Britain’s last operational tin mine, South Crofty, has been sitting dormant in Cornwall for nearly 30 years. But now the historic site may be revived thanks to an unlikely benefactor: Donald Trump.
The US president’s administration last week said it was willing to loan up to $225m (£165m) to developer Cornish Metals to support the mine’s reopening – so long as it agrees to send some of the output across the Atlantic.
Just two days earlier, and more than 4,600 miles away, a Washington-backed investment fund had announced a deal to acquire a 40pc share in a copper and cobalt mine run by Glencore in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
And in Western Australia, the US government has emerged as one of the backers of a scheme to build a new refinery that will produce gallium, a rare metal.
The investments follow a spate of dealmaking by the Trump administration at home in the past year – which has seen it take stakes in a magnet producer, a lithium mine and rare earth refineries – among other things.
According to experts, they are all examples of the new, more muscular approach Washington is taking to securing critical minerals abroad as it seeks to break China’s stranglehold over global supplies.
Tin, copper, cobalt and gallium are all commonly used in electronics, while lithium – known as “white gold” – is the main ingredient in batteries that power the modern world.
Rare earth magnets, meanwhile, are found in the spinning parts of wind turbines, electric motors and even fighter plane wing flaps.
Without them, and a plethora of other metals, factory production lines across America would grind to a halt.
That briefly became a real prospect last year, when the US was locked in a trade standoff with China.
“One of the challenges we’ve had in the last 20 years in the United States is our mineral security efforts have largely been contained to handshake diplomacy,” says Gracelin Baskaran, a critical minerals expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
“But handshake diplomacy doesn’t bring projects online. And it doesn’t yield minerals that can meet critical security interests.“It’s the start, but what is the support that we need to get projects into production? It’s financing, it’s trade agreements, it’s off-take agreements [where a customer agrees to buy raw material before it is produced]. That is how we increase access to minerals.
“We’re going from paper agreements to deploying capital.”
US trailing China
This is the thinking behind the dizzying series of deals announced by American officials in recent months.
Efforts to start directly nurturing alternative supplies began under Joe Biden but have accelerated under Trump, with investments made through several arms of the state – including the department of war, the department of energy, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Exim) and the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).
The DFC was the investor that supported Glencore’s copper and cobalt operations, while Exim has extended the offer of loans and financing to the tin project being developed by Cornish Metals.
the old south wheel crofty tin mine at pool near redruth in cornwall, uk
Trump’s administration has offered a £165m loan to help Cornwall’s South Crofty tin mine reopen — Kevin Britland / Alamy Stock Photo
Yet the Trump administration is still playing catch-up.
Chinese companies have been steadily building their control over key mining and refining operations for decades, giving Beijing the ability to turn off supplies to the rest of the world at will.
Take just one example: copper, the world’s most important industrial metal, used in electrical wiring, circuit boards and plumbing. Analysts predict the world is headed for a supply crunch in the coming years – and China is far better placed to weather it.
The Middle Kingdom’s companies control around 16pc of global copper production compared to 6pc owned by American firms, according to data from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, and there have been calls in China to boost domestic stockpiles.
“China has been doing this for a while, so this isn’t new for them,” says Albert Mackenzie, an analyst at Benchmark.
“The US may have looked at how they have built up their copper assets overseas, and is now trying to replicate that or not get left behind.
“There’s a big desire for more copper at the moment – you can point at AI, or to the energy transition, but actually it’s in basically everything we use because it’s such a good conductor.”
Minerals monopoly
While China has a grip on supply, its dominance of critical minerals is really about processing, with its share standing at over 50pc for a whole host of metals and exceeding 90pc for certain products.
This means that even though such metals may be mined in the US, Australia or elsewhere, they are still sent to China for refining.
Some 91pc of rare earth magnet metal refining and 94pc of global magnet production is concentrated in China, according to the International Energy Agency.
These are the magnets used in critical parts of the US military’s F-35 stealth fighter, as well as Tomahawk cruise missiles, navy destroyers and submarines, the Stinger portable missile and the M1 Abrams tank.
This leverage was brought into painful focus for Mr Trump last year, when he was forced to walk back his threats of trade tariffs after Beijing imposed export restrictions on heavy rare earths.
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2412 Rare earths power US defence
2412 Rare earths power US defence
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Ahead of his visit to China in April, the US president has now approved the creation of a $12bn critical mineral reserve, known as Project Vault, that will seek to guard US manufacturers against similar threats in future.
The initiative has been backed by captains of industry including the bosses of GE Vernova and Boeing.
“We don’t want to ever go through what we went through a year ago,” Mr Trump told reporters last week.
“Just as we have long had a strategic petroleum reserve and a stockpile of critical minerals for national defence, we’re now creating this reserve for American industry, so we don’t have any problems.”
Security and stability
The US administration has also been seeking to rally allies around an international network for developing critical mineral supplies outside of China.
Last week, vice-president JD Vance and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, hosted a critical minerals summit in Washington aimed at drumming up support for the initiative.
In a speech, Mr Rubio pointed out that the Chinese grip over supplies posed the same danger to all of America’s allies and urged them to work together.
“No country in the world has every critical mineral that’s valuable,” he said. “So it will rely on international cooperation.
“Right now, you have 90-something per cent of some of these elements controlled by one nation, one place. And that’s just not healthy for the global economy and it’s certainly not healthy for security and stability.”
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1002 China leads production of many critical minerals
1002 China leads production of many critical minerals
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Along with the deals that have been announced, the White House has also vowed to back minerals producers with grants, loans and even “price floors” that will ensure they get paid a minimum amount for their minerals.
This is seen as vital because China’s producers receive large amounts of state support and can otherwise undercut competition from private Western firms.
Dominic Raab, the former Conservative deputy prime minister who now works with minerals investor Appian Capital Advisory, was in the room and says this change in mindset is key.
“There’s a recognition that it’s not a free market, it’s a broken market,” he says. “So they’re going to have to engage at a state level, but they also want to unlock private sector investment, and that’s important for de-risking those investments and unlocking more capital.”
Sophia Gaston, a geopolitics researcher at King’s College London, says the showdown with Beijing last year left Washington officials chastened by America’s “profound vulnerabilities on these supply chains”.
“China called the Trump administration’s bluff, and that forced America back to the negotiation table, and I think they felt extremely exposed by that, and wanted to move quickly to try and prevent that kind of situation happening again,” she says.
“There’s been a very intense flurry of activity, because Donald Trump is pencilled in for a visit to Beijing in April. So I think he wants to feel he’s going into that conversation with the maximum leverage.
“Until that critical minerals and rare earths diversification strategy starts to come into view, that’s going to be difficult – because there will always be a feeling that China can turn off the tap.”