Resilience of critical mineral supply chains in the energy transition: a whole-lifecycle spatiotemporal analysis of China’s nickel industry

Amid escalating geopolitical risks surrounding critical minerals, safeguarding supply chain resilience is imperative. Employing a comprehensive lifecycle approach, this study develops a multidimensional framework encompassing resistance, recovery, and transformability to systematically quantify the bilateral resilience of China’s nickel industry chain across 120 trading partners from 2005 to 2022. By deconstructing the industry into upstream, midstream, and downstream stages, significant spatial divergence emerges beneath an overall upward resilience trend. Geographically, upstream resource acquisition demonstrates highly localized path dependence. The midstream processing network realizes multipolar global diffusion driven by transnational capacity expansion, while downstream high value exports face regional market blockades due to nontariff barriers. Furthermore, spatiotemporal modeling reveals that these driving mechanisms are highly nonstationary. Specifically, policy interventions increasingly exacerbate the vulnerability of upstream foreign dependency. Concurrently, bilateral direct investment has replaced natural endowment complementarity to become the core driver of midstream resilience, whereas downstream expansion relies heavily on institutional cooperation. Ultimately, this study expands the theoretical boundaries of critical mineral risk assessment and provides actionable intelligence for global economies to identify structural vulnerabilities and dynamically reconstruct resilient transnational supply networks.