As concerns grow over China’s dominance in the global critical minerals supply chain, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland warns that the regime is deliberately trying to “wipe out” emerging miners and processors, and calls for allies to unite in enhancing supply chain security.
Addressing Canada’s challenges in developing critical minerals, Freeland, who also serves as deputy prime minister, said, “We are seeing very targeted, very intentional Chinese action to wipe out the nascent miners and processors in some of these areas.” She also noted that allied nations in the G7 need to “find collective ways to support our miners, our processors” in the sector.
This call came from Jonathan Price, president of the Canadian resource company Teck. He noted that China controls 40 percent to over 90 percent of global processing capacity for critical minerals, including copper and cobalt. To illustrate his concern, Price compared this to when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) controlled about 40 percent of the world’s oil supply. He said that when OPEC had this level of control, its oil embargo in the 1970s led to significant economic problems in the West, resulting in a global recession.
“With critical minerals increasingly forming the backbone of not just the energy transition and energy industry, but also technology and defence, that kind of intense concentration [by China] creates a material risk for our shared economic health and for national security,” Price said.
Price cited an example of this concern materializing: China’s restriction of gallium and germanium exports last year. China produces around 98 percent of the world’s gallium and about 60 percent of its germanium, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Gallium is essential for manufacturing semiconductors and solar panels, while germanium is used in fiber optics and infrared optics.
“Chinese investment over the past decade has completely upended the industry, placing China in a dominant position and sidelining Western supply. They can flood the market, drive down prices, and make it impossible for companies to justify investing in new supply when there’s no hope of a reasonable return, which keeps the playing field tilted to their benefit,” Price said.
He also expressed concerns about the “lengthy and often unpredictable permitting processes” that have deterred new mining investments in Canada and the United States, noting that, on average, it takes 15 years to build a single copper mine.
In contrast to Price’s call for more government support, Cohen said that the ultimate solution to China’s supply chain dominance lies with the private sector through diversification, citing the OPEC example.
“It wasn’t tariff or trade policy that has reduced the reliance on OPEC for oil and fossil fuels. It was maybe government encouragement, maybe some incentives, but it was the development of [production] capacity outside of OPEC for the production of oil, which was done by the private sector,” Cohen said.
“At the end of the day, the way we’re going to break the control of China over mining, processing, [and] refining is going to be private sector investment.”
