What's new

A running list of reports, tools and data added to Commodity Origins, newest first. For the data itself, see data status for source vintages or monthly changes for what prices did.

4 November 2026

The mines and companies pages now also cover zinc (24 mines, including Red Dog, Antamina, the Hindustan Zinc mines, Boliden's and Nexa's mines and Kipushi) and tin (8 entries: Bisie, San Rafael, Renison and four Chinese and Indonesian company totals). Zinc is compared as zinc contained in concentrate. Four of the tin entries are company totals across several mines, not single mines, and are labelled that way. Mines in China (zinc), Bolivia and Myanmar (tin) are missing because no mine-level output document was available. Independent re-checks again confirmed the printed figures and corrected a wrong country for Gamsberg, an unsupported Antamina operator, a four-mine group described as one mine, and several statements the sources did not make.

4 November 2026

The mines and companies pages now cover iron ore (Rio Tinto and BHP in the Pilbara, Fortescue, Vale's Brazilian complexes, Kumba, Minas-Rio, NMDC and others), aluminum (primary smelters whose owners print production by smelter) and bauxite (mines in Australia, Brazil, Guinea, India and China). These three are not measured as metal content: iron ore is compared with the USGS usable-ore total, aluminum as smelted metal and bauxite as ore, each in the tonnes the operator prints, and every page says which. Where a source gives only a rounded, part-year, merged or mixed-basis figure, the operation is listed with its output and no share of world output. Independent re-checks of every figure against its source corrected ownership wording, removed ranking language such as 'record' and 'highest-ever', and dropped shares where the measure was unclear (NALCO's cast metal, Alba, Chalco's Guinea mine).

3 November 2026

The mines and companies pages now cover nickel (15 operations, including the Indonesian ferronickel and hydroxide plants, Vale's Canadian operations and BHP's suspended Nickel West) and rare earths (Mountain Pass and Mt Weld). For rare earths no filing gives output by mine for China, which mined about 69% of the world's rare earths in 2025, so none of its mines is listed, and each commodity page says what share of world output the listed operations cover. Nickel in processed plants is compared with mine production and marked indicative; a plant-only figure at Weda Bay is shown without a share because the mine also sold ore. Independent re-checks of the sources again found no wrong figure and changed the labels, the rankings and several operator descriptions.

3 November 2026

New, as a pilot: the mines behind lithium, cobalt and copper and the companies that operate and own them. Each of the 27 operations has a page with its owners and their stakes on a stated date, the output its operator reports in the operator's own unit, the share of world output that represents where it can be stated in metal content, and the documents every figure comes from. The lithium, cobalt and copper pages gained a section listing them. It is a list of operations that publish their output, not a ranking of the world's largest mines, and each page says what it leaves out.
Every figure on these pages was read from a company annual or production report, a stock-exchange filing or a USGS document, and then re-checked against the same documents by a second, independent pass. The checks removed claims the sources did not support, such as calling a minority holder's figure the operator's, dividing refined metal by world mine output, and leaving out the DR Congo cobalt export suspension.

28 October 2026

New: a critical minerals tracker, one page rebuilt at every data refresh that lists the latest price moves of the critical minerals that have a benchmark price, the export controls on them, and every data change logged for them; each refresh is recorded as an edition so the next one can say what was added.
New: country profiles for 11 countries that mine or control the most critical minerals (China, Russia, Peru, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, DR Congo, Indonesia, Chile, India and the United States). Each puts what the country mines, what it exports, which of its imports rest on one supplier, its export controls and what the data show after earlier controls side by side. The profiles are built from tables already on the site, and each states how the countries were chosen.
New: two tools that run in your browser. Basket exposure takes a weighted list of commodities and shows how much of it is concentrated in one producing country, on a critical-mineral list or under an export control. The supplier exposure checker takes an importing country and shows its largest suppliers by commodity, whether the largest supplier has an export control in force, and, if you enter your own spend, how much of your mix rests on one supplier. Nothing you enter is sent or saved.
Five analysis pages (the risk matrix, substitution coverage, prices around export controls, export share history and trade after export controls) each gained a headline chart that can be shared or embedded. Several statements that read as true only on the day they were written, in the cocoa, lithium and shrimp pages and one guide, were reworded or dated.

