Following up on Squire Patton Boggs’s continuing coverage of the critical minerals industry, we examine some recent reforms in the federal permitting process which aim to ease supply-side constraints by expediting the development and exploitation of critical minerals. Rapidly mounting geopolitical tensions, East/West decoupling, and longstanding supply chain stresses underlie a new reality—global logistics now operates less like a fine tuned watch and more like a game of Calvinball, where delays, ever-changing rules, and black-swan shocks are the norm.  But this disruption only goes so far—some things remain largely unchanged.  One certainty in this uncertain time is that the demand for critical minerals will continue to increase in the coming years as countries push a green transition to meet Paris Accord targets.  Countries and companies remain laser-focused on the need to obtain reliable sources of critical minerals needed to fuel this transition.

Although the demand for critical minerals is robust and largely insulated from the current political climate, critical minerals supply faces significant hurdles including both short- and long-term capacity strains given political instability in key regions, an uncertain trade outlook, and—most of all—skyrocketing demand.  The International Energy Agency reports that demand for critical minerals related to electric vehicles and battery storage will soar by orders of magnitude in the coming years, to say nothing of critical minerals’ increasing use as the United States and European Union attempt to develop independent chip/high-tech manufacturing bases and redundant critical mineral supply chains.