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

The public conversation about critical raw materials is dominated by mines. New projects make headlines, permitting disputes attract political attention, and strategic ambitions are routinely expressed in terms of where new extraction will happen. This is understandable. Mining is visible, tangible, and politically consequential in a way that the rest of the value chain rarely is. It is also a distraction from the binding constraint. For most critical raw materials, the most

Critical raw materials lists are expanding. The European Union's current list includes 34 materials, up from 14 in 2011. The United States now designates 60 critical minerals, up from 50 in 2022. Both jurisdictions are investing significant political capital in securing these materials through legislative frameworks, strategic project designations, equity stakes in producers, and, in some cases, the activation of emergency powers. The policy apparatus erected around critical

Critical raw materials are at the centre of the energy transition, digitalisation, and defence. They are also at the centre of an intensifying geopolitical contest. China's escalating export controls, the EU's Critical Raw Materials Act, and the Trump Administration's shift toward direct federal equity investments have all accelerated in the past twelve months. Yet the policy conversation often remains fragmented: mining is discussed in isolation from processing, regulation f

When representatives of 54 countries gathered in Washington on 4 February 2026 for the inaugural Critical Minerals Ministerial, the scale of ambition was unmistakable. In the space of a single week, the Trump administration launched Project Vault, a public-private strategic minerals stockpile backed by approximately $12 billion in seed funding; unveiled the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement (FORGE) as successor to the Biden-era Minerals Security Partnership; and annou