battery criticals

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 Biden Administration has announced the “most aggressive” plan to curb tailpipe emissions to date, with new vehicle pollution standards proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and announced by the White House last week.

If finalized, the proposed rules would require automakers to reduce carbon emissions by 56% in their 2032 models compared to 2026 models.  The expectation is that with the rules in place, 67% of new light-duty car purchases will be electric by 2032.

The move comes at a time when geopolitical and trade tensions between the United States and our allies on one hand, and China on the other are soaring, and observers argue that the ambitious plans could play into Beijing’s hands.

While the United States has taken several important steps to decouple its 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 the EV battery supply chain, and the latest USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries report confirmed that for all of the recent U.S. policy efforts, our dependencies still persist.

In case anyone needed a reminder, here is an infographic from last November, compiled by our friends at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence clearly visualizing China’s dominance of the battery supply chain.

The Biden Administration has, in recent weeks, stepped up its friend-shoring initiatives to bolster U.S. supply chains, with recent trade deliberations having yielded a free trade Critical Minerals agreement with Tokyo and a likely similar accord between the U.S. and EU. U.S.-Canadian critical minerals cooperation has also seen a boost.

Embedded into a comprehensive “All of the Above” strategy, these friend-shoring initiatives can play an important role in strengthening critical mineral supply chains.  And yet there are mounting concerns that the Biden Administration, in spite of verbal affirmations of wanting to responsibly expand domestic resource development and processing, continues to cater to the “not-in-my-backyard” sentiment, which still runs strong in discussions on resource development.

This brings us back to the “inherent irony” or “paradox of the green revolution” Reuters columnist Andy Home has invoked in several instances when covering critical mineral resource supply chains for the very materials underpinning the green energy transition — the paradox that “public opinion is firmly in favour of decarbonisation but not the mines and smelters needed to get there.”

It’s not that there is a lack of promising domestic resource development projects, especially for the Battery Criticals — lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel, and manganese.

ARPN recently looked at each of these materials, now deemed under President Biden’s DPA determination to be “essential to the national defense,” and the U.S.-based projects working to urgently needed new supply into production. [See our discussions linked here: Lithium, Cobalt, Graphite, Nickel, Manganese]

And let’s not forget copper, which has increasingly been recognized – most recently by the EU — as a critical raw material in light of its key role in the green energy transition, and for which a push to have the metal added to the U.S. Government Critical Minerals List is currently underway.

As ARPN has previously pointed out, lofty goals of net carbon neutrality – and that includes the just released proposed EPA emission standards –  will not be achievable if we don’t embrace a push to secure critical mineral supply chains from “soup to nuts” to borrow a term used by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

After all, as we’ve noted often at ARPN, the first word in supply chain is… supply.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed and enacted into law last year, is considered one of the landmark pieces of legislation to combat climate change and strengthen U.S. critical mineral supply chains. The package included funding for tax credits and rebates for consumers buying electric vehicles, installing solar panels or making other energy-efficiency upgrades to their homes, [...]

In a new video clip, the Wall Street Journal explores one of the areas of competition between the two superpowers that is emerging as a key theater of the 21st century tech wars: EV battery supply chains. Followers of ARPN know all too well, and our friends at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence clearly visualized this fact in [...]

Sometimes hailed the “fuel of the green revolution,” lithium has been the posterchild of the “battery criticals.”  Start with the fact that the leading battery technology underpinning the shift towards net zero carbon emissions is called “lithium-ion.” With its high electrochemical potential and light weight, the commercialization of the lithium-ion battery has transformed and accelerated the renewables shift.  Lithium is [...]

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 [...]

 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 [...]

It is essential to the production of iron and steel. It is a key component of certain widely used aluminum alloys.  It’s considered a Critical Mineral by the U.S. Government, “essential to the national defense,” under the terms of the long-standing Defense Production Act.  And, perhaps most importantly today, it is one of the five battery criticals, with the [...]

 For all the talk about reducing our over-reliance on foreign critical mineral resources against the backdrop of soaring demand, strained supply chains and increasing geopolitical tensions, last week’s release of the annual USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries report still paints a sobering picture. While the number of metals and minerals for which the U.S. remains 100% import dependent [...]

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 [...]