NEW DELHI: India’s Ministry of Mines is expected to soon introduce an incentive policy aimed at boosting domestic processing of lithium and nickel, with a proposed outlay of approximately ₹3,000 crore (US$313.48 million), according to two sources familiar with the development.
The sources requested anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. The Ministry of Mines did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Reuters had reported in January that the planned incentive scheme would focus on lithium and nickel processing. In April, the Mines Secretary stated that the government had shortlisted two critical minerals for a processing policy designed to strengthen the electric vehicle (EV) value chain, though the specific minerals were not disclosed at the time.
Lithium and nickel are key components in EV batteries and are considered vital to India’s clean mobility ambitions. The government aims to increase electric vehicle adoption to 30% of passenger car sales and 80% of two-wheeler sales by 2030, up from the current levels of 6% and 9%, respectively.
Under the proposed policy, lithium processing facilities would be required to have a minimum annual capacity of 30,000 metric tonnes, while nickel processing plants would need a minimum capacity of 50,000 metric tonnes to qualify for incentives, Reuters previously reported.
Bridge Green Launches Critical Mineral Recovery Plant in Chennai to Advance Battery Circularity
In a significant step toward building a circular battery economy, US-based startup Bridge Green Upcycle has inaugurated a state-of-the-art critical mineral recovery facility in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.
Strengthening India’s Battery Recycling Ecosystem
Located in Gummidipoondi near Chennai, the newly commissioned plant is designed to process end-of-life lithium-ion batteries as well as battery manufacturing scrap. With an annual processing capacity of 7,200 tonnes, the facility represents one of the most advanced battery recycling operations in the region.
The plant will recover a range of critical minerals, including:
Lithium
Cobalt
Nickel
Manganese
Copper
Graphite
These materials play a vital role in battery manufacturing and are essential for supporting the growing electric vehicle (EV) and energy storage industries.
Recognition Under Government Incentive Scheme
The facility has been selected under the Government of India’s Critical Mineral Recycling Incentive Scheme, highlighting its strategic importance in strengthening domestic supply chains for critical raw materials. Notably, it is the only facility in Tamil Nadu included in the first cohort of projects approved under the initiative.
Major Investment Plans Ahead
Bridge Green’s Founder and CEO announced that the company plans to invest between ₹500 crore and ₹1,000 crore over the next five years. The current plant is expected to ramp up operations and reach full processing capacity by the end of this year.
This investment underscores the company’s long-term commitment to developing a sustainable and localized critical minerals ecosystem in India.
Expanding into Refined Battery Materials
Beyond mineral recovery, Bridge Green has outlined ambitious expansion plans. The next phase of development will focus on producing refined battery-grade materials, including:
Lithium carbonate
Nickel sulfate
Manganese sulfate
Cobalt sulfate
The company is targeting commissioning of these facilities by the end of 2028. Additionally, plans are underway to establish a second-life battery plant, further extending the lifecycle of battery assets and reducing waste.
Supporting the Circular Economy
As demand for batteries continues to grow worldwide, recycling and material recovery will play an increasingly important role in reducing dependence on virgin mining and improving resource security. Facilities such as Bridge Green’s Chennai plant demonstrate how innovative recycling technologies can help create a more sustainable, resilient, and circular battery value chain.
The launch marks an important milestone not only for Bridge Green but also for India’s emerging critical minerals and battery recycling sector, positioning the country as a key player in the global energy transition.
A key differentiator for Bridge Green is its proprietary technology platform focused on both battery life extension and critical mineral extraction. By combining advanced recycling processes with second-life battery solutions, the company aims to maximize resource utilization while reducing environmental impact.
The company’s strategy extends beyond recycling alone. Bridge Green plans to serve both domestic and international markets, supplying recovered minerals and battery materials to industries including battery manufacturing, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, defence, and aerospace.
In addition to mineral recovery, the company intends to provide second-life battery systems for data centres and industrial users. These systems can repurpose batteries that are no longer suitable for electric vehicles but still retain sufficient capacity for stationary energy storage applications, further supporting circular economy objectives.
Capitalizing on Growing Demand
According to Founder and CEO demand for battery-grade materials already exists in India and is expected to grow significantly as the country’s cell manufacturing ecosystem matures. As domestic battery production expands under various government initiatives, the need for locally sourced critical minerals and refined battery salts will become increasingly important.
