US Critical Minerals Challenges

Duncan Wood: What do you see as the major remaining challenges and what should be the priorities for the remainder of this administration?

Mahnaz Khan: The trade policy front is not just doing the plurilaterals, but having an Africa strategy and hopefully doing bilaterals. We really push for bilaterals along the Lobito corridor where the U.S. and allies have made significant investments also in the infrastructure sides there.

The other policy gaps that we see are innovation, recycling, and recovery. So I always say that there's five ways we can reduce our net import reliance: mining and processing, which this administration has done a good job on trying to tackle, but also on the other side, recycling, recovery—you know, from tailings and mine waste and end-use products—and then innovation.

So hopefully we can get the financing ecosystem and the policy ecosystem for those three in line and have our strategy or executive orders from the administration so that we can actually strategically leapfrog over China and reduce our dependence.