UK government to publish new critical minerals strategy in 2025

The UK government will publish a new critical minerals strategy in the spring of 2025, Industry Minister Sarah Jones is set to tell the Resourcing Tomorrow mining conference on Dec. 3 in London.

"We need critical minerals for everything and we'll need a lot more if we want a thriving car sector, a world-leading tech ecosystem, and secure renewable energy," Jones is set to say, according to prepared remarks released by the Department for Business and Trade.

The new strategy is designed to support the "industries of tomorrow" and will explicitly target the UK, according to the statement. It will evaluate the impacts on people, deliver for businesses and create new jobs, Jones will say.

Ensuring resilient critical minerals supply chains needed for the next 10 years and beyond is "vital" for delivering the confidence businesses needed in the UK's industrial sectors, according to Jones.

The new strategy would differ from previous strategies by adopting a more targeted and long-term approach and focus, including collaborating with international partners to secure supplies, working closer with partners in forums like the Minerals Security Partnership, and using data in its development, according to the department.

The strategy would set out the government's role in helping UK universities partner globally to build on their expertise, such as the University of Birmingham's rare earth magnet expertise, and Camborne School of Mines' mining engineering work.

New details would be provided by the government in early 2025, the department said.

Industrial strategy

The government also plans to launch an industrial strategy in 2025 to provide businesses with certainty to invest in UK industry and was part of the government's Invest 2035 vision to boost growth in the UK's most important sectors.

Oliver Richards, head of critical minerals and mining for the Department for Business and Trade, told the UK Critical Minerals Association's annual conference in London Dec. 2 that the new industrial strategy would look at how the government could bring forward more ambitious plans for manufacturing across a number of different sectors in the UK economy, with clean energy industries one of eight growth-driving sectors under the strategy.

"Growth is the number one mission, of course, of this government and supporting that is the National Wealth Fund bringing together existing and new resources to really turbocharge that growth. And the second bit is around the clean energy transition," he said.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer set a target for the UK at the UN Climate Change Conference to reduce all greenhouse gas emissions by at least 81% by 2035 on 1990 levels.

"Our ambition really on critical minerals is to help meet the supply that will be needed to achieve those ambitions both domestically and internationally and from a UK perspective, we think there's a whole host of things that can be done domestically," Richards said.

He said the government wanted to take the country's mining projects forward, "contributing in a meaningful way, both to the British economy, but also to the security of supply for our downstream industries as well as trying to integrate those in any way we can."

He said the National Wealth Fund was supporting that, as was UK research and innovation. On the international front, there were new initiatives like UK Export Finance's ability to finance critical mineral projects further upstream.

Bilateral agreements

To help secure supply internationally, Richards said the UK had signed nine bilateral agreements with international partners, including South Africa, Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Saudi Arabia, Zambia, Japan and Indonesia.

He gave the example of Kazakhstan, saying there had been a lot of interest in engaging with the UK in the Central Asia region. A memorandum of understanding was signed in 2023, with an actionable roadmap signed in 2024 to support objectives in technology partnerships, mining environment and capability building.

Richards also mentioned the Minerals Security Partnership, of which the UK was a member, which was a group of 15 nations committed to driving investment into strategic critical mineral projects.

"It's about thinking about where do we have those comparative strengths, how can we build that integrated supply chain across different countries to help achieve that security of critical minerals," he said.

The MSP members then connected with 15 other producer countries in the MSP Forum to advance projects and identify policy interventions to promote high ESG standards, local value addition and investment.

"We all know that supply chains are complex, global cutting across many different geographies," Richards said. "And really, the purpose of the mineral security partnership is to bring together a group of like-minded partner countries to see if we can drive investment into sustainable critical mineral value chains in those markets and across the world."

The third pillar was the MSP Finance Network, of which UK Export Finance was part of and brought together "a huge amount of capital to try and focus that in a meaningful way on addressing this challenge of how do we meet that demand," he said.

"There's an ecosystem that develops ... where we can really play a role as the UK in contributing to global challenge for the demand for some of these minerals and to use the MSP as one of many frameworks to achieve," Richards said.

Platts, part of S&P Global Commodity Insights, assessed both battery grade lithium carbonate at $10,650/mt CIF Europe and hydroxide at $9,250/mt CIF Europe on Dec. 2, down 33% and 42%, respectively, since the start of 2024.