Loading content
Transformation
Every product decomposed into its recipe — the inputs, the process, and the prior products it is made of, all the way down to the raw deposit.
Every finished good is a recipe of prior goods; unroll the recipe and you get a chain of transformations, each adding value and each controllable by whoever owns that step.
The live graph
Every essential product, unrolled into its recipe: inputs and transformations down to raw materials, with the chokepoint step where control concentrates.
399 materials · pick one to unroll its transmutation chain — every input links to what it's made of, and who makes it.
The foundational industrial material; rolled to beams, sheet, rebar.
First principles
Every product is a recipe of prior products. Nothing is made from nothing.
Value is added at each transformation — and captured by whoever controls that step.
A supply chain is only as free as its scarcest input and its narrowest processing step.
The bottleneck is the power. Find the step with the fewest players and you have found the leverage.
The layers
Manufacturing Recipes decomposed from surface to foundation. Each layer rests on the one beneath it, and control of a lower layer reaches every layer above.
The library
The systems in this domain, explained in full — each with every type described.
The essential products, unrolled into their recipes — inputs, transformations, and the one narrow step where control lives.
Explore Major Supply ChainsThe finite set of physical and chemical transformations every material chain is built from.
Explore Processing MethodsA chain is only as free as its narrowest step. These are the shapes that narrow step takes.
Explore Chokepoint TypesKey concepts
The recipe: the exact set of prior products and quantities a good is made from.
The margin captured at a transformation step — the difference between input cost and output price.
The narrowest step in a chain (few players, one region), where control translates into pricing power.
A country that imports a good while holding the raw base to make it — a buildable manufacturing opportunity.
A recipe read at each step: steel
Input in, transformation, output — the recipe unrolled.
| Step | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Extraction | Iron ore, coking coal | Washed ore + coke feed |
| Refining | Coke + ore + limestone | Pig iron (blast furnace) |
| Manufacturing | Pig iron + scrap + O₂ | Crude steel (BOF) |
| Product | Rolled steel | Beams, sheet, rebar |
Findings, with confidence
Every claim carries its confidence — fact, inference, or projection — and the reasoning behind it. Nothing here is asserted beyond what the evidence supports.
Refining is a narrower chokepoint than extraction for most industrial metals.
basis · Facility counts by stage across the supply graph; inductive.
A country with a raw base but zero domestic processing is a value-add opportunity.
basis · The Market Structure Analysis gap logic; leads to validate, not buy calls.
Every finished good decomposes to a finite tree of prior products.
basis · Definitional — a bill of materials; deductive.
Going deeper
Iron ore and coking coal come out of the ground (deposits, extraction); coal is baked into coke, then coke, ore and limestone go into a blast furnace to make pig iron (refining); pig iron plus scrap and oxygen become crude steel in a basic-oxygen furnace (manufacturing); the steel is rolled and shipped by port and rail to the buyer (distribution). Every beam a building stands on embeds that entire chain, folded up into a price.
Value-add concentrates wherever the step is scarce. For most industrial metals, refining and processing capacity sits in far fewer places than extraction — so pricing power lives midstream, not at the mine. Whoever controls the narrow step controls the chain, which is why processing chokepoints, not deposits, are the real strategic prize.
A chain is only as free as its scarcest input and its narrowest processing step. Count the players at each stage and in each region; the stage with the fewest is the chokepoint — and simultaneously the best investment thesis, the clearest geopolitical lever, and the most fragile point of the whole system.
Deposits, mines, refineries and plants are observable and geolocated — the upstream chain is high-confidence. Distribution and retail are weak in open data, so those links are partly inferred and labelled as such (routes drawn as inferred rather than observed). Read upstream claims as fact and downstream ones as leads to validate.
Data provenance
This page is a view over the same intelligence graph the rest of Tricellix runs on. Where the graph is thin, we say so; the live interactive view mounts here as each source is wired in.
Take this system from reference to decision.