacks the liquid futures market that copper or aluminium buyers rely on. Price movements driven by a cyclone or a strike pass through to input costs with limited financial instruments available to smooth them.
Lead time risk that compounds. When ore supply tightens, the effect propagates through alloy producers, then through mill schedules, then into finished component availability. A disruption at the mine level can surface as a delivery slip four or five months later, often without buyers connecting the two events.
Specification risk in higher-purity applications. This is the least appreciated of the three. Bulk ferromanganese for steelmaking and high-purity manganese for battery precursors, additive manufacturing, or speciality alloys are effectively different supply chains with different bottlenecks. A fabricator specifying 99.5% purity manganese powder for powder metallurgy, welding consumables, or diamond tooling is drawing on refined material with far fewer qualified sources than the commodity ore market suggests, and those sources are disproportionately concentrated in Chinese processing capacity.
The Demand Side Is Making This Worse
None of this is occurring against flat demand. Automakers including Tesla and Volkswagen are actively integrating manganese-rich cathode technologies to reduce costs, with an estimated 30% of new EV models incorporating LMFP chemistries requiring approximately 50 to 60 kg of manganese per vehicle.
Global manganese production is forecast to rise to 59.1 million tonnes in 2026, largely underpinned by Groote Eylandt reaching full capacity, while production from South Africa, Gabon, and Ghana is expected to remain broadly flat given the absence of significant new capacity additions. Supply growth is real but narrow, and it depends heavily on one Australian asset returning to form.
How Sourcing Strategy Is Actually Shifting
Manufacturers responding seriously to this are doing a few things differently.
Qualifying redundant suppliers before they are needed. Qualification takes months when done properly, involving material testing, certificate review, and often customer approval for regulated applications. Starting that process during a shortage is starting too late.
Distinguishing domestic distribution from domestic production. No U.S. supplier mines or smelts primary manganese, and any claim otherwise deserves scrutiny. What established domestic distributors do provide is inventory held stateside, documented material traceability, and hazmat-compliant logistic meaningful buffers against transit and customs disruption, but not a substitute for upstream diversification.
Treating documentation as a sourcing requirement. ISO 9001 certification, SDS availability, certificates of analysis, and end-use documentation matter more when supply chains are under policy scrutiny. Manganese metal ships as a flammable solid under UN 3089, which constrains carrier options and makes supplier logistics capability a genuine selection criterion rather than a formality.
Watching Western refining buildout realistically. South Africa’s Manganese Metal Company announced a $25 million commercial plant to produce 5,000 metric tons of battery-grade manganese sulfate annually by the end of 2026. Investment in HPMSM refining infrastructure is also growing in the United States and Australia. These are meaningful developments, but the volumes involved remain small relative to Chinese capacity, and the timeline to material independence is measured in years rather than quarters.
The Honest Assessment
Manganese is not a near-term crisis. Ore is available, prices have been comparatively stable since early 2025, and no export restriction is currently in force against U.S. buyers.
What it is, unambiguously, is a concentrated dependency with limited domestic buffer and no substitution path. The concentration of mineral commodity production in a few countries, combined with high U.S. import reliance, increases the risks associated with foreign supply disruptions a formulation the USGS applies specifically because those risks have already materialised elsewhere on the same list.
For manufacturers, the useful response is not alarm. It is treating manganese with the same supplier-diversification discipline already applied to semiconductors after 2021, rather than continuing to procure it as though it were an ordinary commodity with an ordinary supply chain behind it.
