Gracelyn Baskerin
Appearances
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
And what this means, because the US doesn't necessarily have alternate supply, is that we now face supply chain vulnerabilities and potentially undermine our ability to protect ourselves in the instance of war.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
We've seen President Trump talk a lot about critical minerals. So we've seen executive orders on domestic production and processing, international cooperation. We've heard the president talk about it in the context of Ukraine.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
We've seen him talk about mining under the sea. This administration is really thinking about all of the above, home, abroad, production, processing, on land, underwater, but really going at it with all the tools in the toolkit.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
So President Trump has pushed for the reconstruction deal that we signed with Ukraine, which essentially creates a fund that in the long term is capitalized by future mineral oil and gas revenue in Ukraine, as well as co-capitalized by the United States.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
Now, Ukraine is a complicated place, though, and here's why. Some minerals are a little bit more, you know, what we might call shovel-ready, right? Something like lithium. But even then you have complexity because two of the four lithium reserves in Ukraine are actually on Russian-occupied land. We actually don't have a good understanding of what is economically viable.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
So DRC has become a hot area in terms of mobilizing U.S. government efforts. So what's happened is there has been a conflict, a long-running conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
Now, what President of Congo, the DRC, came to President Trump and said is like, we need military support. And in exchange, we will give you access to minerals. So essentially a mineral for military support deal.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
What we have seen already happen is that through the Trump administration, they have negotiated essentially a principles framework for peace that gives U.S. access to minerals in both Rwanda and the DRC, a separate deal. And there will be a third deal that is a peace deal between the DRC and Rwanda.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
This is a game changer because DRC has a very, very developed mining sector. So 70% of the world's cobalt comes out of the Congo. They have fantastic lithium and nickel reserves. So it's a place where we see that we could actually get minerals for American offtake quite quickly, which makes it quite an interesting place for the administration to be targeting efforts.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
Greenland is a strategic area for two reasons. One is from a national security position. It's geographically well positioned. The second is a critical mineral story. But we have to acknowledge, you know, there's a lot of minerals in Greenland. However, it's not all easily or cost effectively mined.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
And cost competitiveness is a critical determining factor in whether a mining company is obviously going to go extract it. So it's a long-term look, and obviously Greenland and Denmark have said they are interested in private exploration and potentially sale of private land. However, they're not looking to be annexed.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
There are absolutely more diplomatic ways to pursue mining interests in Greenland. And we have to remember that it's not just about the U.S. and Greenland here. It's also about our European allies. We are not going to out-compete China alone. We are going to need our European allies. We're going to need allies in emerging markets. We're going to need Canada.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
So we're going to have to find a more diplomatic approach to pursuing our minerals security goals with Greenland.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
coast. China, however, is warning that this could break international law.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
You know, this is a great question and it's probably going to be one of those interesting things that we will watch play out in the next few years because there's a lot of mineral potential underwater, but there's a lot of challenges that we have. So one is licensing, right? We have now, we have our licensing system and the International Seabed Authority has their own licensing system.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
What happens when there's a dispute between these two frameworks? We're not really sure, number one. Number two, there's maritime security implications that we're not thinking about. We're going to have Chinese ships sitting between Mexico and Hawaii under the guise of deep sea mining without a clear way of how to monitor and manage that in an era where geopolitical tension is quite rife.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
And then the third thing which we obviously hear about the most probably is the environmental implications because we actually don't know. We don't, it's not that we know it's good or we know it's bad, it's we haven't really done it at commercial scale. So there's still a lot of questions about how to manage that.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
So I want to actually go back to Trump's first administration. It was really 2017 where President Trump passed the first executive order mandating that we take a better look at our supply chains, understand our vulnerabilities and identify what we need to do. So this was started under Trump's first administration.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
Then we went to Biden and President Biden actually built on the efforts of President Trump. And the big thing that President Biden did was obviously the Inflation Reduction Act, which created a demand signal. It encouraged you to buy the EV. And by encouraging you to buy the EV, I encouraged large scale mineral investments because we need far more minerals for EVs in any other industry.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
And then now we go to President Trump. And while certain things like the Inflation Reduction Act are clearly incongruent with the current administration, we see a further acceleration. But all to say that minerals are the most bipartisan issue in Washington, D.C. And we generally, with some changes, have seen administrations build on what the previous has done.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
We are starting to see the rise of minerals diplomacy, which is what happens when we embed minerals into our foreign policy. We are forging alliances. We are making strategic decisions. We are pursuing certain objectives, all driven by a need to enhance our mineral security, which we acknowledge we can't do alone. Because at the end of the day, the U.S. still has limited geological reserves.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
So we have less than 1% of the world's cobalt, nickel and graphite. So we have to work with other countries.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
So China has built this advantage in minerals through about 40 years of concerted effort by linking up their foreign policy. So when you look at how they've used things like Belt and Road Initiative, they have spent their money and made their decisions to secure minerals from Africa, Latin America, Asia, Australia, and then they bring it back home for processing.
Today, Explained
The minerals that rule our world
So when we look at some of our key minerals like rare earths, graphite, cobalt, lithium, nickel, like they process between 40 and 90% of the world's supply. What this means for the United States is that China can now weaponize these minerals.