Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Sam Fenwick.

The crushed ore is getting fed onto a conveyor belt.

Today in part two of our series on critical minerals, we're looking at how they're process.

And you can see it coming down that tube there.

These precious resources are hot geopolitical bargaining chips thanks to our reliance on

them in everything from mobile phones to wind turbines. And when it comes to processing,

there's one key player that's hard to ignore, China. It is not an accident to steadily climb up the industrial value chain.

China has rapidly become a dominant force in the refining and processing of critical minerals.

But with that dominance comes questions about dependency and control.

Especially of unstable geopolitical world, allies of yesterday are not necessarily allies of tomorrow.

And as China's influence expands beyond its own borders,

we'll take you to the manicured lawns and glass towers of Jakarta's financial district.

Can countries rich in natural resources challenge China and win?

That's all coming up on Business Daily from the BBC.

So what we've got here in front of it is bags and bags and bags of bags of crushed granite

and I can run it through my fingers like that.

Just outside the seaside town of Newke in the south-west of England,

there's a facility quietly playing a part in the global race for critical minerals.

And to take us on a tour of this processing plant, we've got Ben Cordia.

When this material comes in, it's not pure lithium, is it?

Absolutely. It's there as part of a mineral.

So we need to take that mineral out from all of the other gang,

...