22 October 2026

Six new analysis pages, each computed from the site's own data and each with its method, its limits and what it cannot show: a critical-minerals matrix (concentrated production, export controls, US import reliance and dominant import origin side by side, no composite score); other exporters' sales next to an importer's biggest supplier; what each large exporter's basket would have fetched at each month's prices; prices after dated export controls; the controlling country's exports after a control; and who gained and lost world export share since 2000.
Trade history now reaches back to 1995 (an older customs coding from CEPII BACI), used only for lines that pass a check that the older and current codings measure the same world trade. Each new page was recomputed independently from the raw data by a separate reviewer before release, and the reviews changed several pages: a basket index that was not really fixed-quantity, three controls that never took effect, measures that loosened controls and a headline that rested on one customs line were corrected or labeled.

14 October 2026

New: pages for boron, rhodium and iridium (with ruthenium), three more critical minerals. None has a country production ranking, because USGS publishes none that can be ranked, so each page is built from customs data, says why, and quotes USGS's own figures with their forms and units. The critical minerals page now says, for each listed mineral still without a page, what the free data holds.
The About page and the site footer now say how AI is used to write the pages and how the text is checked, following Google's updated guidance on generative-AI content. Glossary definitions, side-by-side comparisons and country-by-commodity pages with under 250 words of text are kept out of search engines' indexes and the sitemap; they remain available to readers.

13 October 2026

New: a Critical minerals item in the main menu. The page now lists all 40 critical minerals by group, shows who mines each and which lists name it, and gathers every related report, data file, pattern page, tool, article and glossary term in one place. The homepage links to it.
Wording that read as true only at the time it was written (such as "now", "currently" and "today") was removed or replaced with dates across the commodity pages, the pattern reports, the weekly statistics and the blog; several weekly statistics were also corrected, and each is listed on the corrections page.

12 October 2026

Every commodity page now opens with a short original reading of its numbers, the commodities hub, the countries hub and each category page have one too, and the longer country-by-commodity pages are now listed in search only where the country is a top-three producer or exporter with at least 15% of the world total.
Corrections to existing pages after an independent line-by-line check of the new text: the sugar, cinnamon, urea, salmon, palm oil, fishmeal and barley pages each had a sentence the data did not support, and the net trade report now counts every country's imports, so its totals reconcile (cheese, for example, moves from 41% to 38%). The corrections page lists the changes.

11 October 2026

New: chokepoints, 13 straits, canals, rivers and routes that bulk commodities pass through, from the Strait of Hormuz to the lower Mississippi, with each volume stated for its own year and scope, the routes around it, dated disruptions and where sources disagree.
Five more parts of From source to store: cocoa, soybeans and chicken, steel, lithium and milk. The gasoline post has a dated update on the 2026 Strait of Hormuz disruption.
New: a corrections page listing every published error we have fixed, with what was wrong and what changed.
Statements that can go out of date, such as a tariff rate or a ban in force, now sit in a marked "time-sensitive" box with the date they were last checked.
Country pages now show an exposure panel: the minerals a country leads in producing, the single-supplier imports of the United States, Japan, India and South Korea, and the export controls it imposes.
The phosphate rock and logs pages now show the processed-product trade beside the raw trade (fertilizers for China, sawnwood for Russia), as the oranges page does for juice.
Consumption data now keeps countries whose FAO supply figure is negative (exports exceed production plus imports in the year), flags them, and leaves them out of rankings; coffee, cocoa and soybean world totals rose as a result. A new check compares every world total on the site with the sum of its countries.

10 October 2026

Five more parts of From source to store: cotton, aluminum, sugar, rice and copper. The aluminum page also now gives China's export duty on unalloyed unwrought aluminum as 30%, not 15%, and the older copper post's concentrate import and export figures were corrected.
The oranges page now shows the orange juice trade beside the fresh-fruit trade: Brazil grows 23% of the world's oranges but ships juice, not fruit, so it was missing from the fresh-orange tables and the "who sells oranges to whom" chart. The orange juice page also now counts frozen concentrate, which it had left out of its flows.
New series: From source to store, on how everyday products are grown or extracted, moved and distributed. The first four parts follow coffee, bananas, bread (wheat) and gasoline (crude oil). Each post opens with the journey in brief, uses the site's production and trade figures, and names a source for every process fact.
A correction to the crude-oil post: China, India, South Korea and Japan together bought 46.6% of imported crude by value in 2024, not 46.7%.

