The major trends that will shape the global mining and metals industry in 2025 were laid out at Resourcing Tomorrow 2024 in London. Five key watchwords for the year ahead: Trump, Tesla, terbium, technology and takeovers.
Returning US president Donald Trump wasn’t at Europe’s biggest mining conference. His former assistant secretary of state for energy resources, Frank Fannon, did make a telling appearance.
Voices from the world’s major critical minerals processing hub, China, were also absent from the event.
But China and Trump were the proverbial elephants in nearly every room over Resourcing Tomorrow’s three-and-a-half days, including a series of government-industry roundtables convened ahead of the main conference program.
“Geopolitical considerations, particularly the competition between the West and China, dominated much of the discussion on global supply chains,” one Resourcing Tomorrow Government Roundtable 2024 observer said.
“China’s dominance in critical mineral processing was described as a central challenge, with participants noting the difficulty of building alternative supply chains.”
Another noted: “In critical minerals, the world is highly dependent on Chinese-controlled supply chains … Reducing this dependency is essential for securing stable, transparent and sustainable supply chains. It will require substantial investment in mining and processing infrastructure outside China.”
And government metal stockpiles were back on the table after a multi-decade absence.
“Establishing strategic reserves of critical minerals [is vital] to mitigate supply disruptions caused by geopolitical tensions, trade restrictions or natural disasters.”
The tone for the week was set.
Trump’s triumph
Sixty countries had national elections in 2024 and none were more consequential for the global mining business than America’s November poll which put Trump back in the White House.
It raised many questions, a few weeks later, at Resourcing Tomorrow. Fannon, outgoing US assistant secretary of state for energy resources, Geoffrey Pyatt, and Appian Capital Advisory head of global affairs, Dominic Raab, were on hand to provide politically-savvy answers. Raab, former UK deputy prime minister, says he got to know US secretary of state nominee, Marco Rubio, while in politics.
He felt the incoming government would maintain and almost certainly seek to step up the pace of various multilateral alliances working to build new minerals and metals supply chains rather than unravel them. Fannon agreed, suggesting a four-year window for change meant US mines wouldn’t add materially to the country’s strategic metal flows.
He said the Trump administration’s “North Star” would be security versus the Biden-Harris government’s “organising principle”, anthropogenic climate change.
“For America to achieve its objectives, to mitigate climate change, actually required more reliance on China not less given that they are the dominant manufacturing powerhouse of clean technologies as well as controller of the critical mineral supply chain,” he said.
“To improve the security situation of the United States … goes to the industrial base, including the development of clean energy technologies, but also things like the defence systems that use some of these key and niche critical metals.
“In our system the government can establish parameters for action but it’s the private sector that is the instrument of development and building. Government can create the appropriate signals to market participants so they can go off and develop new technologies, new methods and develop mines and transmission and logistics and all of those other elements.
“And this is not just an academic exercise.
“This is what happened in the United States in the case of hydraulic fracturing. In 2005 congress … [voted to] restrict the US federal government from regulating hydraulic fracturing. It was a deregulatory action. And three years later the shale revolution was born and it changed the world.
“So governments create the structure to allow the private sector to get after it and that’s what I do expect you will see more of with the Trump 2.0 administration.
“Some people deride it for having too many people from business.
“I think having businesspeople in government who want to promote economic development is actually a virtue.”
One of the most prominent businesspeople in Trump’s ear is Tesla boss Elon Musk who will, if he’s true to form, urge pragmatism on trade tariffs.
Fannon, Pyatt, Raab and others had opinions on Trump’s tariffs, of course. But answers to the many questions raised about them and their potential inflationary and other impacts will only be answered in 2025.
The focus of the US, Europe, Japan and others on military supply lines is already as pervasive in discussions about so-called critical minerals and metals as the energy transition and big tech. And it’s only going to become more urgent in 2025 after China announced during Resourcing Tomorrow 2024 new bans on antimony, gallium and germanium exports to the US due to their “dual military and civilian uses”. It is also tightening restrictions on graphite exports.
