From Minerals to Megawatts 2025

Examples of collective actions and associated resilience levers FIGURE 14 Taken together, these responses point to a set of practical levers across supply expansion and diversification and demand management that downstream owners, upstream suppliers, financiers and policy-makers can deploy together. Supply expansion and diversification: Increase, de-risk and re-route supply 1. New mining and processing/refining capacity: Capacity additions focused where supply concentration is most acute (e.g. synthetic graphite capacity to address export-licensing restrictions,48 GOES, REE production) and paced to credible, rolling demand signals help manage disruption risk while limiting asset stranding. Location decisions often follow two paths: extending established refining hubs that already host capabilities and linkages, or bringing processing closer to mines to reduce logistics and emissions and build local value. Evaluation of suitable sites can be guided by the Forum’s country-readiness framework49 for manufacturing and supply chains. Supply diversity may also come from new extraction routes (e.g. direct lithium extraction) once proven at scale. 2. Long-term offtakes, prepayments and equity investments: Deploying long-tenor, volume-flex offtakes, with prepayment or modest equity where needed, helps secure supply through new capacity. These structures close financing gaps and de-risk projects, particularly for processing in diversified locations, while preserving the buyer’s ability to adapt to specification changes.Export controls on REE technologies and REEs (2023, 2025) Automotive chip shortage created awareness on upstream vulnerabilities (2020-22) Oil supply crisis (1973-75)New capacity/public co-financing US Department of Defense funded mining company Lynas’s rare-earth processing and partnered with MP Materials to build a domestic rare-earth supply chain Equity in new supply/joint projects General Motors (GM) and Lithium Americas established a joint venture to develop the Thacker Pass lithium mine; Ford, Vale Indonesia and Huayou Cobalt formed an equity partnership to develop a nickel-processing project in IndonesiaMulti-year offtakes Tesla signed a three-year lithium supply agreement with Piedmont Lithium; GM agreed to a supply and investment arrangement with Controlled Thermal Resources that gives it first-refusal rights on Salton Sea lithium Accelerated permitting/new supply The 1973 Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act expedited approvals for a strategic pipeline to boost US oil supplyAllied partnerships The International Energy Agency (IEA) was established in 1974 by OECD members to coordinate a collective response to oil supply disruptions and ensure supply securitySecondary supply infrastructure/ multi-year offtake Nidec Motor Corporation and Noveon Magnetics entered into a five-year offtake agreement for US-made recycled rare-earth magnetsR&D for recycling at scale Western Digital, Microsoft and others partnered to recover and recycle rare earths from hard disk drives (HDDs) Substitution/ chemistry shifts Battery chemistries have shifted to reduce cobalt reliance, adjusting nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) ratios and expanding lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) models in mass-market segmentsMineral-intensity reduction/ efficiency Mineral use in batteries has been lowered by shrinking battery pack sizes and adopting higher-efficiency pack designs (e.g. cell-to-pack/cell-to-chassis, delivering more power per mass Efficiency standards The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards were introduced under the US Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 to curb fossil-fuel demand growthStrategic inventories The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve was established by the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act as an emergency crude stockpileMineral-intensity reduction/ efficiency Tesla announced its next-generation permanent magnet electric motors will contain no rare-earth elementsExamples of resilience strategies and levers Supply expansion and diversification Trigger Demand management From Minerals to Megawatts: Building Resilience for EVs, Data Centres and Power Grids 29