Bridge Green is also positioning itself to tap into international opportunities. Potential export markets include the United States, Southeast Asia, and Europe—regions that are rapidly strengthening their battery supply chains and seeking reliable sources of critical minerals.
The recently established US–India Critical Minerals Supply Chain Framework presents an additional opportunity for the company. As a US–India enterprise, Bridge Green is uniquely positioned to support cross-border collaboration in securing sustainable supplies of critical materials required for the global energy transition.
The US, Japan, Australia and India have unveiled a $20 billion framework to strengthen critical minerals supplies as Washington continues to seek ways to loosen China’s stronghold.
The four Quad partners said they intend to raise up to $20 billion in public and private sector support to boost critical minerals supply chains that includes mining, processing and recycling by identifying projects in member countries.
“Through the Quad Critical Minerals Initiative, Quad partners intend to work together to use economic policy tools and co-ordinated investment to accelerate the development of diversified and fair critical mineral markets. and support the supply of critical minerals that are crucial to our region’s economic growth and security,” the members said in a statement.e
Monday’s announcement followed US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to India, where he and Quad foreign ministers also announced initiatives to strengthen maritime and transnational security, emerging technology and humanitarian assistance.
Under the critical minerals agreement, the Quad partners said they would support strategic projects through export credit agencies, private capital, development financial institutions, and explore new ways to raise private capital in the critical minerals space.
Critical minerals are used to produce advanced technology, defence systems, electric vehicles and other technologies in the clean energy transition.
Pip: Welcome to the podcast where we track what the earth gives up and what the markets make of it — rare earths, trade deficits, and the occasional geopolitical scramble.
Mara: Today’s episode, shaped by posts from Nanthakumar Victor Emmanuel, P.Eng, covers three connected territories: Europe pushing back on its trade imbalance with China, a long-term rare earth supply deal out of Greenland, and the magnet problem sitting inside the Pentagon’s drone ambitions.
Pip: Let’s start with the EU-China trade picture.
EU and China: Rebalancing an Unequal Trade
Mara: The European Union is signaling it wants a different kind of relationship with China — one where the trade flows more evenly and the strategic vulnerabilities get addressed.
Pip: The numbers make the case bluntly. The EU’s trade deficit with China reached approximately 360 billion euros last year, and the post notes that “particular concern has centered on rare earth minerals after China imposed export restrictions last year, exposing Europe’s heavy reliance on Chinese supplies.”
Mara: So the upshot is Europe is not just haggling over tariffs — it’s reckoning with structural dependency. A summit in Brussels on June 18 and 19 is expected to advance those discussions, with a possible visit from China’s commerce minister also on the table.
Pip: Which makes Greenland’s rare earth story land with considerably more weight.
The Tanbreez Deal: Greenland’s 15-Year Commitment
Mara: The Tanbreez project in Greenland is one of the world’s largest known heavy rare earth deposits, and it just got a significant commercial anchor.
Pip: Critical Metals has signed a 15-year binding offtake agreement with REalloys, and the post quotes directly: “REalloys will receive priority rights to concentrate containing higher levels of the critical heavy rare earth elements, dysprosium and terbium, along with a right of first refusal over additional volumes.”
Mara: Those two elements — dysprosium and terbium — are exactly the heavy rare earths that go into the high-performance magnets defense and clean energy applications depend on. The deal formalizes and expands a non-binding agreement from last October, and follows Greenland’s April approval for Critical Metals to raise its ownership stake in the project to 92.5%.
Pip: Fifteen years is a long runway. That’s not a spot purchase — that’s a supply chain being built from the ground up.
Mara: Pricing is linked to international rare earth oxide benchmarks, and deliveries ship from the Tanbreez port in southern Greenland. The post frames this in the context of the U.S. and its allies stepping up efforts to secure critical mineral supplies outside China.
Pip: And REalloys turns up in the drone story too — which is where the magnet dependency gets very concrete.
300,000 Drones and the Magnet Bottleneck
Mara: The Pentagon has placed the largest drone order in American history — 30,000 one-way attack drones, with a target of scaling past 300,000 by early 2028. Every one runs on a rare earth magnet.
Pip: And the post puts the constraint in one number: “roughly 98% of the world’s magnets are manufactured in China.” That is a supply chain risk dressed up as an ambition.
