Skillings Mining Intelligence: The DRC
Sunday, March 15, 2026 The era of the "pit-to-port" raw export model is dying. If you’re still looking at Central Africa as merely a source of…
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Charles Pitts is the publisher of Skillings Mining Review, the trade journal that has covered mining since 1912. He writes on the macro forces behind metal prices: commodity cycles, sovereign capital and the shifting sources of demand. His current work argues that hyperscale AI, and the gigawatt-scale power its data centres need, is becoming a buyer of lithium and copper in its own right, competing with the automotive supply chain for tier-one reserves.
Sunday, March 15, 2026 The era of the "pit-to-port" raw export model is dying. If you’re still looking at Central Africa as merely a source of…
Everyone loves a diversification narrative until the invoice arrives. For a decade, the West has talked a big game about breaking the Chinese stranglehold on critical…
The global supply chain for critical minerals is no longer a matter of free-market economics. It’s a matter of national survival. For decades, the West treated…
Most analysts are looking at $10,000 copper as the ceiling. They’re wrong. In reality, $10,000 is the new floor, and the $13,000 milestone projected for 2026…
The mining industry loves to talk about "long-term cycles," but the reality on the ground this week suggests we are moving at a much faster, more…
Geology is indifferent to your net-zero timelines. This is the uncomfortable truth facing the global midstream as we cross into mid-March 2026. While Western policy circles…
The consensus narrative of the last 24 months was simple: lithium is in a death spiral. High-cost projects were mothballed, inventories swelled, and the "white gold"…
The uranium "super-cycle" is the most talked-about narrative in the mining halls right now, but here is the thing nobody wants to admit: a super-cycle is…
Silicon Valley doesn't want to talk about dirt. They want to talk about Large Language Models, generative art, and the "democratization of intelligence." But the shiny…
The 2026 mining cycle isn't a recovery. It's a structural scramble. Most analysts spent the last two years waiting for prices to "normalize." They missed the…
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