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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 appreciate the importance of parts of the Periodic Table more critical to economic growth than ever before.” 

To those dialed into the issue, Boric’s move was hardly shocking. For one, he had made his plans known before he even assumed office. Furthermore, Boric’s announcement ties into an overall trend of countries resorting to resource nationalism, a trend which has certainly been noticeable in Latin America, an area with a historic penchant for nationalist policies, but also in other parts of the world.

Globally, recent steps taken by governments to nationalize their mineral resources have involved

• Myanmar, where the ethnic minority Wa militia has announced the suspension of work at mines in areas it controls beginning in August – a move that has led to a surge in tin prices with the Wa-controlled region estimated to account for over 70% of the country’s tin production;
• Indonesia, where the government has enacted an export ban on nickel and was exploring a ban on tin exports, with a scheduled bauxite export ban scheduled to take effect in June of this year, and more export bans for other materials to be announced in the coming years;
• Zimbabwe, where the government imposed a ban on unprocessed lithium in December of 2022, reportedly to prevent artisanal mining projects from taking the minerals across borders.

And then of course, as followers of ARPN well know, there is China, a country with traditionally tight state control over its resource sector. Beijing has been tightening its reins on its critical mineral supply chains, specifically for the country’s lithium battery supply chain, and has established a new state-owned group to serve as a “consolidated hub for the country’s iron ore trade,” with the mandate for “China Mineral Resources Group” covering mining, ore processing and trading.  As ARPN recently discussed, Beijing is currently considering prohibiting exports of certain rare-earth magnet technology, bringing back the specter of trade weaponization as tensions between China and the West soar.

But even in the Western world, government involvement in the critical minerals sector is on the rise.

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 Nabeel Mancheri, Secretary General of the Belgium-based Rare Earth Industry Association recently stated, “The EU is still reluctant to have state-oriented investment in the mining sector, but in certain cases, we have to do it.”

In the U.S., calls for a more robust industrial policy have also gotten louder – a recent piece in National Defense Magazine is a case in point – and recently passed legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act as well as the Inflation Reduction Act exemplify a more active government role in this sector as stakeholders increasingly acknowledge the importance of critical minerals to their nation’s economic wellbeing and national security.

As the Western world continues its quest to decouple from China, we can expect to see more active government involvement in the critical minerals sector.

For nations to prosper in this brave new world, the challenge will be to balance domestic and global policy approaches and public and private sector involvement with economic and security concerns to reflect today’s political and geopolitical realities.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, a new OECD study has found that export restrictions on Critical Minerals have increased more than fivefold from January 2009 to December 2020, suggesting that “export restrictions may be playing a non-trivial role in international markets for critical raw materials, affecting availability and prices of these materials.”  

While this significant shift to export controls – according to the WSJ mostly in the form of taxes – has been noticeable and relevant, it may just have been the tip of the iceberg.

In the wake of a global pandemic, related supply chain shocks and with the Russia-Ukraine war raging on, the trade dimension of geopolitics has become the new frontier in the tech wars between Beijing and Washington, DC – a relationship in which conflict has been smoldering over the past few years, especially over Rare Earth Elements (REEs).

As we outlined in a recent post, Western nations have made decoupling from China – which has long held a strategic stranglehold over Critical Mineral supply chains – a priority and have pursued a strategy of “friendshoring.”

Observers were waiting to see if China would retaliate in response to the United States’ recently imposed set of sweeping controls on advanced semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment aimed at China and a related agreement with Japan and the Netherlands.

It may not prove to be a long wait.  According to Nikkei reporting earlier this month, China has since announced that it is considering prohibiting exports of certain rare earth magnet technology through updates to a technology export restrictions list last issued in 2020.

The looming export control ratchet and increasing tensions between China and the West are troubling South Korea – which has in the past walked a fine line between the United States and China – its “leading economic partner and increasingly dominant neighbor” – and has publicly balked at the U.S. effort to isolate China from semiconductor supply chains.

Regardless of that fine line, public opinion towards China has been souring in South Korea, and diplomatic relations with the country are also getting tense as Seoul summoned China’s ambassador to protest Beijing’s criticism of remarks made by President Yoon in an interview with Reuters on Taiwan.

