In mid-2025, the United States Department of Defense established a ten-year price floor of $110 per kilogram for neodymium-praseodymium oxide, a hard-to-substitute input for the high-performance permanent magnets used in electric vehicles, wind turbines, industrial motors, and defence systems. The floor was designed to give a single producer, MP Materials, the revenue certainty it needed to justify building domestic capacity. It was an intervention premised on the assumption

ESG constraints select the CRM project pipeline The past eighteen months have seen a pronounced retreat in mandatory environmental and social regulation on both sides of the Atlantic. In the European Union, the Omnibus I simplification package was formally approved by EU Member States in the European Council on 24 February 2026, concluding the legislative process after the European Parliament's approval in December 2025. It substantially narrows the scope of the Corporate Sus

On 9 October 2025, China's Ministry of Commerce published its second critical minerals export control package of the year. The package extended licensing requirements to five additional rare earth elements (holmium, erbium, thulium, europium, and ytterbium), brought refining and magnet-manufacturing equipment within scope, and codified an extraterritorial dimension that applies Chinese regulatory authority to foreign-made products incorporating Chinese material or processing

When 54 countries gathered in Washington on 4 February 2026 for the inaugural Critical Minerals Ministerial, two very different policy architectures arrived in the same room. The European Union came with a Critical Raw Materials Act, a regulatory framework, sixty strategic projects, and a recently launched €3 billion implementation package called RESourceEU. The United States came with a $12 billion strategic minerals stockpile, federal equity stakes in domestic producers, an