The Lyceum: Critical Minerals Weekly — May 13, 2026

The week's signal isn't a single shock — it's the sound of countries quietly placing their chips before China's rare earth export suspension expires on November 10, 2026. India is sprinting toward a minerals pact with Russia. Indonesia is about to break ground on rare earth processing from tin waste. South Korea named China explicitly as the target of its new processing program. And lithium carbonate just crossed CNY 200,000 per tonne in China — the highest in nearly three years — with data center buyers now sitting in the demand stack alongside automakers. The hedging phase is over; the placing-bets phase has begun.

• CATL — Third-Generation Shengxing Battery (CATL): Per CATL's Chinese-language launch coverage, the new LFP cell delivers an approximately 6.5-minute fast charge with more than 90% capacity retention after 1,000+ cycles — tightening the specification ceiling for lithium carbonate purity and graphite anode quality.
• Nissan — New Leaf EV Motor (Nissan): Per Nissan's release and Nikkei Asia reporting, the motor in the Leaf that went on sale in Japan in January cuts heavy rare earth use (dysprosium, terbium) by roughly 90% compared with the previous Leaf motor design, while still relying on light rare earths neodymium and praseodymium.
• Kirchardt Battery Recycling Facility — Expanded Permit (Fortum): Per Fortum, the German site received an expanded environmental permit enabling capacity growth in battery dismantling and black-mass preparation; Fortum claims its process recovers 95% of valuable metals from black mass.
• Industrial Hydromet Recycling Plant (tozero): A German industrial-scale hydromet plant now operating at roughly 10,000 tonnes/year of EV packs, producing battery-grade salts suitable for LFP supply chains.
• Silmet Rare Earth Separation Facility (Neo Performance Materials): Capacity expansion progress at the Sillamäe, Estonia plant — the only operating rare earth separation-to-metals facility in Europe at the step that turns oxides into magnet-ready material.

Reuters reported this week, citing two sources familiar with the matter, that India and Russia are seeking to sign a preliminary agreement on exploration, processing, and technological cooperation in critical minerals — including lithium and rare earths — within two months. India's Ministry of Mines has already shared a draft with Moscow.

Read past the headline. India has signed plenty of exploration deals; what's different here is the processing and metallurgy clause. India holds monazite deposits but imports nearly all of its high-performance NdFeB (neodymium-iron-boron) magnets — the workhorse magnet inside EV motors, wind turbines, and guided munitions. Russia, meanwhile, consumes roughly 3,000 tonnes of rare earth metals annually but produces only about 50 tonnes domestically, with imports covering more than 98% of demand. Russia accounts for roughly 1% of global rare earth production. So this is not a supplier swap. It is two countries with complementary gaps trying to build a processing capability neither has.

If it succeeds, India gets a non-Chinese pathway toward magnet metallurgy and Moscow gets a customer for a downstream industry it doesn't yet have. If it fails — and India has a thin operational track record converting minerals diplomacy into running plants, with exactly one overseas lithium project signed (Argentina, 2024) — the tell will be the absence of project-level financing or a named JV within twelve months of signing. Watch whether the deal touches Rosatom's lithium project in Mali, which India previously walked away from over security. The draft-sharing detail is the most concrete piece here; everything else is two unnamed sources, so treat as credible but preliminary.

Chinese lithium carbonate prices rose past CNY 195,000 per tonne in early May and have been reported trading around CNY 200,000 per tonne as of mid-May 2026, the highest in nearly three years. Eighteen months ago, after the brutal 2024 correction that killed financing across three continents, this would have looked like fantasy.

Market participants point to buyers beyond EVs. Trading Economics flagged fresh buying from data center operators, whose grid-scale storage systems require more lithium per facility than passenger EV fleets. That's a structural shift: data centers are now a floor-setting buyer for lithium, not a marginal one. Layer in BYD revising its 2026 overseas sales forecast up to 1.5 million units from 1.3 million, oil prices supporting EV adoption, and CATL's Jianxiawo mine at a standstill — amid CATL buying externally, markets see the supply side strained. CME lithium carbonate futures recorded a second consecutive record monthly volume in April 2026, per CME data, a sign procurement teams are scrambling to hedge.

