Mine the Gap

Source details

Gracelin Baskaran is the founding director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a mining economist with a PhD from the University of Cambridge.
Her interest in minerals was cemented while living in Rustenburg, South Africa, when the town produced 70 percent of the world’s platinum but then faced a collapse in demand in the late 2010s as the world transitioned to electric vehicles.
Minerals are described as “mission critical” to economic, national, and energy security because they are inputs to phones, computers, defense technologies, semiconductors, and vehicles.

Export restrictions by a single country can disrupt global manufacturing: China imposed restrictions sequentially on germanium and gallium (used for semiconductors and chips), graphite (used for electric vehicles), and rare earths, causing production stoppages (for example, Ford manufacturing in Chicago and Suzuki manufacturing in Japan were affected).
Concentration of processing or export capability in one country creates significant economic risk for global supply chains and factory floors.
The race for critical minerals is comparable in importance to historical oil rushes but is more geographically dispersed; minerals are “everywhere,” making cartelization harder than for oil.

Industrial policy is framed as a historical tool used to nurture nascent industries (examples: Japan subsidizing Honda; Finland subsidizing Nokia).
Mining and minerals processing are nascent outside existing dominant players and often require support—subsidies, grants for processing facilities, or equity investments—until they can compete commercially.
Mining development timelines are long: it takes 29 years for a mine to start producing after a deposit is first identified.
Project Vault is described as a U.S. economic security stockpile designed to ensure availability of minerals for civilian technologies (auto manufacturers, semiconductor companies, energy manufacturers) in case of export cutoffs or trade disruptions; it reframes mineral security as both a national security and economic security imperative.
Historical precedent: stockpiling for defense has existed since 1939.

The primary difficulty with rare earths is processing, not extraction: rare earths require separation in a process of more than 50 steps to achieve necessary purity.
China has concentrated technological know‑how and processing capacity: it was processing 99.5 percent of heavy rare earths when export restrictions were put in place.
Because processing capacity is concentrated and processing is complex and time‑intensive, reliance on a single country for processing is likely to persist for some time.

The global minerals scramble has shifted external engagement with Africa from mainly aid to “commercial diplomacy,” increasing competition for African resources and creating opportunities for better value propositions for resource‑producing countries.
Several African countries (explicitly cited: Ghana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe) have introduced restrictions on mineral exports to capture more in‑country value addition, asserting that “If you’re not processing here, minerals aren’t leaving the country.”
Realizing benefits depends on stable investment environments: consistent policies (particularly taxation), and reinvestment of resource revenues in physical infrastructure, human capital, and sustainable resource management.
Achieving the necessary level of policy stability to create an investible market where benefits are shared “remains a struggle.”

Clean‑energy technologies are the biggest drivers of mineral demand.
Comparative mineral intensity: the average internal combustion engine uses 32 kilograms of critical minerals; the average electric vehicle uses 210 kilograms of critical minerals—a sixfold increase.
Transitioning to clean energy will require substantial expansion of mining and processing capacity beyond current levels to meet increased demand.

Source: Mine the Gap, BRUCE EDWARDS, F&D Magazine, June 2026