It’s not often that minerals dominate world news. But Donald Trump’s treatment of them as diplomatic bargaining chips has suddenly thrust these elements centre stage.
Whether the US President secures any of Ukraine’s rare earths remains to be seen, after his angry meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky left a deal to access them hanging by a thread. Vladimir Putin has been trying to spoil the pact by hawking Russia’s valuable metals to America instead.
Trump’s coveting of Greenland’s geological wealth also shows that obtaining minerals is now a foreign policy priority. Never mind Bitcoin; the likes of bismuth and borates are becoming the new global currency.
British scientists, tech entrepreneurs and industrial chiefs are hoping this sudden focus on the global race to secure supplies of critical minerals serves as a wake-up call for their own country. Because they are concerned Britain is falling behind.
Sourcing these important materials is “really of absolute national importance” for the UK, says Professor Frances Wall of Exeter University, an expert who has served as a government adviser on the Critical Minerals Expert Committee.
Although they’re essential for manufacturing high-tech devices, some can only be mined at a few locations in the world. Others are more common but demand for them is rocketing, forcing nations to compete for strategic supplies.
Wall says that British experts have been “worrying” for some time about China’s dominance in the mining and processing of critical minerals, as well as the use of them in manufacturing. “We’re going to have to work hard to be competitive.”
She hopes that political and media attention to the US-Ukraine negotiations will spur the UK into stronger and more urgent action of its own.
“Every time they say ‘minerals’ on the TV, I think hooray,” says Wall. “We do need to press the panic button a bit, if we want to have the level of innovation and financially competitive industry to keep up with China.”
Critical minerals are not necessarily rare. They’re called “critical” because they’re so important to various products and manufacturing processes – and therefore to jobs, economic performance and national security – but supplies are at risk of being disrupted.
Among the 34 classified as critical in the most recent official UK assessment, for example, are iron which humans have been using for 5,000 years, aluminium which is used for canned foods and drinks, and nickel which is used in 5p and 10 coins.
Some are much less common, however, such as platinum. Niobium can only be mined at a few locations in the entire world.
One of the 34 entries is a group called rare earths, comprised of 17 separate elements.
“Rare earths have loads of applications and are used in all kinds of things,” explains Wall, who researches the sourcing and processing raw materials used in technology, at the Camborne School of Mines.
“If you have a self-cleaning oven, that’s cerium oxide doing the job for you. It’s in the coatings on lenses and the colours on some smartphone screens. It’s why you can have electric windows in your car.”
Some critical minerals, such as lithium, are particularly useful in making magnets which are crucial to green technologies, such as wind turbines and the motors of electric cars.
That is why Elon Musk, the owner of electric-vehicle firm Tesla who is now a member of Trump’s government, may have been a driving force behind trying to achieve a Ukraine deal.
British ministers hope the tech sector will be a major part of the push for higher growth in the economy, especially in helping to meet the national target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Minerals are vital to this, as well as defence and aeronautical firms such as Rolls-Royce, Airbus and BAe.
The UK wants to develop its electric car industry, sustaining vehicle manufacturing which employs 800,000 Britons. But China could gain a stranglehold over the materials it needs, making it uneconomic or practically impossible to build them here.
“It could make all of the electric cars for us, never mind just the batteries, and simply ship them to us. That’s what we’re seeing coming down the road.”
The problem is that much of the world’s supply of rare earths is located in China – such as 98 per cent of the ores containing gallium and 91 per cent of germanium, which are used in computer chips and many other technologies. Last year, China’s authoritarian regime banned the export of these to the US.
China has also established mining operations in many foreign countries through its Belt and Road Initiative.
Once raw minerals have been mined, they need to be processed. But Chinese companies also control 90 per cent of the global processing capacity for rare earths, plus half the capacity for other key minerals needed to make the batteries for electric cars.
The country could also pull ahead of the West in scientific advancement, says Wall. “China has huge research institutes with thousands of researchers in them, working just on rare earths, never mind anything else.”
By contrast, the professor is concerned about a skills shortage in the UK. “We really need more people to come into careers in geology and mineral processing and mining engineering that hardly anybody’s ever heard of.”
Only the Government can help cultivate a national supply chain by funding and incentivising innovative companies, argues Wall.
She was pleased when the previous government produced a critical minerals strategy in 2022, but says it needs to go much further.
She points out that the US and Australia have provided “hundreds of millions of dollars” to schemes aimed at strengthening supplies. In contrast, the UK’s Circular Critical Materials Supply Chains programme known as Climates – which is providing government funding to innovative projects, such as extracting minerals from mining waste or even from the plume of a volcano – was backed with just £15m.
“We’re not in the same league in terms of supporting our industry,” says Wall. “There’s certainly more that could be done.”
The Foreign Affairs Committee warned in 2023 that the UK is “lagging behind its allies,” creating “vulnerabilities in terms of our economic resilience and security.”
Wall suggests the UK also needs to be more decisive. “The UK has done a lot of diplomacy, talking to countries like Zambia and Kazakhstan about minerals. A lot of it is nice words and making connections with companies, but I don’t know what substantive results have come out of it.”
She worries that unless the UK works harder to get deals “over the line, eventually we could find that somebody else has already signed everything up.” She adds: “It’s not too late. There are still opportunities to link up with other countries around the world, there are lots of interesting deposits.”
The good news is that the British Isles have some rich mineral resources of their own. Cornwall is thought to boast the largest lithium source in Europe.
A £15m demonstration plant there opened near St Austell in October, having received funding from the Government’s automotive transformation fund. The UK currently imports all of its lithium, but by 2027 this site alone could produce just under 10 per cent of what’s needed, extracting it from granite in a former clay pit.
Wall hopes that in future, Britain will produce its own tin, tungsten and nickel. Recyling plants should also be able to extract minerals from old batteries and other devices. But all this will require more government support to get it going.
Ukraine claims to have 100 major deposits of titanium, lithium, cobalt and other minerals within its borders, which the US hopes to share in extracting if a deal can still be signed.
However, this assessment is based on old research, it’s not clear how easily these sources could be mined, and many are in territory occupied by Russia.
Putin argues that he could offer the US more than Zelensky ever could, dangling the possibility of American firms working in the Donbas area of Ukraine if Trump allows Russia to keep hold of it. Putin has said Moscow could supply “about 2 million tons to the American market” at “absolutely acceptable market prices”.
Some reports have suggested a potential US-Ukraine deal would be worth trillions, but Wall suspects that much of this sum includes the value of oil and gas reserves rather than critical minerals.
Under the terms of a 100 Year Partnership which Sir Keir Starmer signed with President Volodymyr Zelensky in January, the UK was made a “preferred partner” in Ukraine’s “critical minerals strategy”.
Wall wonders if a US deal might yet trump this. It is possible that “we could be a loser,” she speculates, but the situation is very unclear. She underlines that defence of Ukraine is her biggest wish right now.
The UK and Ukraine were both already members of the Minerals Security Partnership, a US-led initiative for Western nations to collectively rival China. Given that Trump’s overarching tenet is “America First,” however, might a ruthless US stop regarding the UK as a partner and start to outmuscle British counterparts?
Laughing, Wall replies: “I don’t think I need to answer that question – you can come to your own conclusions.”
Trump has vowed to “dig, dig, dig” in Ukraine if a deal does go ahead. But experts have highlighted that on average it takes 18 years to develop a mine, and that’s without considering the safety and security risks of doing so in a country that has been at war.
It can be hard to secure minerals deals, but that’s just the first challenge. Often it’s even harder to extract them. That’s another reason why they are so valuable to the US, Ukraine and the UK.
@robhastings.bsky.social
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