“This is part of the war,” Ivanhoe Mines founder and chair, Robert Friedland said at the conference.
“President Biden said to Xi Jinping, look buddy, we won’t sell you Nvidia chips. You’re just not going to get access to those chips for machine learning or AI.
“And he [China’s president] waited about a month but today he formalised it and said, I won’t sell you any gallium or germanium which you need to make those chips.
“We’re balkanising the world economy and this is going to be insanely inflationary.

“And if we go to war with a combined China, Russia, Iran and North Korea at the same time as we’re trying to do an energy transition that won’t work well for anybody on this planet.”
The US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said the new restrictions marked the first time Chinese critical minerals export bans were aimed only at the US and the first time the curbs were a direct response to controls on advanced technologies. Critical mineral security was now intrinsically linked to an escalating tech trade war, it said.
“The rise of the defence agenda is going to drive prioritisation in industrial value chains [and] focus industrial policies. And to some extent it will drive also a new societal debate about the value and the necessity of minerals,” Ludivine Wouters, Latitude Five managing partner, said at Resourcing Tomorrow 2024.
Friedland thinks the West has fallen so far behind China in the energy transition technology race it will struggle to catch up. Does it take a different approach in the AI, defence and maybe even the space race?
“We have a mining industry that’s funded with net present value models which are created by complete idiots for complete idiots,” he said in London.
“China never paid any attention to net present value models. They just paid more. And now China controls the supply chain for almost everything useful.
“If I’m going to shoot you in the head you don’t have time to do a net present value model. You either have copper to shoot a bullet back or you’re just dead.”
Electric dreams
Antoine Troesch, managing partner at Demeter, joined a panel discussion about Europe’s Critical Raw Materials Act and efforts to restore domestic mineral and strategic metal supply lines vital to downstream production of batteries, vehicles and most other things.
Troesch is a French citizen, a European citizen and a world citizen. “If I want to buy an EV today I’m buying a Chinese car. They are better and cheaper,” he said with his world citizen hat on.
“If I want to succeed in electrification of transportation I can just let the door open to the Chinese car.”
Then there’s his French and European-framed world view. Buy the Chinese cars and “we are killing thousands and thousands of jobs and entire industries”.
Which governments that send representatives around the world to attend climate accords won’t abide.
In the US, 2024 new car sales were reportedly at a five-year high, with hybrid vehicle deliveries up, but EV pioneer Tesla ending 10 years of growth with lower annual sales. Will Trump follow through with a proposal to remove EV tax credits in 2025?
At Resourcing Tomorrow’s sister event, IMARC, in Sydney late in 2024 veteran Australian mining executive Michael Nossal said China had “passed the tipping point” on electric vehicles, with more than half the country’s new car buyers opting for EVs “because they’re just cheaper and better vehicles”.
“The equivalent electric vehicle is now about five or 10% lower cost than the equivalent ICE [internal combustion engine] vehicle,” the chair of lithium, nickel and copper miner, IGO, said.
“Some of that’s due to subsidies but a lot of it is due to the position that they took 15 or 20 years ago to say, we’re going to become competitive in electric vehicles, and that’s resulted in the current scale of manufacturing.
“And there’s a very positive cycle that drives that.
“China has low energy security in fossil fuels. It has high-density populations that are connected by very fast electric public transport. It has no 100-year consumer identity around vehicles. A lot of Chinese families that buy a car for the first time are first time owners of vehicles, whereas the US has been driving cars for 100 years.
“So the US consumer’s view of what a vehicle is might include that roar of the V8 engine, etc.
“That just doesn’t exist in China.
“And they took the policy decisions; they built the manufacturing capacity to get to that price point that’s different. And once you reach that point then it goes around and around.
“Whereas in the US last year about 10 or 12% of vehicles were electric. People are projecting by 2026-27 it could be up to 20% but it’s well behind. Europe is somewhere in the middle, at about 20% of full EVs and plug-in hybrids and running to probably about 30% in the next couple of years.”
Robert Friedland said in London: “If we think we’re going to beat the Chinese at electric cars and electrification we’re crazy. They do windmills and solar and electric cars at scale.
