Can the West ‘friendshore’ enough critical minerals?

Over the coming years, Western countries will require tremendous volumes of critical minerals given the demand for mineral-rich technologies like electric vehicle batteries.

A popular policy proposal for supplying and de-risking this mineral demand in industrialized Western countries is “friendshoring,” where partner countries source extracted minerals from each other instead of relying on geopolitical adversaries, namely China.

For example, Australia and the European Union recently signed a memorandum of understanding to increase collaboration and investment in critical mineral supply chains.

In this article’s context, “the West” encompasses countries part of the Mineral Security Partnership—that is, Australia, Canada, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States and nations in the European Union.

Theoretically, these countries collectively have significant reserves of critical minerals; they just need to build more mines. However, building new mines requires not just deposits but profitable deposits, which the West lacks for many critical minerals.

A mine’s potential profitability influences whether a mine is built. Mine profitability relies on several variables, including the targeted element’s price, the mine’s capital expenditures, operating costs, metallurgical recovery rates, and—perhaps most crucially—the deposit’s scale and grade.

For many minerals, Western countries have discovered and are mining most of their large-scale, high-grade deposits, while other jurisdictions like African countries have more untapped large-scale, high-grade deposits.

For example, of the ten largest copper discoveries between 2012 and 2021, only 13% of the