News in Brief

Welcome to the March issue of The Crucible.

In the February issue you might have read Tom Butcher’s Letter from North America on the increasingly trendy concept of “friend-shoring”. This is an expansion on “onshoring”, a practice of promoting a domestic industry that relies quite heavily on the notion that the resources to build it will be found within your country’s shores. Friend-shoring is what happens when they do not— and when geopolitics open your eyes to the fact that relying on economic and political rivals for those resources might not be the wisest idea. So you decide to get by with a little bit of help from your friends.

Friend-shoring in action

The month of  March opened with the 2023 Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) Convention  in Toronto, where the mining industry had the chance to meet and  discuss pressing matters. This set the scene, during the UK’s Business and Trade Minister Nusrat Ghani ‘s visit to Canada and her meeting with the Canadian Minister of Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson.  for the two countries to sign a co-operation agreement on critical minerals.

Canada and the UK have both released national Critical Minerals strategies, both are looking to their own supply chains and each other’s resources: natural, financial, and other. The two countries are long-term allies, so here is friend-shoring in action. The agreement is a commitment to work together on critical minerals research and make supply chains more resilient. Details are hazy but overall it aims to:

• Promote and build secure and integrated UK-Canada critical mineral supply chains, including through information-sharing, facilitating investment, and building commercial relationships between Canadian and UK industries, and sharing supply chain resilience analysis.
• Drive higher ESG performance across all elements of the critical minerals value chain, through government signalling, active promotion throughout our respective industries and close collaboration in multilateral fora.
• Leverage the existing strengths of the two countries to promote skill-sharing and R&D between UK and Canadian industry, academia, and governments, along with other close international allies to spur supply chain innovation.

Canada is the UK’s 13^th largest export partner. It also represents a large opportunity for UK mining and engineering firms, with Canada currently producing 60 minerals and metals at 200 mines and 6,500 quarries.   

The UK is not a major miner of metals, however it has a nascent lithium industry and is en route to a tin and tungsten mining and processing revival. What you may not know is that, like Canada, it is sitting on resources of nickel and cobalt.

In the 18th century, cobalt was mined on a small scale in Scotland, and this is where a mineralogy not dissimilar to that which underpins Voisey’s Bay mine in Labrador, Canada, could provide a potential for commercial exploration. And while we have reported on a cobalt vein that transpired to have been mined in Cheshire’s Alderley Edge in the Napoleonic era, resources exist elsewhere in the north of England, and cobalt has been mined sporadically along other metals in the south-west of England, in Wales and in Norther Ireland. You can find our more, on key battery metals in particular, in reports recently produced by the British Geological Survey for the brand new UK Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre.

Friends or rivals?

After much stress in Europe caused by the onshoring exclusivity implicit in the USA’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the penny has now dropped on both sides that is better to be friends than rivals.

To that effect US President Biden and the EU President von der Leyen this month announced a shift away from “zero sum competition” and launched a Clean Energy Incentives Dialogue to co-ordinate their respective green investment programmes.

In a joint statement on 10 March they announced the start of negotiations on a targeted critical minerals agreement that would enable relevant critical minerals extracted or processed in the EU to count toward requirements in the clean vehicle tax credit of the IRA.

Separately, both sides committed to “achieving an ambitious outcome” in the Global Arrangement on Sustainable Steel and Aluminum negotiations by October 2023. The arrangement will encourage low-carbon intensity steel and aluminium production and trade, and aims to level the playing field for European and US workers.

Net-Zero Industry Act

The co-operation agreement with the US has not stopped the EU in March publishing its own answer to the IRA: the Net Zero Industry Act. This legislation aims to bring clean technologies manufacturing and the associated green jobs to the EU. The Act, proposed by the European Commission  still needs to be discussed and agreed by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union before it can be adopted and come into force.

The act supports the following technologies:

• solar photovoltaic and solar thermal
• onshore wind and offshore renewable energy
• batteries and storage
• heat pumps and geothermal energy
• electrolysers and fuel cells
• biogas/biomethane
• carbon capture, utilisation and storage
• grid technologies
• other technologies for clean energy generation including from alternative fuels and nuclear materials

The Net-Zero industry Act rest on four pillars.