Mara: REalloys is positioned as a direct response to that gap — holding what the post describes as the only fully non-Chinese mine-to-magnet heavy rare earth supply chain in North America, from processed metals through to magnet-ready inputs.
Pip: The Greenland offtake deal and this Pentagon supply problem are clearly two ends of the same chain.
Mara: Whether it’s Brussels negotiating with Beijing, Greenland locking in a 15-year deal, or the Pentagon counting magnets — the throughline is the same scramble to diversify critical mineral supply.
Pip: Next time, we’ll see where that scramble leads. The deposits are finite; the demand is not.
LMEL eyes cobalt from Congo to India through US partnership
Nagpur: Lloyds Metals and Energy Limited (LMEL), which has taken over CHEMAF Group, a mining company in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), early this month by forming a joint venture with US’ Virtus Mineral Group, plans to get its share of cobalt from the African nation to India as well.
The sharing formula would depend on the agreement between Indian and American governments as the venture also has a US partner. CHEMAF’s mines are seen as a major non-Chinese source of cobalt, a critical mineral, especially when India doesn’t have any major resources of the metal.
“The production is expected to start within the current fiscal,” said LMEL’s managing director B Prabhakaran.
The company projects an initial output of 20,000 tonnes of cobalt and 60,000 tonnes of copper a year from the Congo mines. CHEMAF Group has mines in Congo’s Katanga belt, known to be among the biggest copper reserves in the world apart from having sizeable cobalt deposits.
The takeover of CHEMAF Group by the LMEL–Virtus combine is also seen as a major victory for the US government, as it could outmanoeuvre the Chinese players who were also eyeing the company.
“You can’t fight a twenty-first-century war with twentieth-century supply chains”. “Modern weapons rely on materials that are difficult to source, difficult to process, and difficult to replace once inventories begin to tighten.”
Reports from the South China Morning Post and Reuters indicate Washington could have only weeks or months of certain rare-earth inventories available for defense manufacturing if supply disruptions deepen.
Rare earth elements are embedded throughout modern military systems—from missile guidance and drone propulsion to radar systems and fighter aircraft electronics.
Note: War is only necessary for protecting human rights, human lives and the nature.
The Ministry of Heavy Industries is likely to call for bids under the Scheme to Promote Manufacturing of Sintered Rare Earth Permanent Magnets (REPM) Friday. Officials said the Rs 7,280 crore scheme will promote domestic manufacturing of 6,000 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) of magnets, strengthening supply chains for the automotive, defense, and aerospace sectors.
Long before trade wars and tariffs, China secured manufacturing dominance by controlling rare earths – a reality so consequential that the United States and its allies are now pledging more than $8.5 billion just to claw back some control of the supply chain. Companies mentioned in this release include: REalloys Inc., MP Materials Corp.,Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile, Amprius Technologies, Inc., Critical Metals Corp., Nouveau Monde Graphite Inc.
As global manufacturing expanded over the past two decades, rare earth processing was steadily pushed out of Western supply chains. It was capital-intensive, technically demanding, and difficult to defend on short-term economics.
China made the opposite choice, keeping those capabilities in place and methodically expanding them as others exited.
“China didn’t win this by mining. It won by building the entire system–separation, refining, metals, magnets–all connected. Everyone else walked away from it. At that point, control wasn’t up for debate anymore,” REalloys’s CEO Lipi Sternheim said. “North America lost control, and the reality is simple: factories don’t run on ore. They run on metals and alloys and at this moment in time our company is the only one able to actually refine heavy metals and magnets. Our competitors, no matter how well funded they are, are at least 3 years away from production”
Prior to going into mining in unexplored part of the world:
1. We need immediate research and development to improve the existing technologies.
2. Build refineries in the existing mines with infrastructure using developed technologies.
3. Take the price control of the Rare Earth Elements by tariffs or other means until the local refineries optimize the refining processes and operating cost.
We do not want to send the concentrate to another country to do final refining.
The US has developed a critical minerals price floor system that it’s pitching to allies as the Trump administration and more than 50 countries look to reduce dependence on China for the resources that are deemed critical to national security.
Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg said multiple US agencies have developed the system and are having conversations with allies and partners. It’s the latest update to progress being made by the US and its allies to ringfence Western companies from China’s pressure on those markets.
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