Twitter

Europe Mining

Column: US aluminum tariffs threaten scrap clash with European Union – by Andy Home (Reuters – June 9, 2025)

https://www.reuters.com/

US President Donald Trump’s move to double tariffs on aluminum imports heightens the risk of a full-blown scrap war with the European Union. Although they are supposed to be blanket tariffs with no exceptions or exemptions, there is one significant gap in the tariff wall.

Aluminum scrap is explicitly excluded on the grounds it constitutes a key raw material for US manufacturers. The Trump administration’s decision to lift aluminum tariffs to 25% effective the start of March has already caused US imports of recyclable material to rise.

Read more

EU adds 13 new critical mineral projects abroad – by Staff (Mining.com – June 3, 2025)

https://www.mining.com/

The European Union has selected 13 new strategic raw materials projects outside its borders as part of its push to secure critical mineral supplies.

The full list of new projects spans 13 countries: Canada, Greenland, Kazakhstan, Norway, Serbia, Ukraine, Zambia, New Caledonia, Brazil, Madagascar, Malawi, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. The initiative comes as the bloc seeks to reduce its reliance on China, which tightened export controls on rare earth magnets in April.

Read more

Mount Etna erupts, unleashing lava – and possibly hidden minerals – by Staff (Mining.com – June 3, 2025)

https://www.mining.com/

Italy’s Mount Etna, Europe’s tallest and most active volcano, erupted this week in a spectacular display, sending plumes of ash and gas high into the Sicilian sky and captivating onlookers with one of its most dramatic outbursts in years.

The eruption originated from the volcano’s southeast crater, where a combination of a white ash plume and a grey cloud, resulting from a crater collapse and subsequent avalanche, produced a powerful pyroclastic flow. While pyroclastic flows are highly dangerous due to their heat and mobility, the event occurred in an uninhabited area.

Read more

Trump Dreams of Minerals: in Ukraine and Greenland – by John Feffer (Foreign Policy in Focus – May 28, 2025)

https://fpif.org/

Trump wants to keep the US in, China out, and everyone else down.

The clean energy transition that the Biden administration touted as the focus of its industrial policy required large amounts of mineral inputs. Batteries for electric vehicles depend on lithium, solar panels contain gallium and molybdenum, and powerful magnets in wind turbines can’t be built without rare earth elements.

Biden’s landmark legislation, such as the 2022 Inflation Adjustment Act, effectively resurrected industrial policy in the United States but this time on the basis of a shift away from fossil fuels. Donald Trump, since taking office in early 2025, has swung U.S. policy back again toward oil, gas, and coal. But the Trump administration is no less interested in securing access to minerals.

Read more

Why the US-Ukraine Minerals Deal Matters – by Kateryna Odarchenko and Serhii Kolisnyk (CEPA.org – May 16, 2025)

Home

The agreement to set up a US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund reinforces security, sovereignty and strategic supply chains.

The long-awaited investment plan agreed with the US on April 30 marks a pivotal step in Kyiv’s efforts to rebuild its war-torn economy, reduce reliance on legacy industries, and assert sovereignty over its natural wealth. It also reflects growing US interest in diversifying critical mineral supply chains away from China while sending a signal to Moscow about Washington’s strategic commitment to Ukraine.

The deal serves as a framework for strengthening and formalizing cooperation between Ukraine and the US, and represents a significant opportunity for Ukraine to attract investment, accelerate post-war reconstruction, and assert greater control over its economic future. While the agreement lays a strong foundation, further clarity is needed about the allocation of the fund’s resources, which will be addressed in detail in the forthcoming Limited Partnership (LP) agreement.

Read more

France’s Orano files lawsuit over staff detention in Niger – by Anna Peverieri, Forrest Crellin and Portia Crowe(Reuters – May 13, 2025)

https://www.reuters.com/

French uranium miner Orano said on Tuesday it had filed a lawsuit with the Niger courts over the “arbitrary arrest, illegal detention and unjust confiscation of property” involving its staff and assets in the country.

Niger and neighbouring Mali and Burkina Faso have been stepping up pressure on foreign mining companies over the past year, seizing assets and removing permits as all three Sahel countries look to assert more sovereignty over their natural resources.

Read more

OPINION: Donald Trump’s Ukraine minerals deals looks to be more about oil and gas than rare earths – by Eric Reguly (Globe and Mail – May 3, 2025)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

On the morning of Pope Francis’s April 26 funeral, U.S. President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, sat alone on two red chairs, facing one another, in the largely empty St. Peter’s Basilica. At the time, the topic of the impromptu mini-summit amid the baroque opulence of the Vatican was not known.

Less than a week later, all became clear. The two leaders were wrapping up the fraught Ukraine-U.S. minerals deal, discussions of which had sometimes been ill-tempered and explosive since Mr. Trump’s election campaign in the fall. On Thursday, in his evening address from Kyiv, Mr. Zelensky said, “In fact, now we have the first result of the Vatican meeting, which makes it truly historic.”

Read more

With Minerals Deal, Trump Ties Himself to Future of Ukraine – by Kim Barker (New York Times – May 1, 2025)

https://www.nytimes.com/

The text of the agreement, made public by Ukraine’s government, made no mention of the security guarantees that Kyiv had long sought.

