彭博深度探讨关键矿产与稀土供应链

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Joe Doe is Bloomberg News senior economic stakecraft reporter. He is here with us. We're talking everything when it comes to rare earths and critical minerals, a crucial part of the supply chain for everything from electronics to weapons systems. Joe, we've wanted to do this for so long and we're glad you can do it. I'm I have to say we're happy to have you, Christine. Carol is so sad she's out today.

But Joe is making it up to her because next week when I'm out, I I guess Joe is stepping in a little bit.

So, he's going to be here.

We get more Joe.

Okay. So, Joe, I want to start with you. Then we're going to bring in uh this this fantastic lineup that we have for the next hour. And it's a lot of it is all of it is thanks to you and the people you've brought us over the last few years. So, we are grateful to you for that. I just want to start Joe with a a general question about critical minerals and and rare earths because when I met you, you were metals and mining reporter and and we talked to you sometimes about heavy equipment

and then something something happened something changed.

What was it and why did rare earth and critical minerals become this conversation that investors, the administration and we're so focused on? I mean, if we really go way back, right, the pandemic hits in 2020, if we in case we forgot, and supply chains became a story like actual supply chains and like you know, those of us who are in the commodities space had covered actual supply chains, you know, understanding the procurement officers at various big companies you've heard of, right?

Uh, soda companies, beer companies, car companies. Um, and then if we just move from there, it becomes very apparent to investors in a big way why supply chains matter. Fast forward to a couple years later, 3 years later, China in the middle of the summer of 2023, uh, shocks a lot of close watchers by saying they're putting export controls on gallium and germanmanium. And these are two elements that are absolutely essential to defense technologies, right?

Defense, right? Like it's not a it's not a Silicon Valley thing. It's not Apple and and Google all. It's it is very much these are defense applications. And we had some reporting shortly after that time. We did a big take that said when those export controls were announced, it sent off alarm bells throughout the Biden administration. And we had a senior administration official tell us for that story that was the moment that all of the concerns that various agencies had had in particular the Pentagon and trying to warn you know big players in Congress the president of the United States that it was there and that is where we are now.

Right? So the Biden administration moves on Trump administration comes back in. They had long had this conversation about the importance of rare earths and critical minerals. In some ways it was Trump and Trump 1.0 know that put this on the map.

Mhm.

It got it got supercharged, right? Liberation day happens. The president of the United States puts tariffs on every imaginable country in the world and he goes hard on China and China responds just a few days later. Initially, nobody heard about it because it just happened in the middle of the night on a Thursday. And they said, "We are putting export controls on rare earths, the important rare earths, but also permanent magnets."

And this is when it went from becoming a defense technology problem to an allout tech war.

You bring up exactly what we're going to do right now perfectly, Joe, because you fast forward from then to today and we're regularly hearing from the president about this meeting with executives from the mining and critical minerals industries, including on Friday when he had them down in Washington DC. Check out what he had to say about the US versus China.

Accredited mining programs in the United States now graduate less than 170 mining engineers each year, while China graduates more than 3,000 and half of our current mining workforce is set to retire within the next 3 years. Wow.

That was President Trump on Friday. Joe, jump in here.

Yeah. I mean, his wow at the end, right, is again a conversation that you've been hearing in in the world that I've been covering for a long time. I I mean, I remember sitting in this office, call it three or four years ago with the now former CEO of Riotento and, you know, we would catch up with him every so often and and one of the things that he pointed out was, you know, Joe, one of the big problems we have is a lack of geologists and a lack of people who want to come in to the mining space.

Riointo is the second largest mining company in the world. Well, who were they losing that talent to? Um, oil and gas. So, when you hear the president say last week, you know, um, we're having an aging workforce. Well, it's largely because the people who are capable of a lot of these jobs are not going into mining. Um, and we've had some wonderful reporting out from our commodities team uh, even this year about the der of labor and, um, you know, that's just the the tip of the iceberg.

Well, somebody who is at least going into mining from a reporting perspective is Paulie Mosens, a reporter for Bloomberg News. Paulie recently writing about how the president is rewriting corporate norms with this 211 mile Arctic road. The federal government granting a permit to build a road through the Alaskan wilderness in exchange it gets part of a mining company. Paulie, what what is what is happening here with the road on and sort of the economic stcraft part of this which I think investors are becoming increasingly used to.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's funny to ask what is happening to the road. Well, right now nothing but soon potentially everything, right? This could completely alter the way of life there, which is that people go bush plane by bush plane from village to village. to build a road in this untouched wilderness would really strongly change the way of life there, but it would also really change the mining environment there.

You're going from having extremely expensive expeditions to try to prospect in very costly helicopter rides to being able to drive in and, you know, really see what's going on there, see what could be mined there, and also once the mines are actually built and say about a decade to be able to just tuck, you know, get everything on tractor trailers and freight it out. That is a huge, huge difference. And so right now we're at the very very beginning stages of that.

But allowing this road to potentially be built allows you to completely change the way that people live there and the way that mining is able to make money in Alaska. Now Polly, one of the things that stood out from your story is the fact that the due diligence by the government in terms of carrying out the project uh was completed in less than 72 hours. Uh, and that seems a little too short, right, for a project that, as you say, is going to completely change the way that people live around that area.

What could have been potentially missed uh given that rush to complete the due diligence?

Yeah, I think one of the big questions is how successful is this mining district really going to be, right? Because there's a lot of prospecting still to be done. I think something that we and the federal government, you know, still need to see is exactly how much ore is going to be able to get out of there, how profitable it will it will be. And also, you have the big question of how much are people going to want thi