From Minerals to Megawatts 2025

3. Public co-financing and guarantees: Blending private commitments with public instruments (guarantees, first-loss, production credits) from national or regional programmes improves project bankability and FID speed, particularly for first- of-its-kind or first-in-region capacity. 4. Streamlined, predictable permitting and infrastructure enablement: Treat permitting, interconnection, ports and rail as part of a value chain-critical path. Clear, time-bound processes and early community engagement reduce project delay risk more than design tweaks. 5. Allied/friend-shoring partnerships and joint projects: Forming joint ventures and reciprocal offtakes among allied markets spreads geopolitical and logistics risk while keeping scale economics. Further, pairing partnerships with common standards and mutual recognition keeps switching costs low. 6. Industrialized secondary-supply infrastructure: Scaling industrial recycling with the same rigour as primary supply can drive additional diversification. Analyses show that over 20% of the current global import demand of a selection of energy transition minerals50 could be satisfied through recycling.51 Demand management: Reshape demand 1. Efficiency and mineral-intensity reduction: Design and engineering, through part consolidation, yield improvement or unit optimization, can reduce metal intensity per unit without sacrificing safety or performance. However, consultations also raised a note of caution: ultra-low content can make end-of-life recovery commercially or technically challenging. Designing for performance and circularity in tandem is key. 2. Fit-for-purpose substitution: Where performance and safety requirements allow, changing materials, chemistries and components can reduce pressure on scarce inputs; for example, using LFP batteries or REE-free motors in appropriate EV segments, installing aluminium conductors in place of copper where grid specifications permit, or leveraging silicon-carbide/gallium nitride power devices in data centres to raise efficiency with a different materials mix. 3. Recycling and circularity at scale: Building secondary supply from end-of-life products and manufacturing scrap (e.g. battery-grade salts from battery “black-mass,” copper and aluminium scrap capture) shifts demand patterns. Recycling today contributes a small share for several critical minerals: end-of- life recovery for lithium and REEs remains below 5% globally, constrained by collection, economics and technology. Consultations stressed the immediate bottleneck is collection and mechanical separation; therefore, this should be a key area of focus. 4. Strategic inventories and buffers: Targeted buffers at the right tier (e.g. active materials, trade-restricted metals) can prevent long production stoppages. Approaches range from strategic public stockpiles to private vendor- managed inventory with transparent draw-down rules and replenishment triggers. 5. Standards and interoperability: Agreeing on common standards and modular designs (e.g. fewer chip variants, standardized transformer specifications, clear efficiency targets, harmonized audit requirements) enables a shift in demand structure, simplifies manufacturing requirements, incentivizes R&D that reduces mineral intensity and avoids duplicative audits. From Minerals to Megawatts: Building Resilience for EVs, Data Centres and Power Grids 30