Jon Emont of The Wall Street Journal reports that Western efforts to make a dent are languishing; ‘China is not just standing still waiting for us to catch up’; they are, in fact, winning the minerals war. Emont writes:
For the past few years, the West has been trying to break China’s grip on minerals that are critical for defense and green technologies. Despite their efforts, Chinese companies are becoming more dominant, not less.
They are expanding operations, supercharging supply and causing prices to drop. Their challengers can’t compete.
“China is not just standing still waiting for us to catch up,” said Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines. “They are making investments on top of their already massive investments in all aspects of the critical-minerals supply chain.”
Take nickel, which is needed for electric-vehicle batteries. Chinese processing plants that dot the Indonesian archipelago are pumping out vast quantities of the mineral from new and expanding facilities, jolting the market.[…]
“It’s just a simple, straightforward engineering capability that the Chinese have that has been lost in the rest of the world,”
-said Jim Lennon, managing director for commodities strategy at Macquarie, an Australian bank.
“At today’s prices, the economics for new greenfield projects, particularly in the West are not supported,” Kent Masters, chief executive of Albemarle, the largest U.S. lithium producer, said this year. Unless prices rise, Masters has said he doesn’t think there is a “business case” for a complete Western lithium supply chain.
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