• Setting enabling conditions: the Act will improve conditions for investment in net-zero technologies by enhancing information, reducing the administrative burden to set up projects and simplifying permit-granting processes. In addition, the Act proposes to give priority to Net-Zero Strategic Projects, that are deemed essential for reinforcing the resilience and competitiveness of the EU industry, including sites to safely store captured CO₂emissions. They will be able to benefit from shorter permitting timelines and streamlined procedures.
• Accelerating CO₂capture: the Act sets an EU objective to reach an annual 50Mt injection capacity in strategic CO₂ storage sites in the EU by 2030, with proportional contributions from EU oil and gas producers. This will remove a major barrier to developing CO₂ capture and storage as an economically viable climate solution, in particular for hard to abate energy-intensive sectors.
• Facilitating access to markets:  to boost diversification of supply for net-zero technologies, the Act requires public authorities to consider sustainability and resilience criteria for net-zero technologies in public procurement or auctions.
• Enhancing skills: the Act introduces new measures to ensure there is a skilled workforce supporting the production of net-zero technologies in the EU, including setting up Net-Zero Industry Academies, with the support and oversight by the Net-Zero Europe Platform. These will contribute to quality jobs in these essential sectors.
• Fostering innovation: the Act makes it possible for Member States toset up regulatory sandboxes to test innovative net-zero technologies and stimulate innovation, under flexible regulatory conditions.

A Net-Zero Europe Platform will assist the Commission and Member States to coordinate action and exchange information and data. It will identify financial needs, bottlenecks and best practices for projects across the EU, and foster contacts across Europe’s net-zero sectors, making particular use of existing industrial alliances.

The CRM Act

Also in March, the European Commission published the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRM Act), which updates the EU’s critical raw materials list. This is now (strategic raw materials in bold) as follows:

The CRM Act also sets out clear benchmarks for domestic capacities along the strategic raw material supply chain and to diversify EU supply by 2030: 

• At least 10% of the EU’s annual consumption for extraction
• At least 40% of the EU’s annual consumption for processing
• At least 15% of the EU’s annual consumption for recycling
• Not more than 65% of the Union’s annual consumption of each strategic raw material at any relevant stage of processing from a single third country.

UK updates Critical Minerals Strategy

Meanwhile the UK in March updated its Critical Minerals Strategy, following the restructuring of the government’s business and energy departments. As part of implementing the strategy, the government is creating an independent Task & Finish Group on Critical Minerals Resilience for UK Industry, which will find out which – and how much – critical minerals UK industry needs now and in future, what risks they face and how businesses can promote resilience in their critical mineral supply chains. The Group will produce an independent report at the end of 2023.

In February, the UK launched a Circular Critical Materials Supply Chains (CLIMATES) fund with an initial £15 million to focus on making the UK’s Rare Earth Element supply chains more resilient and boost the circular economy.

There are currently 18 items on the UK critical minerals list, which will be open to updates as research under the new strategy advances. As of 2022 these include: antimony, bismuth, cobalt, gallium, graphite, indium, lithium, magnesium, niobium, palladium, platinum, rare earth elements, silicon tantalum, tellurium, tin, tungsten and vanadium.

UK energy strategy

As this issue went to press, the UK unveiled a multibillion pound investment programme in its energy security. Under this umbrella, a new nuclear industry body Great British Nuclear will be tasked with selecting prospective Small Modular Reactor (SMR) technologies for advancement, with selection to be made by Autumn 2023. New green hydrogen production projects were allocated a first tranche of finding under the £240 million Net Zero Hydrogen Fund. The funding is shared between 20 projects comprising 250MW of power across Scotland, Enland and Wales. Among other investments is more than £380 million for boosting EV charging points and infrastructure across the UK to support EV rollout. And UK Export Finance will be given an extra £10bn capacity to boost exports, including from the clean growth sectors. The UK has just joined the CPTPP free trade partnership.

More on  Malmbjerg Molybdenum Project

In the February issue, the MMTA reported on Greenland Resources’ Malmbjerg Molybdenum Project, which is supported by the EU and an MoU on offtake by Scandinavian Steel.

In a the second week of April, a visit to the project has been scheduled as part of the engineering and financing proce. s,The site visit will include a European equipment manufacturer, supplier, and contractor as well as a Canadian arctic construction company and representatives from a Canadian bank. The equipment manufacturer will conduct an installation suitability and construction inspection of the ore transportation system, based on an onsite aerial and ground route inspections to advance on the proposed routing topography, support towers and transfer foundations. The arctic construction company with extensive infrastructure experience, will review the overall project infrastructure construction requirements which include the port facilities, access roads, tailings management, aviation access, open pit preparation and glacier road routings. Molybdenum remains a tight market, with prices at historical highs. Read the latest market analysis from CRU on  and Antaike