“You saw Northvolt [in Sweden] try to build batteries: $20 billion is just going to money heaven.
“When I was a kid we had the first Japanese car. The Datsuns and the Nissans … were kind of a joke, and they got really good. Toyota took over the world. Then we started seeing the first Korean cars. And now Hyundai is the world’s largest automobile group.
“The Chinese cars are fantastic. They’re so much better than a Tesla. I got out in a big SUV and the Chinese salesman said, just ask it to play any piece of music. There’s a big, high-resolution screen [in the front console]. I got in and said, in English, Hotel California, and boom, Hotel California, in a nanosecond in this Chinese car.
“It’ll play anything for you.”
Turning on more terbium
In September little-known Nebraska firm Rare Earth Salts scored a tiny US Department of Defense grant to up production of terbium and other rare earth elements used in rare earth (RE) magnets.
Terbium was one of 17 rare earth elements that “play a critical role in our national security, energy independence, environmental future, and economic prosperity”, Rare Earth Salts said. Unlike some of the not-so-rare earths, terbium is described as one of the hardest to source, making up less than 1% of the total RE content of most deposits.
Yet its role in neodymium iron boron (NdFeB) magnets used in aircraft, submarines and missiles is critical, adding temperature resiliency.
“Rare Earth Salts’ capability will help the United States establish a mine-to-magnet supply chain without reliance on foreign sources of material,” said the country’s first assistant secretary of defense for industrial base policy, Dr Laura Taylor-Kale. Only confirmed in the role in March 2023, she advises US senior defence leaders on “all matters pertaining to industrial base resilience and innovation”. Her office authorised more than $500 million of what it calls program awards in FY2024.
Rare Earth Salts says it is one of a few terbium oxide producers outside of China.
“As co-products the company will also recover the rare earths lanthanum, cerium, europium, and yttrium, each with their own applications in commercial industry and defence,” the company said, citing Adamas Intelligence research that highlights potential for global magnet RE oxide consumption to triple in value to $46.2 billion by 2035.
Despite the market growth projections and its claim to uniquely hold patented non-solvent extraction technologies to separate light and heavy REs cost-competitively, Rare Earth Salts is among many Western firms battling to build scale and become a significant part of alternative supply chains feeding non-Chinese industry.
“I’ve been involved in critical minerals for about four years and in that time China’s market share has increased,” Sean Sargent, CEO of UK-based Green Lithium, said at Resourcing Tomorrow 2024.
A minnow trying to raise funds to build a lithium chemical plant in northern England, Green Lithium put out a lightly worded statement in October proclaiming a strategic partnership with Rio Tinto.
“Even though we’re all talking about it we’re actually making very little tangible progress in terms of taking some of that market share.
“But I think the opportunity is huge.
“Taking lithium as an example, by 2040 we need 40-times more refineries than exist today.
“So for every refinery in China today we need 39 new refineries to be built over the next 15 or 16 years.
“And of course we can do that in a more sustainable way … with greater transparency – putting the power in the consumer to say I’m going to choose this battery or that battery based on its labour or carbon [footprint].
“I think that transparency is potentially the game changer. It’s the wedge in the door and for us it can very much level the playing field so we can compete on a much more fair and comparable basis.”
Transparency may or may not be a game changer. It can certainly be a fairly malleable term for Western and Chinese companies.
Technology and innovation like that being promoted by companies such as Rare Earth Salts and Green Lithium is, on the other hand, pivotal, according to Brian Menell, CEO and founder of US Government-backed “technology metal” investor, TechMet.
“To do our job as an industry, to adequately supply the world with critical minerals two, three, five and 10 years out, we really can’t do more of what we’ve been doing before, particularly in the context of countering China’s dominance, which we need to,” Menell said at Resourcing Tomorrow 2024.
“We can’t out-Chinese the Chinese.
“What we can potentially do is out-innovate the Chinese and out-democracy the Chinese.
“We need to encourage innovation in terms of novel processing technologies and novel ways of using materials more efficiently in batteries and other systems.