If CNY 200,000 per tonne holds through Q2 2026, hard-rock projects that went dormant in 2024 — particularly in Canada and Zimbabwe — start looking financeable again, and the 2027 surplus thesis quietly dies. If it doesn't, watch for whether CATL restarts Jianxiawo, which would signal the price has overshot fundamentals.

The new Leaf, on sale in Japan since January, uses roughly 90% less heavy rare earths than the original, according to Nikkei Asia; the reduction is measured relative to the previous Leaf motor design. The Rare Earth Exchanges teardown clarifies what Nikkei's headline elides: the cut is specifically in dysprosium and terbium, now roughly 1% of magnet weight. The motors still rely heavily on light rare earths — neodymium and praseodymium.

That distinction is the whole story. Heavy rare earths are the ones Beijing controls most tightly and has been actively licensing through the April 2025 export regime. Light rare earths are available outside China — MP Materials in California, Lynas in Australia. So Nissan has meaningfully reduced its exposure to China's most aggressive lever, without eliminating rare earth dependency. IDTechEx projects nearly 30% of the EV market will use rare-earth-free motors by 2036, with Europe and the U.S. moving fastest, according to Electric Vehicles Research.

If this engineering route generalizes across Japanese and Korean OEMs, the dysprosium and terbium licensing weapon loses some of its bite — and Beijing's leverage shifts toward neodymium, which is harder to weaponize because supply is more dispersed. If it doesn't generalize, the signal will be heavy rare earth oxide prices: continued strength would suggest the substitution remains a Nissan-specific engineering achievement, not an industry trend.

At PDAC 2026, allied governments and public finance arms announced roughly $12.1 billion across about 30 partnerships explicitly aimed at mines and midstream processing outside China. The pivot from "exploration deals" to "processing-backed projects" is the meaningful part: financing structured to underwrite refining and separation, not just ore supply.

This matters because plants get built when processing is bankable, and processing becomes bankable when state finance absorbs the offtake risk private capital won't. If a meaningful share of these commitments converts to final investment decisions within twelve months, the chronic gap between minerals diplomacy and operational capacity finally starts to close. If conversion lags, watch for whether Canada's Electra refinery expansion and Australia's Browns Range financing get follow-on tranches — those are the bellwether assets that tell you whether allied capital actually believes its own press releases.

South Korea's Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM) announced a national initiative — reported by Korean outlets as the "K-Plant Project" — to develop domestic rare earth processing capable of competing with China's industrial base. KIGAM's stated goal: separation and processing technology that surpasses China's in efficiency and purity.

This is a processing-first strategy, not a mining strategy, which is the right call. South Korea has no significant domestic rare earth deposits, but it has world-class chemical engineering — the same industrial base that built the semiconductor and battery industries. The question is whether KIGAM's research mandate becomes industrial capacity. If Samsung, Hyundai, or LG attach procurement commitments, the K-Plant becomes a supply chain. Without offtake, it remains a government lab program — and the tell will be the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy's next budget cycle. No capital line, no chain. Source: Seoul Economic Daily, Chosunbiz, 동아사이언스 (Korean).

This week: Indonesia turning tin waste into a rare earth play, a Nissan Leaf motor that ditched roughly 90% of its dysprosium but kept its neodymium, and Lula telling Washington that Brazil's rocks come with strings attached. The hedging phase is over and the placing-bets phase has begun — half the bets are on countries that have never run a separation plant, against the one country that runs almost all of them, with the clock running down to November 10, 2026. May your offtake agreements be signed and your tungsten cost models be revised.

Forward this to the procurement lead still pretending the November 10, 2026 deadline is somebody else's problem.