Trump’s mineral deposit is an admission that the future is electricity

The Trump administration announced this week that the US government will work to build a $11.7 billion mineral reserve. That’s the headline; A very interesting little story.

The project, known as Project Vault, is the administration’s latest attempt to secure essential minerals for US producers and which President Donald Trump says will ensure that “American businesses and workers are not harmed by the shortage.”

This follows recent ventures from management into rare earth developers, including mining equity stakes. USA Rare Earth and MP equipment.

Individually, they can be interpreted as managers who are taking measures to reduce the share of the market affected by its trade wars. Together, they are accepting, even tacitly or subconsciously, that the future depends on electrical technologies, including electric cars and wind turbines.

In his speech, Trump also referred to the world’s dependence on China for the most important mineral resources. Over the past year, China has been using its influence to counter threats by the Trump administration, banning imports of foreign steel and lithium battery materials to the United States. In the end, China gave up, but the story made it clear who had the trump card.

The conflict also revealed how important minerals are to the modern economy. Trump compared the new reserves to the Energy Department’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was established after the oil embargo of the early 1970s.

“Just as we already have oil reserves and minerals that are very important for national defense, we are now building American industrial reserves, so we have no problem,” Mr Trump said.

Storage space isn’t running out, but it’s not as important as it used to be, limited by US oil wells and the growing market for solar, wind, and battery power. (Sun and wind stay in control new power generation, where more than 25% of new cars sold globally were EVs or hybrids.)

It is not clear which rocks will go into storage; Bloomberg reported that gallium and cobalt will be included. It is possible that others such as copper and nickel may be thrown in, although they are not mentioned.

The size of the money is known. The US Export-Import Bank is providing a $10 billion loan, and private funds are completing the rest. This is about half of the price of oil currently in the Strategic Oil Reserve going to the market which is 1% growth in the world oil market, according to Bloomberg reporter David Fickling. he said.

The disagreement is more like Trump’s bluster or an admission that the market for essential oils will grow significantly in the coming years.

Both are possible, with a high probability of being the latter.

Most of the growth in demand minerals comes from clean energy technologies and EVs; without them, the market will not be as difficult as the experts predicted. Energy demand, including data centers, will play a role, but more than half of the global growth in demand for fossil fuels is expected to come from electric vehicles and wind turbines, according to at the IEA. For cobalt and lithium, these figures are very skewed, with EVs representing the greatest growth until 2050.

The Trump administration has not been silent on these issues silence on clean energy technology, prefer to bet on the situation with fossil fuels. But the world continues to move toward solar, wind, and batteries, which is driving demand for the mineral. The new inventory shows that the markets can be hard to ignore.