Exorbitant Privilege of the Periodic Table? Geoeconomics, Endogenous Centrality and Strategic Minerals for the Green Transition

Trade networks underpinning the energy transition are endogenous economic objects, and their structure is a source of market power. Using bilateral trade data for thirteen electrification metals over 1995–2023, we show that trade in these materials has reorganised into a hub-and-spoke system centred on China, in sharp contrast to the diffuse, multilateral structure of fossil fuels. This centrality did not follow from resource endowments: China holds few of the underlying reserves. It was built through processing investment, industrial policy, and commodity-targeted development finance—an equilibrium outcome rather than a geographical accident. We formalise this in a stylised model in which a country chooses how central to become, and show that centrality maps into pricing power: the world price response to a strategic supply cut is stronger when the network is more concentrated and downstream demand and fringe supply are more inelastic. Constructing text-based, commodity-specific supply shocks and estimating local projections, we find that supply contractions in critical metals raise US and EU consumer prices by roughly twice as much as comparable fossil-fuel shocks, and more persistently. Centrality is therefore not merely descriptive: it creates leverage over global prices. The green transition reduces strategic dependence on hydrocarbon exporters but reconstitutes it around mineral supply chains.