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With global pressures on supply chains continuing to mount, the United States and allied countries announced the formation of a new initiative to bolster critical mineral supplies during last month’s Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada convention.

The Minerals Security Partnership (MSP) comprises the United States, Canada, Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the European Commission, and seeks to “ensure that critical minerals are produced, processed, and recycled in a manner that supports the ability of countries to realize the full economic development benefit of their geological endowments.”

With demand for critical minerals underpinning the green energy transition and other key 21st century tech sectors forecast to skyrocket, the MSP will “help catalyze investment from governments and the private sector for strategic opportunities —across the full value chain —that adhere to the highest environmental, social, and governance standards.”

Similar cooperative announcements have been made in the past, but the MSP, in the words of Reuters’s Andy Home, may signify a “tectonic realignment with far-reaching implications” as it — against the backdrop of Russia’s war on Ukraine and mounting tension with China — is “defined as much as anything by who is not on the invite list — China and Russia.”

Explains Home:

“China’s dominance of key enabling minerals such as lithium and rare earths is the single biggest reason why Western countries are looking to build their own supply chains.

Russia, a major producer of nickel, aluminium and platinum group metals, is now also a highly problematic trading partner as its war in Ukraine that the Kremlin calls a ‘special military operation’ grinds on.

A previously highly globalised minerals supply network looks set to split into politically polarised spheres of influence.”

In essence, according to Home, “a metallic NATO is starting to take shape, though no-one is calling it that just yet.”

With the era of globalized trade patterns in strategic commodities over, as Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Christian Freeland has phrased it, “friend-shoring” may well become “the big economic and geopolitical issue” going forward, and may end up topping our “word of the year” list for 2022.

However, as we have frequently argued — most recently in our latest post — friend-shoring alone is not a panacea. It will not obviate domestic production and processing, as some would have you believe. It is a crucial piece of the puzzle, but the only viable path to success in the long run lies in a comprehensive “all-of-the-above” policy approach from mine to manufacturing which encompasses fostering cooperation with allies and scaling up research and development while at the same time building out domestic production and processing capabilities along with recycling and closed-loop technology.

As critical mineral supply chain challenges deepen against the backdrop of a global pandemic, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and rising resource nationalism in the Southern Hemisphere, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm sounded the alarm during the beginning of the Sydney Energy Forum, an event co-hosted by the Australian Government and the International Energy Agency, with the support of the Business Council of Australia as a Forum partner.

Kicking off talks with Australian resources minister Madeleine King and mining executives from 14 mining companies, Granholm expressed concern that the Biden Administration’s goal to get to net zero carbon, a goal which, as followers of ARPN well know hinges on critical mineral resource development, could be subject to manipulation or even weaponization in the current geopolitical context.

Said Granholm:

“It is no secret that the United States does want to get to net zero. We can’t get there without much of the critical minerals and rare earths that you are extracting.

We have a goal in the United States of being able to do some of this but –in fact, the President has put forward $5 billion for development of processing for particularly battery supply chains. However, as those of you who have been doing processing know, it takes a while to be able to set that up. And we need additional processing capacity throughout the world.

Our concern is that critical minerals could be as subject, or vulnerable, to manipulation as we’ve seen in other areas, or weaponisation. And we want to – I think it’s healthy and from a national security perspective for both of our nations – to diversify our supply chains and make sure that these minerals are available to get to the ultimate goal of net-zero.”

After years of neglect, it is good to see that the issue of strengthening and diversifying supply chains away from adversary nations like China is finally being awarded the attention it deserves in government circles. The Biden Administration is well-advised in partnering with friendly nations like Australia and Canada in its efforts to shore up reliable and sustainable supplies of the metals and minerals underpinning 21st Century technology and the green energy transition. However, as we have previously stated, cooperation with allies must be embedded into a broad-based all-of-the-above context across the entire value chain:

“‘Friend-shoring’” is certainly an important pillar of the “all-of-the-above” concept, but, in light of mounting demand and ever higher stakes with Russia’s war on Ukraine and rising resource nationalism, it is insufficient to alleviate our overall problem.
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The good news is that courtesy of the materials science revolution, industry can harness new technologies to do expand our mining infrastructure responsibly and sustainably – (…) and as Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm acknowledged [last] summer during a U.S. Senate hearing: ‘This is the United States. We can mine in a responsible way. And many places are doing it. And there are some places where there are more challenges, but we can do this.’”

As U.S. stakeholders grapple with the question of how to bolster U.S. supply chains for the battery criticals and other critical minerals amidst skyrocketing demand scenarios and growing geopolitical pressures, our allies are taking steps of their own to unleash their mineral potential. Looking north, in order to “secure Canada’s place in important supply chains with [...]

Set to deliver his first State of the Union address today (March 1, 2022), U.S. President Joe Biden will likely have to tweak the outline for his speech considering the latest developments in Ukraine, and the resulting implications for the United States, and the world as a whole. Against growing tensions, we recently highlighted mounting [...]

Against the backdrop of the global push to net carbon zero, supply chains for the critical metals and minerals underpinning this shift are facing immense pressures. As followers of ARPN well know, China, which not only holds the pole position when it comes to sourcing critical minerals, but has also cornered the downstream supply chain, [...]

As the global push for net carbon zero accelerates in the wake of last year’s UN Global Climate Summit in Glasgow, another leading automaker draws attention to the critical raw materials challenge: In a recent interview with German paper Die Zeit, Mercedes-Benz Group (previously Daimler AG) Chief Executive Ola Kaellenius warned that EV battery raw material scarcity [...]

ARPN’s Year in Review —   a Last Look Back at the United States’ Critical Mineral Resource Challenge in 2021 Well, two words, for the sticklers.  Merriam Webster may have gone with “vaccine,” but for ARPN, there was really no doubt. As one article put it, “2021 is the year ‘supply chain’ went from jargon to [...]

Every December, editors of the English-speaking world’s dictionaries release their choices for Word of the Year, a “word or expression that has attracted a great deal of interest over the last 12 months.” Unsurprisingly, for 2020, the honorees were coronavirus-related terms, with Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com bestowing the honor on the word “Pandemic,” whereas the Collins Dictionary Word of the [...]

At the 2021 United Nations Climate Change conference (COP26) held in Glasgow, Scotland earlier this month, two major U.S. automakers, General Motors and Ford, signed a commitment calling on automakers to sell only zero-emissions vehicles by 2040.  Joined by Volvo, Jaguar Land Rover and Mercedes-Benz, as well as several countries, territories and fleet operators, the manufacturers [...]

On the heels of the recently-released White House 100-Day Supply Chain report, momentum to strengthen U.S. supply chains is building. On July 22, 2021 the House Armed Services Committee’s bipartisan Defense Critical Supply Chain Task Force, chartered in March of 2021 to “review the industrial base supply chain to identify and analyze threats and vulnerabilities,” released its [...]