Reports
Europe’s battery strategy
Europe is on a mission to increase its production of batteries by establishing a foundation for large-scale supply chains on the continent. It is a tricky proposition, not least because it is an expensive plan to carry out and China already holds the dominant position. Success, however, could benefit a ...
Rare earth minerals return to the U.S. security agenda
China has recently hinted that it could use its stranglehold on the production and processing of rare earth elements to strike at the U.S. economy. The Trump administration has put forth several new initiatives for ending the U.S. reliance on rare earth imports from China and building a domestic supply ...
Opinion: Bolivia’s leftist president is feeling the heat
As President Evo Morales gears up to run for an unconstitutional fourth term, Bolivian politics enter a pivotal year. The last successful member of Latin America’s “pink wave” of leftist governments that rose to power on the commodities boom of the early 2000s must now deal with slumping hydrocarbon revenues ...
Chile’s Pinera struggles to make headway
Midway through his term, Chile’s President Sebastian Pinera is facing resistance to his agenda from a hostile congress. His clumsy handling of several domestic crises has not helped his government gain traction. The economy is doing well, though, fueled by copper exports. But that poses a danger as well – ...
The global battery race: Europe’s strategic perspectives
Slow at first to pick up on the disruptive nature of battery technology, Europe is now aiming to give the industry a boost. The U.S. and Asia, especially, have a head start. The stakes are high: if Europe loses out, not only could it suffer economically, it could also lose ...
Uncertain strategies for securing supplies of critical raw materials
Western industries are faced with a grave challenge: the exploding demand for rare metals and elements required by cutting-edge decarbonization and digitalization technologies could far outpace the projected growth in their supplies. Moreover, the global market for these raw materials is dominated by a handful of countries, and the usual ...
The growing importance of raw material supplies
As new technologies grow in popularity, rare earths and other critical raw materials like lithium and cobalt are becoming crucial to the global economy. But their production is often concentrated in one or two countries, raising the risk that supply could be cut off suddenly. Perhaps most worrisome, China has ...
GIS Dossier: China dominates the rare earths supply chain
The unique chemical and physical properties of rare earth elements make many cutting-edge technologies possible. China is richly endowed with the resource and once attempted to corner the REEs market. Beijing’s predatory policy was thwarted by the WHO and the global economic slowdown, but the West’s efforts to develop alternative ...
