Last week, the UK Government announced a Critical Minerals Refresh, aimed at reinforcing its commitment to its Critical Minerals Strategy, as well as highlight progress and set out upcoming delivery milestones.

The Critical Minerals Refresh was aimed at reinforcing the government’s commitment to its Critical Minerals Strategy, as well as highlighting progress and setting out upcoming delivery milestones.  Key announcements include that:

·      The UK government is launching an independent Task & Finish Group on Critical Minerals Resilience for UK Industry to investigate the critical mineral dependencies and vulnerabilities across UK industry sectors and opportunities for industry to promote resilience in its supply chains. It will deliver a report at the end of this year.

·      The UK government is accelerating its collaboration on critical minerals with international partners, including recent partnerships agreed with Canada and South Africa and engagement through the Minerals Security Partnership, International Energy Agency and G7.

·      The UK Research and Innovation’s Circular Critical Materials Supply Chains (CLIMATES) fund launched with an initial £15M in current spending window to focus on making the UK’s REE supply chains more resilient and boost the circular economy.

·      A £65.5 million Accelerate-to-Demonstrate (A2D) Facility, under the umbrella Clean Energy Innovation Facility (CEIF) platform through the £1 billion Ayrton Fund commitment, includes a dedicated funding pillar on technology innovations for critical minerals in developing countries.

The UK Government published Resilience for the Future: The UK’s critical minerals strategy in mid 2022.  The strategy sets out an accelerate-collaborate-enhance (“A-C-E”) approach with the latter two parts promoting an “international” response to the challenges faced.

In a Blue View written when the strategy was released, Project Blue argued that the strategy was both realistic and pragmatic and that the strategy’s authors should be commended for their positioning of the challenges ahead, the strategy’s global ambition, and for identifying the UK’s current position and future potential in the critical materials space. 

But we also suggested that the hard work was still ahead, and it was the detail and implementation which the government would be judged on.

While the “refresh” announcement argues that the UK has already made significant progress against the ambitions of the Critical Minerals Strategy, in line with the A-C-E approach set out in July, in the wider context of the USA’s Inflation Reduction Act and now Europe’s Critical Raw Materials Act, there is a growing urgency for the UK to make things happen.

A refreshed set of milestones – with various action points for 2023 set out against the pillars of the Critical Minerals Strategy – has now been set out, and there are plans to publish a delivery update in 2024 to report on progress, highlight major developments and set out refreshed delivery plans. Much will need to be achieved between now and then if the UK isn’t to fall behind in the critical materials space.