The looming specter of China restricting technology exports has South Korea’s industrial sector worried, prompting the government to announce a “strategy to secure core minerals” to reduce its dependence on Chinese critical mineral imports for from the current 80 percent to 50 percent by 2030.

In the context of this strategy, the South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy designated 33 as critical minerals and named 10 of those as strategically critical minerals, including the “battery criticals” lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite and five types of rare earth materials considered crucial in 21^st century tech applications including the manufacture of semiconductors.  ARPN followers will note that Korea’s 10 “strategically critical minerals” list  – assuming the five REEs are those used in permanent magnets — squares up with ARPN’s “Super Criticals,” circa April 2022.

As part of a push to “expand and strengthen bilateral and multinational cooperation with resource-rich countries” a public-private delegation of officials from South Korea’s public and private sectors is currently visiting Chile and Argentina to “explore ways to boost cooperation on supply chains of lithium and other major minerals and the development of natural resources.” 

The country is also stepping up domestic and global investment.  Last month, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol announced that the government and companies including Samsung Electronics Co. would invest $422 billion into chip making and EV manufacturing projects in what Bloomberg calls “the nation’s most aggressive effort yet to win a heated global race for tech supremacy.”

Seoul is further looking to  provide $5.32 billion on financial support to its domestic battery makers looking to invest in infrastructure in North America, while also looking to upgrade its partnership with India with a focus on trade, investment and strengthening critical mineral supply chains.  To put South Korea’s $5.3 billion in context, at 1/12^th the size of the U.S. economy, that’s equivalent to the U.S. Government allocating more than $60 billion to Critical Mineral supply chains.

Whether or not China escalates export controls for critical minerals remains to be seen – though officials already finished taking expert comments on the planned restrictions reported by Nikkei earlier this month and the changes are expected to go into force this year – it is becoming increasingly clear that a “huge realignment” in the critical minerals space is underway, and its one that not only sees the West looking to reduce Chinese resource dominance, but also sees allegiances shift in Asia itself.

The world breathed a collective sigh of relief when Chinese drills in the seas and skies surrounding Taiwan wrapped up without further incident this Monday. Nevertheless, tension between the U.S. and China over the island, which some analysts consider “the most dangerous standoff between global superpowers, even as the war in Ukraine rages,” remain high, and a recent development in [...]

 Semiconductors have become indispensable components for a broad range of electronic devices. They are not only “the material basis for integrated circuits that are essential to modern day life” – the “‘DNA’ of technology” which has “transformed essentially all segments of the economy,” they are also essential to national security, where they enable the “development and fielding of advanced weapons systems and [...]

 In this post, we continue our review of the “battery criticals” (lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel and manganese) against the backdrop of the just-released 2023 iteration of the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries.  Next up:  cobalt. With the material accounting for up to 20% of the weight of the cathode in a typical lithium-ion EV battery, cobalt was considered the highest [...]

With the coronavirus pandemic and growing geopolitical tensions having shone a light on U.S. over-reliance on foreign sources across our nation’s critical mineral value chains and its implications for our national and economic security, domestic stakeholders have stepped up their efforts to decouple U.S. supply chains from reliance on our adversaries. While for “battery criticals” [...]

“The U.S. has for too long ceded control of the front end of our manufacturing supply chains to foreign nations, assuming the materials we require will be there when we need them,” writes National Mining Association president and CEO Rich Nolan in a recent Boston Herald piece. In doing so, the U.S. has allowed China [...]

After months of rumblings, it appears that China is gearing up to play its “rare earths card” again. Citing people involved in a government consultation, the Financial Times reports that Beijing is gauging exactly how badly companies in the United States and Europe, including U.S. defense contractors, would be affected by plans to restrict exports [...]

We blinked, and 2020 is knocking on our doors. It’s been a busy year on many levels, and mineral resource policy is no exception. So without further ado, here’s our ARPN Year in Review. Where we began: In last year’s annual recap, we had labeled 2018 as a year of incremental progress, which had set [...]

On Tuesday, June 4, the U.S. Department of Commerce released the “interagency report that was submitted to the President pursuant to Executive Order 13817, A Federal Strategy to Ensure Secure and Reliable Supplies of Critical Minerals.”  The report, which, according to the agency’s official announcement, “contains a government-wide action plan, including recommendations to advance research and development [...]