China’s export ban on key minerals may have a silver lining for the US
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. China is the handmaiden to the globe’s energy transition—and will continue to be so once an anti-transition president occupies the White House again next month. As if to advertise that, Beijing announced that, in response to US export controls on advanced chips, it was banning exports to the US of several critical minerals and tightening restrictions on sales of another, graphite.
Trade wars are, in general, not good for decarbonization. Falling prices for clean tech are owed primarily to China’s low-cost supply. The domestic content provisions in US President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, will inevitably put upward pressure on prices for those technologies, for a while at least.
Yet unease at China’s hold over this sector, built with the help of decades of industrial-policy support, is justified to some degree, as is an effort to build domestic capacity. For critical minerals, this strategic element will be vital during President-elect Donald Trump’s second term. Trump wants to roll back at least some parts of Biden’s green agenda, such as federal tax credits for buyers of EVs.
At the same time, he has an affinity for digging and drilling, ranging from his professed love of coal miners to his drill-baby-drill energy approach, plus his 2020 declaration of a national emergency over import dependence on a range of critical minerals. Not all critical minerals are necessarily critical for an energy transition. Antimony, gallium and germanium, the three metals under China’s new export ban, are known more for their applications in ammunition, semiconductors and electronics, respectively.
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