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Against the backdrop of ever-increasing pressures on critical mineral supply chains, we are seeing a flurry of activity on the part of government stakeholders to shore up supply of the metals and minerals underpinning 21^st Century.

While it is certainly encouraging that these developments are not only underway but are also increasingly making headlines and garnering the attention of the American people, it is important to ensure that legislative efforts to strengthen our nation’s critical mineral supply chains are not only enacted, but actually implemented, and that timelines set forth in enacted legislation are in fact met.

Unfortunately, new laws are not always effectively implemented.  Case in point:  that’s the charge made in recent correspondence by U.S. Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV), Chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), a senior member of the committee, in a series of joint letters to key members of the Biden Administration.

In letters to U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, and U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, Sens. Manchin and Murkowski lamented the delayed implementation of a set of provisions included in the Energy Act of 2020 and the bipartisan infrastructure package passed last year, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

Citing several lapsed deadlines set forth in both legislative packages and highlighting U.S. vulnerabilities “due to the lack of domestic production and processing of critical minerals, including rare earth elements,” the Senators called on the Administration to prioritize

the “substantial new authorities and federal assistance to boost domestic mineral supplies” mandated via the Energy Act of 2020, and the bipartisan infrastructure package, and to “ensure crucial deadlines are met.”

They concluded:

“While we appreciate the President’s focus on this issue, including the recent invocation of the Defense Production Act, a whole-of-government approach is required to meet this challenge. Timely implementation of the provisions of the Energy Act are crucial to ensuring that America’s critical mineral supply chains are strong, responsibly produced, and ethically sourced.” 

Meanwhile, momentum appears to be building to strengthen the U.S. strategic minerals stockpile. The Department of Defense has submitted a legislative proposal to request authorization of $253.5 million to procure critical minerals in the FY 2023 defense authorization bill, while the House Armed Services Committee is reportedly seeking to bolster the United States’ supplies of specifically Rare Earths as part of the National Defense in the same bill.

As the geopolitical stakes continue to get higher in light of Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine and China’s Xi Jinping doubling-down on its zero-Covid policy earlier this month which may lead to more lockdowns with serious economic disruption and trade consequences, here’s hoping that U.S. stakeholders are ready to not only talk the talk, but also walk the walk.

Click here to read the Senators’ letter to U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

Click here to read the Senators’ letter to U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.

Click here to read the Senators’ letter to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.

Click here to read the Senators’ letter to U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.

 

Against the backdrop of the accelerating global push towards net zero carbon emissions, the authors of a May 2021 KPMG study on “geographical and geopolitical constraints to the supply of resources critical to the energy transition” and the associated “call for a circular economy solution” titled the first chapter of their report “From OPEC to ‘OMEC’: the new global energy ecosystem.” In a then little-noticed footnote the authors explained that “OMEC” was a “freshly minted acronym for ‘Organisation of Mineral Exporting Countries’” – a grouping that “may not yet exist, but the point remains: geopolitical power could shift from oil-dominated countries to critical metal-dominated countries.” 

“There is an underappreciated risk to the energy transition: the supply of clean energy depends on mined natural resources, which are steeped in geological, geopolitical, and governance challenges,” wrote the authors at the time.

Fast forward twelve months to our vastly changed geopolitical landscape, and the “freshly minted acronym” may go from footnote to required subject of global public policy considerations.

As  Tsvetana Paraskova writes for OilPrice.com, “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed, once again, the vulnerability of the global energy markets and economy to the actions of petrostates with the power to weaponize their energy resources for political purposes.” She adds that as the European Union attempts to wean itself off Russian oil and gas and accelerate the shift to renewables, other harsh geopolitical realities come into focus:

“Countries that aren’t Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran hold vast resources of the metals and minerals that will be critical to enabling a faster energy transition. But those resource holders also include Russia, China, and a host of African and South American nations still living ‘the resource curse’, where conflict, forced and child labor, and critically low environmental standards are undermining the ‘green’ credentials of the clean energy transition.”

With a confluence of factors — pandemic-induced supply chain shocks, increasing resource nationalism in various parts of the world, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — having completely altered the Post-Cold War geopolitical landscape and mineral resource security calculus, the new global energy ecosystem could indeed see a transformational shift “from OPEC to OMEC.”

We know how decades of petro-dependency warped geopolitics and challenged national security.  The question as we move from “OPEC to OMEC” is whether the U.S. and its allies will trade petro-dependency for tech metal-dependency – or will U.S. policy makers and other stakeholders be able to chart a course that will provide much needed security for 21^st century supply chains?

It’s not exactly news to followers of ARPN that the global green energy transition will require vast amounts of critical minerals, however, against the backdrop of the raised geopolitical stakes in light of Russia’s war on Ukraine and rising resource nationalism in the southern hemisphere, new figures released by Belgium’s KU Leuven University underscore the [...]

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 [...]

Stressing that the “The United States depends on unreliable foreign sources for many of the strategic and critical materials necessary for the clean energy,” specifically for EV and large capacity batteries, U.S. President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA) to accelerate buildout of domestic supply chains via Presidential Determination earlier this month. While, as Reuter columnist Andy [...]

Last week, against the backdrop of mounting pressures on U.S. critical mineral supply chains, U.S. President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA) to encourage domestic production of the metals and minerals deemed critical for electric vehicle and large capacity batteries. The move is a sign that “America is finally taking the battery metal shortage seriously,” as the [...]

Bearing testimony to a growing awareness of our nation’s critical mineral resource challenge, the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources held a full committee hearing on domestic critical mineral supply chains earlier this week. The witness panel at the hearing, which E&E Daily described as “a largely pro-mining hearing that could serve as a blueprint for a potential deal [...]

A confluence of factors — pandemic-induced supply chain shocks, increasing resource nationalism in various parts of the world, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine extending into its second month — has completely altered the Post-Cold War geopolitical landscape and mineral resource security calculus. Responding to the resulting growing pressures on critical mineral supply chains and skyrocketing [...]

Pandemic induced supply chain shocks, increasing resource nationalism in various parts of the world, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exactly one month ago have brought the stakes for securing critical mineral resource supply chains to a whole new level. The emerging geopolitical landscape has sent countries scrambling to devise strategies to not only ensure steady [...]

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 [...]