Critical Minerals Weekly — Mar 09, 2026

The U.S. hosted a 54-nation summit, signed eleven new mineral deals, and unveiled a $10 billion financing vehicle — and refining concentration actually got worse since 2020, not better. China's one-year pause on export controls expires on November 10, 2026, and the infrastructure to choke global rare earth flows is built, tested, and waiting. The gap between announcement and execution has never been wider, and this week made that painfully clear.

If you're an OEM procurement director trying to figure out whether the U.S. government's diplomatic flurry will change your 2028 sourcing options, here's the honest answer: not yet — but the architecture is getting built faster than it was a year ago.

The U.S. Secretary of State, joined by the Vice President and a full cabinet bench, hosted 54 countries and the European Commission at the 2026 Critical Minerals Ministerial. The headline: eleven new bilateral frameworks or MOUs — non-binding cooperation agreements — with Argentina, the Cook Islands, Ecuador, Guinea, Morocco, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, the UAE, the UK, and Uzbekistan. Guinea holds a very large share of global bauxite reserves. Morocco has phosphate rock. The Philippines is where nickel laterite processing is expanding.

The qualifier: the U.S. signed ten other mineral frameworks in the five months prior, and most haven't yet translated into financed, permitted projects with binding offtake. These are diplomatic scaffolding, not shovels in the ground.

Three things from the ministerial that matter operationally. First, the Export-Import Bank approved a direct loan of up to $10 billion for "Project Vault" — one of the largest financings in EXIM's history — intended to shield domestic manufacturers from supply shocks. Real money, real loans. But the projects it will fund are still being identified. Second, a new coordination forum called FORGE, chaired initially by South Korea, is intended to tackle project-level chokepoints — if it moves from policy talk to coordinated financing, it could shave months off cross-border approvals. Third, Canada rolled out a C$12.1 billion allied-focused package aimed at joint projects and a proposed Critical Minerals Sovereign Fund. If Ottawa follows through on project-level allocations, it could materially change which Canadian ores become midstream processing projects rather than raw export candidates.

Watch which specific assets draw Project Vault's first disbursements. That's where the policy becomes supply chain reality.

The single most important countdown in global critical minerals is one most procurement teams haven't fully internalized.

China suspended implementation of its expansive export controls — covering gallium, germanium, antimony, graphite, superhard materials, and a suite of rare earth elements — from November 2025 through November 2026, framing it as a confidence-building measure after a Trump‑Xi meeting. The suspension gave manufacturers breathing room. But the breathing room is finite, and the fire suppression system hasn't been dismantled — it's been manually switched off.

Crucially, China's April 2025 restrictions on seven heavy rare earths — the elements that make high-performance permanent magnets work at elevated temperatures, exactly the magnets in EV motors and missile guidance systems — were never suspended. Neither were permanent controls on tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum, and indium. And in January 2026, China imposed new dual-use controls targeting Japan specifically.

This week brought a sharper signal: reporting flagged that MOFCOM tightened quotas for gallium and germanium around March 5 — a move market participants read as a targeted squeeze, not an administrative hiccup. Meanwhile, Beijing's new five-year plan explicitly calls for strengthening China's rare earth competitiveness and value-chain integration, underscoring that the pause is tactical, not strategic.

Defense procurement teams and semiconductor fabs should be modeling what their supply looks like on November 11, 2026 — not waiting to see how diplomacy develops.

The IEA's latest data offers a reality check that should be printed and taped to the wall of every allied government's minerals war room.

For copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and rare earths, the average market share of the top three refining nations rose to 86% in 2024, up from around 82% in 2020 — a rise of four percentage points between 2020 and 2024. Almost all supply growth has come from the single top supplier: Indonesia for nickel, China for many other processing stages. Based on current policy settings and investment trends, the IEA projects that concentration will decline only marginally over the next decade.

This is not a mining problem. There is ore in Canada, Australia, the DRC, Brazil, and dozens of other places. The gap is processing, not geology. Building a mine without a downstream refinery is like building a port without ships.

One concrete counterpoint this week: Australia broke ground on a $1.2 billion HPAL nickel refinery on March 4 — HPAL stands for High Pressure Acid Leach, the capital-intensive process that converts laterite ore into battery-grade nickel sulfate. Led by Wyloo Metals, it's the first non-Chinese HPAL plant to reach construction in years. If built to schedule, it could shift a sliver of refining capacity by 2028. Breaking ground matters — construction is often when projects stall. Watch this plant's offtake partners — if major OEMs sign on, it's the kind of project that actually moves the concentration needle.

Every project announcement that doesn't include a processing pathway should be treated with deep skepticism.

The collapse of Li-Cycle was one of the more instructive cautionary tales of the battery recycling boom: brilliant technology, terrible capital structure, a $1.7 billion DOE loan commitment that couldn't save a company that ran out of cash before its Rochester, New York hub was operating. The interesting story is who picked up the pieces.

Glencore completed its acquisition of key Li‑Cycle assets in August 2025 through a credit-bid process valued at more than $40 million. The prize: a network of lithium-ion battery recycling facilities in the U.S. and Canada, including the Rochester processing hub — designed to handle "black mass" (the shredded output of spent battery cells containing lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese) and refine it into battery-grade materials. That's the hard part of the recycling chain: converting shredded cells into specification-grade cathode precursors.

Glencore now controls one of the only operating black‑mass‑to‑battery‑grade refining assets outside China in North America. That's strategically significant — and almost entirely uncovered. No public timeline has been disclosed for when Rochester reaches commercial-scale processing. Watch whether Glencore pursues the DOE financing that Li‑Cycle couldn't survive to receive.

The IEA reports that two-thirds of global battery recycling capacity growth since 2020 has been in China (IEA, 2025). If allied nations are counting on recycling to reduce primary mineral dependency, they need to build that capacity at home.

Demand analysts and price signals are telling contradictory stories about lithium, and that contradiction has real consequences for which projects get financed this year.

J.P. Morgan forecasts global lithium demand to grow 16% year-over-year in 2026, with 58% of incremental demand from EVs and 30% from grid-scale energy storage. The problem: lithium prices, which surged eightfold during 2021–22, have fallen over 80% since 2023, returning to pre-pandemic levels. That collapse has already killed or deferred multiple projects that needed $20,000+ per tonne of lithium carbonate equivalent to justify their capital costs.

If LCE stays below roughly $12,000–$14,000 per tonne, a significant share of the project pipeline outside Australia and South America loses its financing case. That means 16% demand growth could meet constrained supply by the late 2020s — not because there isn't enough lithium in the ground, but amid price signals that have discouraged investment in processing capacity.

Two structural shifts are reshaping the demand picture. First, LFP batteries — Lithium Iron Phosphate, which contain no nickel or cobalt — are growing at double-digit rates and being rapidly adopted by Western automakers for entry-level models. Every EV with an LFP pack is direct demand reduction for nickel and cobalt, while concentrating pressure on lithium and high-purity graphite. Second, Chile consolidated state influence over the Salar de Atacama through a Codelco-SQM joint venture called NovaAndino Litio, giving the state majority influence over one of the world's richest brine deposits through 2060. For battery makers, that means negotiating with a supplier that is now explicitly an arm of the Chilean state.