"How to Secure Critical Minerals for Clean Energy Without Alienating China" - by CWP alum Zongyuan Zoe Liu

As the U.S. economy strives to decarbonize amid escalating geopolitical tensions, President Joe Biden in February 2021 requested a review of the United States’ vulnerabilities in critical mineral and materials supply chains. Critical minerals, such as cobalt, lithium, and nickel, are core inputs for clean energy technologies and EV batteries. The subsequent report [PDF] issued by the White House in June unveiled an unsettling reality: critical mineral supply chains are concentrated in a few nations, heightening U.S. vulnerabilities. The report also shed light on China’s aggressive use of industrial policies to promote domestic production and establish dominance in the global market share of critical mineral supply chains. Data from the 2022 U.S. Geological Survey shows that the United States is 100 percent import-dependent on twelve critical minerals and more than fifty percent import-dependent on thirty-one additional minerals. China is the largest source of imports for twenty-six of the fifty minerals classified as critical by the U.S. government. This predicament has undeniably emerged as a national security concern for U.S. policymakers.

Blog Post by Zongyuan Zoe Liu May 25, 2023 9:38 am (EST) - https://www-cfr-org.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.cfr.org/blog/how-secure-critical-minerals-clean-energy-without-alienating-china?amp

Zongyuan Zoe Liu is a fellow for international political economy at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Her work focuses on international political economy, global financial markets, sovereign wealth funds, supply chains of critical minerals, development finance, emerging markets, energy and climate change policy, and East Asia-Middle East relations. Dr. Liu’s regional expertise is in East Asia, specifically China and Japan, and the Middle East, specifically Gulf Cooperation Council countries. Dr. Liu is the author of Can BRICS De-dollarize the Global Financial System? (Cambridge University Press) and Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances its Global Ambitions (Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2023).

Photo Credit: By Alchemist-hp (talk) (www.pse-mendelejew.de) - Own work, FAL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11530303