9 October 2026

New: a dated register of export bans, quotas and licensing rules on minerals, each entry with its sources and its status as of 9 October 2026, with filters by country, mineral and status.
New: which minerals are by-products of other metals, 48 links each with a quote from USGS or another source; each mineral page now says where it comes from and what else is recovered from it.
New: how much of each mineral the United States imports and recycles (68 minerals, USGS), and how firm each commodity's production numbers are (a Firm, Fair or Rough level from three repeatable tests, shown in an "About these numbers" box on each page).
New: what changed in the data, with how far USGS revised its own first estimates and a log that fills after each monthly refresh (RSS). The compare page now also shows reserve years, peak output, real price, US import reliance, critical-mineral lists, export controls and data level.
Dated claims on the critical-mineral pages and in the copper and cobalt posts were re-checked against the latest news; helium now notes China's July 2026 export ban.
Eight more critical minerals have pages: gallium, indium, rhenium, tantalum, tellurium, helium, arsenic and strontium. They have production, reserves where USGS gives them, uses and history but no trade table, because customs data do not report these on a line of their own. The site now covers 117 commodities, 40 of them on a critical-mineral list.
New: a reserve scenario calculator (set your own demand growth, recycling, new reserves and reserve figure); do prices fall as output rises?; and an annual critical minerals report, with a PDF.
Under every chart there is now also an "Embed this chart" box with ready-to-paste code.

8 October 2026

Every chart on the site now has a "Share this chart" row under it: links for X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Facebook and Reddit, a copy-link button and a PNG download. Each chart has its own link whose preview card is the chart itself.
New: a century of real prices, asking whether minerals are getting scarcer by comparing real prices since 1900 (and a real-price chart on each mineral's page); supplier exposure, showing which big buyers lean on one source for each critical mineral against the EU's 65% benchmark; and country reserve life, showing how long each major producer's own reserves last (country pages now carry it too).
The critical minerals hub now shows years of reserves, the year output peaked and the real-price comparison for each mineral.
Three new explainers: reserves versus resources, the reserves-to-production ratio and peak oil versus peak copper.

7 October 2026

Commodity pages for minerals and fuels now show how much is left in charts: world production by year with the peak marked (back to 1900 for many minerals) and reserves as each edition of the source printed them.
New report: which minerals and fuels are still setting production records, and which peaked years ago.
Five more critical minerals have pages: zirconium, beryllium, bismuth, silicon and feldspar.

6 October 2026

Tables on the report pages, the critical-minerals hub and the new reserves page now sort when you click a column heading (the arrow shows the direction), and on a phone each row becomes a card with a "Sort by" control instead of a sideways-scrolling table.
Share buttons (X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, email, copy link) now appear at the foot of commodity, country, report and blog pages. They are plain links: nothing from those networks loads until you click one.
New: how much is left, and how long will it last? For 29 minerals and fuels: how much the world mines each year, how much is left in reserves, how many years that is at today's pace and if output keeps growing, and how much has already been mined. It also shows how reserves have changed between editions, and commodity pages now carry a one-line reserve life.
New: a critical minerals hub listing every commodity on this site that appears on the US 2025 or EU 2024 critical-mineral lists, with who mines it, where the reserves are and which list names it; and a plain-English guide, what are critical minerals?
Eight new commodity pages for critical minerals: antimony, tungsten, vanadium, niobium, fluorspar, titanium, magnesium and barite. The site now covers 104 commodities.
Commodity pages for listed minerals now say which list names them.

5 October 2026

Google Analytics now runs in Google's Consent Mode: it sets no cookies until you accept the banner, and declining or changing your choice later removes them. The cookies page and privacy policy explain what it sends before you choose.

