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It’s back to the grind.

The parades, barbecues, pool parties and fireworks to mark this year’s Independence Day are over.  There’s much to be thankful for, especially at a time when the impact of Russia’s war on Ukraine, now in its second year, reverberates around the globe and geopolitical tensions continue to mount.

ARPN has always used the occasion of Independence Day to remind ourselves that “while we cherish the freedom we are blessed with in so many ways, we must not become complacent, as there are areas where we’re increasingly becoming less independent” — with our reliance on foreign mineral resources being a case in point.

Thankfully, stakeholders are increasingly aware of the urgency to strengthen critical mineral supply chains, and, on the heels of a global pandemic, ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, and growing resource nationalism, a flurry of activity has dominated the critical minerals space, ranging from domestic efforts over bilateral trade agreements to multilateral alliances.

For the U.S., a notable example of domestic efforts is the series of DPA Presidential Determinations involving specific Critical Minerals, beginning with President Trump’s July 2019 designation of the Rare Earth permanent magnet supply chain being designated as “essential for the national defense,” followed by President Biden’s designation of what ARPN calls the “Battery Criticals” as DPA Title III eligible in March 2022, followed by Platinum and Palladium in a DPA Presidential Determination in June 2022.  Earlier this spring, two further Presidential Determinations (February 27, 2023 Presidential Determination, and DPA Presidential Determination (2023-5)), effectively created an entirely new category of critical minerals – the “defense criticals” and designated airbreathing engines, advanced avionics navigation and guidance systems, and hypersonic systems and their “constituent materials” as priority DPA materials.

(for more on the Defense Criticals, read our post here.)

Followers of ARPN are further aware of policy initiatives like the United States’ Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) or the European Union’s Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), which are currently being followed by bilateral trade agreements, as well as U.S.-EU discussions to launch a “critical mineral club.”

While the United States and our partners have taken several important steps to decouple critical mineral supply chains from China, Beijing, having systematically built out its dominance across the entire value chain from mining over processing to manufacturing, still has a chokehold on many key critical minerals, and particularly the EV battery supply chain.

And for all of the recent U.S. policy efforts, the latest USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries report confirmed that our critical mineral dependencies still persist.

There is momentum to change this, however, as we have previously argued:

“Those familiar with the inner-workings of Washington, D.C. know all too well that particularly in an election year policy efforts can quickly lose steam or fizzle over attempts to placate certain constituencies. Against all affirmations to strengthen domestic supply chains, the not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) sentiment is still strong.”

As followers of ARPN well know, the stakes are too high to let the momentum for comprehensive reform fizzle.

With a new “Great Game” afoot in the global mineral resource realm (see our most recent post on the issue here), the U.S. must double down on its push to secure critical mineral supply chains from “soup to nuts” to borrow a term used by U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

With the West’s resource dependence running deep, and Beijing’s determination to continue its global quest for resource dominance unbroken, the critical mineral arms race will continue to heat up.   Stakeholders here and elsewhere must gear up for the long haul.

As ARPN stated in a previous post, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Neither was the United States of America.

But built it was, challenges were overcome — and we are celebrating the men and women who have fought for and continue to safeguard our freedoms this week.

Here’s hoping that one day we will be able to say the same for the critical mineral supply chains that anchor the technology economies of the 21st Century.

Resource nationalism has arrived in Africa.

After Zimbabwe banned lithium ore exports last December in a move that only permits concentrates to be shipped out, Namibia has banned the export of unprocessed lithium and other critical minerals, according to Reuters.

The country is largely known as a source for uranium, but also has significant deposits of lithium and rare earth minerals.

With demand surging for the battery criticals — lithium, graphite, cobalt, nickel and manganese — as well as other minerals underpinning the green energy transition like the rare earths, the Namibian government hopes to cash in on this development.

Under the plan approved by the Namibian government’s cabinet, only small quantities of the specified minerals —unprocessed crushed lithium ore, cobalt, manganese, graphite and rare earth minerals — would be allowed to leave the country, and their export would be subject to prior approval by the mines minister.

The Namibian announcement ties into a larger trend, which has been noticeable particularly in Latin America, a region with a historic penchant for nationalism, but has also reared its head in other parts of the globe.

ARPN has featured recent nationalist moves in Chile, Mexico and Bolivia, as well as in Myanmar, Indonesia, and China.

However, even in the Western world, government involvement in the critical minerals sector is on the rise. As ARPN previously outlined, “while modern Western democracies are typically hesitant to embrace more state intervention in the critical minerals sector, many believe that in order to succeed, the United States and its allies need to learn ‘how to stomach more state intervention [themselves].‘ “

As such Namibia’s announcement is hardly surprising, but it also serves as another reminder that as the U.S. and the rest of the West continue the quest to decouple from China, we will have to carefully balance domestic and global policy approaches — as well as public and private sector roles with economic and security concerns to reflect the geopolitical realities of our times.  This can be best achieved within the context of a comprehensive all-of-the-above approach that focuses on domestic resource development where possible and leverages partnerships where needed.

Two weeks after the U.S. Geological Survey rebuffed a bipartisan call from members of Congress for an “out-of-cycle”addition of copper to the U.S. Government’s official List of Critical Minerals, House Republicans from Western mining states are pushing to achieve the “critical mineral” designation for copper via legislation. Arguing that changing copper’s designation would allow the federal government to more efficiently [...]

Against the backdrop of the accelerating global push to net zero carbon emissions, a volatile overall geopolitical climate and a new EPA proposal to tighten tailpipe emission standards U.S. stakeholders are looking for ways to secure critical mineral supply chains. The expectation is that with the proposed EPA rules requiring automakers to reduce carbon emissions [...]

Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s April announcement of his plan to nationalize the country’s lithium industry to boost the Latin American nation’s industrial base and protect the environment may have prompted observers to declare his action a “shock move,” but as ARPN outlined in our last post, the “shock seems to result from global observers who are still learning to [...]

As the cliché goes, the global economy is inextricably interconnected.  Easy to say, but still surprising to see it unfold in front of us – especially when the nation illustrating the truism is the world’s 44th largest economy, with a GDP roughly the size of Indiana. But small size belies the multiplier effect of Critical Minerals, which [...]

When it comes to the metals and minerals underpinning the green energy transition, and specifically the EV battery revolution, much of the spotlight has fallen on lithium — and for good reason, as we will discuss in a forthcoming post.  However, as ARPN’s latest review of the “battery criticals” against the backdrop of the just-released latest iteration of [...]

As a highly versatile key mainstay metal, copper has been a building block of humanity’s progress. As a gateway metal, it yields access to critical minerals.  It also is an energy metal — an indispensable component for advanced energy technologies, ranging from EVs and wind turbines to the electric grid and solar panels. But for all its traditional and new applications [...]

The global race for critical mineral resources is heating up. Against the backdrop of soaring demand and rising geopolitical tensions, nations are scrambling to diversify their critical mineral supply chains away from adversary nations, i.e. primarily China, and, in the case of Europe, also Russia. While the European Union works to flesh out what is [...]

Earlier this week, USGS released its latest iteration of the annual Mineral Commodity Summaries, a much-cited report that every year gives us a data-driven glimpse into our nation’s mineral resource dependencies. It’s fitting that ARPN reviews the report on Groundhog Day, February 2nd, because just like in the Bill Murray classic movie, in which the clock jumps [...]