“And we need to utilise popular will, through better education and better engagement with media and politicians, to push state institutions to more aggressively support financially our projects that align with our values and the supply chain imperative of the United States and Europe and outside world.
“So we really need to focus on doing things differently not trying to do more of what the Chinese are doing and more of what we did last year and 10 years ago.
“It’s not going to work.
“We’ll continue to fail the world.”
Technology takeover
For someone who has turned the exploration business on its head and led the expansion of a major new market for battery minerals over the past decade, Elon Musk wasn’t getting a lot of love at times at Resourcing Tomorrow 2024. Which wasn’t a huge surprise. Mining leaders such as Mark Bristow, Andrew Forrest and Robert Friedland have walked the talk in the past 20 years on accelerating change in the industry, opening up new geographical and geopolitical frontiers, and building value on the back of resource discovery and growth. Yet they are often cast as outliers even within the industry.
Put the “great and the good” of that industry in one room – all the CEOs of the world’s top 20 miners – and they sit on a combined public share market value less than “some clown making shitty cars in the US”, said the departing CEO of one of the small gold companies exiting the public stage after being acquired in 2024.
Centamin’s Martin Horgan, who was participating in a panel on mining mergers and acquisitions in the wake of the company’s $2.5 billion buyout by AngloGold Ashanti, didn’t stop to ponder the wisdom in that remark. An audience member observed in another part of the conference: “Back in the 1990s the mining industry was trading on double-digit EBITDA multiples. Centamin, I think, got taken out on 3.8-times [EBITDA].”
The event also heard commodity-focused investments by more than 350 global funds had shrunk by as much as 80% in the past 15 years. Mining was the focus of less than 2% of the total assets under management at these funds.
Horgan did say finding M&A value in the sector was tough for small and large players alike.
The panel agreed – like many before it – that reasons for this included “systematic under-investment” in exploration and new project development.
On the exploration front Musk has a somewhat loftier goal of finding new habitable worlds for the Earth’s people. But he has said he needs more minerals, faster, to propel the EV fleet growth that will help underwrite interplanetary expansion.
Depletion of the world’s pipeline of high-quality, financeable copper, nickel and other mining projects meant “there are very few clean, bolt-on cash acquisitions that people can make to really move forward,” according to the founder and CEO of London-based private equity fund manager Tembo Capital, David Street.
“If you look at the transactions that have been coming through – Alcoa consolidating alumina; a few years back, the consolidation of Nevada [gold]; Rio Tinto-Arcadium Lithium – they tell a similar kind of story,” Street said.
“Where can we unlock real value in this industry?
“A lot of these [M&A transactions] are not new things. These are things the sector has been thinking and talking about for years, decades in some cases, and people are finally building up the confidence to get on and do it.
“There’s a series of push and pull factors. One is real conviction sinking in that energy transition is coming and it’s going to change the way and the volume in which commodities are consumed.
“And there is also fear that they’re going to get left behind if they don’t move.”
What’s the silver bullet that will turn around disinvestment in the world’s mining sector, Friedland was asked.
“Maybe a crisis will focus peoples’ consciousness,” he said.
“The problem is the crisis has already arrived.
“We have about half of humanity that is educated and interested in trying to do something about anthropomorphic global warming and we can’t afford to take a risk on that subject.
“On the other hand we have war. And drone warfare, artificial intelligence and data centres are all linked for military application and their demand for copper competes with the copper we need for the energy transition.
“How we actually take care of our kids and our grandkids requires a much more realistic discussion about how we revolutionise the supply chain.
“Mining is sort of a 600-year-old enterprise. We still crush rock with compressive force. It takes a huge amount of energy to bash rock together and get the metal out of it.
“That has to change.
“Everything has to change.
“What are we mining? Why are we mining it? How are we mining it?
“We need a fundamental step change in technology in order to mine the metals that we need for seven or eight billion people.
“The mining industry has this huge burden of figuring out a better way to mine much, much larger volumes of greener [metals].
“And I’m an optimist. I think it’s possible.”