Haplo

For Brazilian bauxite shipped to China, about half the cost is the ship. Bauxite is the red rock that becomes aluminum, and it crosses oceans in some of the biggest cargo ships afloat. An early study for one Bahia project puts the cost of a dry tonne delivered to China at US$48.73. Mining it costs US$4.10. Loading it, trucking it to the coast and handling it at the port adds US$19.92. The ocean voyage adds US$24.71, about 51% of the total. Ships charge by the wet tonne, and about 13% of each shipped tonne of this ore is water. That makes freight the number that moves the most. Freight from Guinea to China was about US$23.50 a wet tonne on February 27th, 2026, the day before the US and Israel struck Iran. By mid-September it had climbed to about US$40 to US$42. Bahia and Guinea both sail around the Cape of Good Hope to reach China, on voyages of similar length. So a freight spike raises the cost of both by about the same amount. What separates two sources is everything that happens before the ship, which the study puts at US$24.02 a dry tonne in Bahia. The study is early, with costs meant to be accurate to within about 35%. The full story of the owner of the deposit and its cost before the ship is in the article below.