cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/5399208
Australia and Canada will jointly invest in critical minerals, including processing each other’s resources, in a landmark collaboration designed to wean themselves off China.
Resources Minister Madeleine King said global efforts to diversify supply chains for the vital minerals had concentrated in response to China’s recent restrictions on exports.
Even though China President Xi Jinping put a year-long pause on these restrictions after meeting Donald Trump this week, the volatility had made other countries conscious of their vulnerabilities.
“The arbitrary nature of that export restriction and the equally arbitrary nature of it being taken off – with little detail around the nature of that lift of those restrictions – just shows why it’s important to have an alternative, trusted supply chain,” Ms King, pictured below, told The West from Canada, where she has joined G7 energy ministers shaping the critical minerals action plan leaders agreed to in June.
That plan is about creating an alternative market for critical minerals and rare earths that reflects the price of production in “open-market countries” with high ESG standards, such as Australia and Canada.
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So why don’t we process our own then, it were processing someone else’s anyway…
The deal envisages the two countries co-investing in commercially viable projects and making offtake agreements so that resources mined in Australia will be processed in Canada and vice versa.
The plan is to ultimately be able to do three things; mine our own resources and process them domestically, mine our own resources and export them to Canada for processing, take in Canadian resources and process them locally.
As a plan, it sounds good enough and well overdue - but there are still many ways for it to fail, or become uncompetitive on a global scale if it devolves into a protection-racket or cartel.
Processing for rare earth minerals is costly and environmentally hazardous. The elements of interest are only found in very low percentages so you need to process huge amounts of material to extract them. The slag from this process is very toxic and takes up a lot of space to dispose of.