President Trump said Monday he wants to strike a deal with Ukraine whereby Kyiv would supply the United States with rare earth minerals in exchange for American aid, offering the clearest sign yet of his transactional approach to supporting the war-torn nation.
“We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine, where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earths and other things,” Mr. Trump said from the Oval Office, where he was signing executive orders. “We want a guarantee.”
India’s Cabinet on Wednesday approved a 163 billion-rupee (US$1.9 billion) program to secure supplies of a range of minerals used mainly in battery, electronics, defense and agriculture sectors.
The National Critical Mineral Mission will focus on local mining and processing of 24 vital minerals, as well as acquisitions of mining blocks overseas, Information and Broadcasting Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told reporters.
The initiative, which will also give a thrust to the recycling of materials such as lithium, cobalt, potash and graphite, will help reduce the country’s reliance on imports, he said in New Delhi. The nation relies almost entirely on overseas shipments for energy transition materials, including cobalt, nickel, lithium and copper ore and concentrates, with China being a key supplier.
Canada’s Aclara Resources announced on Wednesday a collaboration with the U.S. Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration to find the best location for its planned rare earth separation facility.
This partnership, through the SelectUSA program, aims to find a cost-effective site for the plant, and to contribute to a resilient supply chain for critical materials essential in the U.S. high-tech sectors.
The location study will evaluate potential sites for Aclara’s separation facility with a focus on operational efficiency, cost management, and project timelines, the rare earths developer said in a statement.
“Aclara believes that it can contribute towards securing a resilient and independent supply chain for rare earths, which are critical materials for electromobility and other key high-tech sectors of the U.S. economy,” chief financial officer François Motte said.
Aclara aims to produce high-purity mixed rare earth concentrate (MREC) from its Penco module in Chile and the Carina project in Brazil. The company plans to use its patented technology designed to extract heavy rare earths from ionic clays.
Mercedes-Benz has partnered with an Australian company to become the first car manufacturer worldwide to close the loop on batteries with its own in-house recycling facility.
The battery recycling plant in Kuppenheim, southern Germany has an integrated mechanical-hydrometallurgical process that will recover valuable and scarce raw materials such as lithium, nickel and cobalt to then be used in new batteries for future all-electric Mercedes-Benz vehicles.
The plant has an annual capacity of 2500 tonnes. Unlike existing established processes, the expected recovery rate of the plant is more than 96 per cent.
The government has launched an online tracking system for nickel and tin shipments to increase state revenue and improve governance in the mining sector. Already implemented for coal shipments since 2022, the Mineral and Coal Information System (Simbara) has now been expanded to encompass nickel and tin and is to be applied to other metallic minerals in the future.
Resource-rich Indonesia is the world’s biggest producer of nickel and one of the largest producers of tin. Simbara will enable the government to track the supply of nickel and tin from mines to domestic smelters. Finance Ministry Budget Director General said the government had launched the online tracking system for nickel and tin shipments given the two commodities’ increasingly strategic role in national and global economic development.
A new type of lithium-ion battery could help make electric vehicles cheaper, safer, and more sustainable — all thanks to the power of iron.
Yes, that’s right — scientists have developed an innovative iron-based cathode material that could replace pricier and rarer metals like cobalt and nickel, paving the way for EV batteries that are easier on the wallet and the planet.
A unique mix of fluorine and phosphate anions that allow reversible conversion between iron powder, lithium fluoride, lithium phosphate, and iron salts.
BASF SE and Eramet SA abandoned plans to spend up to $2.6 billion building a nickel-cobalt refinery in Indonesia, reversing course after slowing sales growth for electric vehicles crimped demand.
Global availability of battery-quality nickel has improved since the project was conceived, BASF said Monday in a statement. A surge in EV sales has also dimmed in the past year, leading to declines in nickel and cobalt prices.
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Wednesday issued new guidelines for its lithium-ion battery industry, aiming to transform, upgrade and promote high-quality development amid rapid expansion in the sector.
The guidelines, following a proposal in May, will help firms scale back manufacturing projects that only expand production capacity, while enhancing technology innovation and product quality and trimming output costs, the ministry said.
Projects built on farmland and ecological zones would be required to be shut down, or strictly reined in and gradually removed.
Rapid expansion of production capacity along the lithium battery supply chain has led to a plunge in prices for products, including battery and raw materials, eroding companies’ profits in the world’s biggest market.
Industry planning and launch of new projects should be in line with national development of resources, ecological protection and energy saving management, the ministry said.
Safe and efficient energy storage is important for American prosperity and security. With the adoption of both renewable energy sources and electric vehicles on the rise around the world, it is no surprise that research into a new generation of batteries is a major focus. Researchers have been developing batteries with higher energy storage density and, thus, longer driving range. Other goals include shorter charging times, greater tolerance to low temperatures and safer operation.
One of the more promising such batteries has a lithium-containing cathode supplemented with nickel, manganese and cobalt (NMC). At the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, a team of scientists has recently developed a new coating method for NMC cathodes with high nickel content, which boosts the energy density substantially. The cathode is the positively charged battery component that supplies lithium ions that shuffle between it and the battery’s negatively charged electrode, called the anode, during cycling.
The repeated charging of batteries under conditions of high voltage and rapid recharge leads to structural instability and breakdown over time. To overcome the problem, Argonne scientists developed a new coating that allows the cathode particles to withstand the fracturing in their crystalline structure that had previously occurred upon cycling. They call this material “epitaxial entropy-assisted coating,” or EEC for short. According to Xu, “entropy assistance” ensures that the coating helps to prevent the breakdown of the material beneath it due to a thermodynamic effect, which leads materials to naturally become destabilized over time.
Chilean state miner Codelco and the world’s No. 2 lithium producer SQM struck a pivotal deal on Friday over a joint venture that will reshape the Andean country’s lithium sector and give the state a front-line role in developing the key electric vehicle battery metal.
The new entity will let SQM boost output through 2060 in the Salar de Atacama, one of the world’s most prized areas for extracting lithium.
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