Iron ore Fe
What it is for
Iron ore is the largest dry bulk commodity moved by sea and the first input to steel, which is to say the first input to construction, shipbuilding, vehicles and machinery. Its price is one of the least abstract indicators of how much the world is physically building.
What it costs
Where it sits in the chain
The chain runs from a small number of very large mines, mostly Australian and Brazilian, through very long sea routes to blast furnaces concentrated in China. It is the commodity where shipping is the largest cost component, so freight rates and chokepoint disruption bear on it more than on any metal — which connects it to the maritime chokepoint series this platform tracks daily.
Who has it
| Country | Production | Reserves | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australia | 930,000 | 58,000 | 2024 |
| Brazil | 440,000 | 34,000 | 2024 |
| China | 270,000 | 20,000 | 2024 |
| India | 270,000 | 5,500 | 2024 |
| Russian Federation | 91,000 | 35,000 | 2024 |
| Iran, Islamic Rep. | 90,000 | 3,800 | 2024 |
| South Africa | 66,000 | — | 2024 |
| Canada | 54,000 | 6,000 | 2024 |
| United States | 48,000 | 3,600 | 2024 |
| Ukraine | 42,000 | 6,500 | 2024 |
Production and reserves in thousand tonnes of usable ore; price in US dollars per tonne. USGS also reports iron content separately, and the two must not be added.
How concentrated it is
Two countries dominate as heavily as in any commodity here. Australia mines around 930 million tonnes of usable ore a year and Brazil around 440 million, with China third on output but overwhelmingly first on consumption — the asymmetry that makes this the highest-tonnage seaborne trade in the world. USGS reports usable ore and contained iron as separate series; this page uses usable ore, and adding the two would count the same rock twice.
What this cannot show
The benchmark price refers to a specific iron content delivered to a Chinese port, and ores of different grades trade at substantial premiums and discounts to it, so a low-grade producer may never receive anything close to the published number. The production table is mine output and says nothing about the steelmaking that consumes it, which is the stage where the value and the emissions sit.
Other resources
Copper · Lithium · Cobalt · Nickel · Potash · Phosphate · Aluminium · Zinc · Tin