4 October 2026

Eight new reports under Patterns: import dependency (who buys most of a commodity from one supplier), supplier shifts (who gained and lost importers' business), trade prices against benchmark prices, prices in euros, pounds and yen, whether some prices lead others, volatility over time, seasonality for every price and ten price ratios.
The lead/lag and seasonality reports compare what they find with what random chance would produce, and say so.
New: who consumes each commodity and which large markets depend on imports, from FAO food balance sheets, plus a report on whether El Niño and La Niña years move prices.
Every commodity page now has a section showing what the Patterns reports say about it (who uses it, volatility, season, price in other currencies and more), and every country page has the same for the country.
New: a page for each country and commodity where the country is a top-five producer or exporter, such as Brazil's coffee (production history, share of world output, export destinations, what it uses).
New: a brief builder for up to five commodities and an optional buying country, printable as a one-page PDF; and a PDF summary of every country.
Search can now be narrowed by kind of page (commodity, country, report, tool and more), and the data files now have an OpenAPI description and JSON schemas for developers.

27 September 2026

Tidied up the navigation: the header and footer are now organized into clear groups instead of one long list.
New: a FAQ page answering common questions about how the site and its data work.
New: a CSV builder — pick any combination of commodities and a date range and download exactly the data you want.
Your watchlist can now flag, and optionally notify you about, anything that has moved 5% or more since your last visit.
The site can now be added to your phone or computer's home screen like an app.
Price charts now mark a few more historical events (oil shocks, financial crises, wars) alongside the ones already shown.
The site now tells search engines faster when a page changes (IndexNow), and Search Console / Bing Webmaster verification is wired up.
The About page now names who publishes the site, and that author now has their own page.

24 September 2026

New: a correlation calculator — pick any two commodities and see how closely their prices have actually moved together.
Your watchlist can now generate a copy-paste digest of everything you have starred.
The homepage now rotates through all 96 commodities over time instead of showing the same six every visit.
Every commodity page now links to a one-page, downloadable PDF summary.

23 September 2026

Prices can now be shown in EUR, GBP or JPY as well as USD.
Each commodity has its own RSS feed for just its price updates.
Added a one-click download of every commodity's data as a single CSV bundle.
Price charts now mark a few major world events (the 2008 financial crisis, COVID-19, the invasion of Ukraine) where they fall in range.
New map: which commodity category dominates each country's exports.
Terms like "FOB" or "stocks-to-use" are now linked to their glossary entry the first time they appear on a page.
New: a decade-by-decade map of where production has shifted since the 1960s, on commodities with a long enough history.
New: a unit converter (tonnes, troy ounces, barrels, bushels and more).
Added a manual light/dark mode switch, alongside the existing automatic one.
Press "/" anywhere on the site to jump straight to search.
"Surprise me" in the header jumps to a random commodity.
"Report an issue" links on commodity and country pages.
Share buttons on the trivia and price-guessing games.
New: an HS customs-code lookup.
New: embeddable price and production badges for other sites (see Embed).
New: build your own commodity index from a weighted basket of prices.
New: trade-flow diagrams showing which country sells to which, for every commodity.
Commodity pages now link to the previous/next commodity in the same category.
Added bilateral trade flows: who sells what to whom, country to country, not just each country's world total.

22 September 2026

Five new country profiles on the blog (Chile, Australia, DR Congo, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia).
Two new reports: export dependency and concentration over time.
New: a price-shock timeline and a country comparison tool.
New: a personal watchlist and a trivia game.

20 September 2026

Eight new cross-commodity reports under Patterns: land vs yield, drawdowns and volatility, stocks vs prices, and more.
New: a harvest calendar, embeddable charts, and weekly stats.

19 September 2026

Launched the Patterns reports and a new fact every day on the homepage.
New: monthly price-change reports for the last 12 months.

17 September 2026

Added an automatic RSS feed for prices that move sharply in a month.

6 September 2026

Commodity Origins launched: one page per commodity, with production, trade and prices, every figure sourced.

This page is written by hand and lists what changed for a visitor, not every internal change. For when the underlying data itself was refreshed, see the data updates feed instead.