The minerals deal signed by the United States and Ukraine on Wednesday could bring untold money into a joint investment fund between the two countries that would help rebuild Ukraine whenever the war with Russia ends. But Ukraine’s untapped resources that are the subject of the deal will take years to extract and yield profits. And those could fail to deliver the kind of wealth that President Trump has long said they would.

It is not yet clear how the nine-page deal, the text of which Ukraine’s government made public on Thursday, will work in practice. Many specifics need to be worked out, but the deal will set up an investment fund, jointly managed by Kyiv and Washington.

Read more

US-Europe fault lines widen over critical raw materials at IEA energy security summit – by Julienne Raboca (Fastmarkets – April 28, 2025)

Home

US advocates for continued fossil fuel development

At a panel on integrating energy security within a broader security network, acting US Assistant Secretary for Energy – Tommy Joyce delivered a blunt assessment of clean energy technology vulnerabilities, directly challenging the European push for rapid decarbonization.

“For true energy security, we must leverage all resources that are affordable, that are available, and that are secure,” Joyce said. “It’s about energy addition, not subtraction. And there’s no world in which the demand for energy is going to decrease.”

Read more

EU Decoded: Is the EU losing the geopolitical race for critical raw minerals? – by Mared Gwyn Jones (Euro News – April 22, 2025)

https://www.euronews.com/

The EU wants to cut reliance on powers like China for mineral supplies by the end of the decade. As geopolitical tensions boil, EU Decoded asks whether the bloc can keep up with its competitors. World powers are scrambling to get ahead in the race for the minerals needed to produce new technologies such as microchips, solar panels and electric cars.

US President Donald Trump has invoked wartime powers to boost American production, and has contemplated the use of economic, military and diplomatic force to gain access to Canada, Greenland and Ukraine’s mineral wealth.

Read more

Britain’s race to take control of its last major steel plant from Chinese owner – by Christian Edwards (CNN.com – April 16, 2025)

https://www.cnn.com/

Britain’s parliament is only recalled at times of national crisis. But when lawmakers were brought back from their Easter vacation last weekend, the cause was not a war, terror attack or the death of a monarch – but the potential closure of a steel plant in northern England.

The government said the owner of the British Steel complex in Scunthorpe, the Chinese company Jingye, was prepared to cancel orders for the raw materials needed to keep its blast furnaces burning, a step that would leave Britain unable to make virgin steel for the first time since the Industrial Revolution.

Read more

Ukraine: What’s up with Europe’s largest lithium deposits – by Maryna Barba (DW.com – April 12, 2025)

https://www.dw.com/en/

Washington and Kyiv are still negotiating their rare earths agreement. But what do Ukrainians who live near potential mines think of it all?

In Polokhivske it’s as if time has stood still. Only a handful of people live here, its houses are abandoned and decrepit, stubbled fields as far as the eye can see. Things are no different in neighboring Kopanki, where nearly every house has been abandoned. The few people who live here tell DW that only one child was born in the village in 2024.

“I started working here in 1976,” says Volodymyr, a Kopanki retiree. “I was the four-hundredth worker in the collective and now there probably aren’t 100 people living here in the village. We only have funerals anymore, never any weddings, things aren’t like they used to be.”

Read more

In Potential Russia Sanctions Removal, Diamonds Illustrate the Complexities – by Brad Brooks-Rubin (Just Security – April 10, 2025)

https://www.justsecurity.org/

Amid intense uncertainty and speculation about the future of sanctions related to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, companies across all sectors are beginning to imagine what a future of sanctions relief may mean for them.

One of those sectors is that of mining and sales of natural diamonds, which is navigating a number of major challenges, only some of which are directly or indirectly connected to business involving Russia. In any case, what happens in the diamond industry related to Russia could be particularly instructive for other sectors because of its exposure to Western consumers, the physical capability of tracing the product along the supply chain from beginning to end, and its experience with mechanisms intended to improve and promote standards for responsible business.

Read more

America’s long Arctic love affair is culminating in Trump’s designs on Greenland – by Peter Harmsen (Globe and Mail – April 2, 2025)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Peter Harmsen is a journalist and the author of Fury and Ice: Greenland, the United States and Germany in World War II.

The historically minded among us may have sensed a certain déjà vu this weekend when U.S. President Donald Trump talked to NBC News about the role military force could play in gaining control of Greenland, currently an autonomous territory of long-time ally Denmark: “I don’t take anything off the table.”

After all, in 1940, when the Americans were slowly waking up from their isolationist slumber to side with the Western democracies in the struggle against fascism, they took a break from this grand mission to threaten Canada and Britain with armed might to keep Greenland to themselves.

Read more

Why UK is close to becoming only G7 nation without steel production ability – by Rishabh Sharma (Business Standard – March 31, 2025)

https://www.business-standard.com/

The United Kingdom, once the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, now faces a major crisis in its steel industry. British Steel has announced plans to close its two blast furnaces and steelmaking operations in Scunthorpe, a move that threatens up to 2,700 jobs and marks the end of more than 160 years of steel production in the town.

The company, owned by China’s Jingye Group, has cited financial losses of £700,000 per day as well as economic pressures including tariffs and rising environmental costs. The decision has been met with strong criticism from trade unions, who have described it as “devastating”.

Read more