The US aims to support shovel-ready critical minerals projects to compete with China's dominance. Photo / Getty Images
By Fox Meyer of RNZ
The United States wants to back shovel-ready critical minerals projects in New Zealand and other countries, as it seeks to close a 40-year development gap with rival superpower China before the end of Donald Trump’s term in office.
That’s emerged from a critical minerals summit in Washington DC this month, at which a Kiwi mining expert and other representatives were asked to show what our country has to offer.
The impetus for the summit was a drive by Trump to make the US the world leader in the production and processing of critical minerals, a market currently dominated by China.
The US’ first step was to bring allied nations together and plan an independent supply chain, including New Zealand.
Duncan Hardie, of Hardie Pacific, represented his company and New Zealand’s critical minerals opportunities in Washington, alongside emissaries from the foreign affairs ministry.
Hardie has decades of experience in the critical minerals sector in New Zealand and Australia. Though most of his time is spent in Australia, Hardie Pacific still lists its permanent address on Leith St, in Dunedin.
Hardie also founded Westland Mineral Sands and served as its chair until he resigned from the position last year.
His new company, Hardie Pacific, has ongoing critical mineral operations on the South Island’s west coast, and has a number of permits in place for further operations on freehold land.
The US State Department invited Hardie to Washington for the event, where he took notes on the presentations and reported back to New Zealand officials this week.
The summit was attended by 27 nations the US had identified as allies. One hundred and twenty-six representatives were sent by their respective exploration and mining companies, with each firm allowed only one representative.
Hardie told Newsroom it was one of the most exciting moments of his professional career, agreeing with US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum’s description of the event as the most significant gathering of figures in the critical mineral sector in modern history.
At the summit, Burgum described the goal of the current Trump administration: to close the gap between American mineral processing capability and that of China’s, which had a 40-year head start and currently dominated over 90% of the critical minerals market.
Burgum, formerly the governor of South Dakota, founded and sold a software company to Microsoft before joining the Trump regime in 2023. There, he worked as an adviser on energy policy and helped lead a pressure campaign to favour coal over wind energy.
Burgum told the crowd he hoped American youths would soon see the mineral sector as preferable to working for Goldman Sachs or Netflix, and wanted to catch up to 40 years of Chinese development in just two years.
According to Hardie, Burgum said the Trump mantra of “drill, baby, drill” would be replaced with “mine, baby, mine”.
The Trump regime wanted allied nations to develop an alternative supply chain to the one controlled by China and Russia. Because the Chinese Government has subsidised mineral refinement, the cost of critical mineral extraction and processing has been uneconomic for consumer nations to develop on their own.
If the American Government could guarantee minimum prices and supply capital for development, allied nations could start mining, refining and producing critical minerals of their own – which American companies like Boeing and Microsoft would be eager to buy.
Hardie said summit attendees did not speak poorly of China – if they mentioned it at all – but recognised how early the country had identified the importance of critical minerals. He said the US Government expected all nations and companies present to honour their current contracts with Chinese suppliers, but planned to win them over in a few years’ time by offering competitively priced mineral products.
Hardie said the Americans wanted each of the 27 nations to prepare a collection of project briefings. These projects had to target an element that was on the American critical minerals list as well as the list of the host nation, and had to be either shovel-ready or in production. The potential timelines necessary to gain consent for mining projects was seen as a barrier to prospective projects.
New Zealand could offer a handful of critical minerals and elements to the American-led partnership: tungsten, antimony, vanadium, manganese and monzonite, to name a few.
The country’s critical mineral potential has been known for some time; early gold miners in Reefton noted the presence of antimony, which was almost worthless until its potential in electronics manufacturing was discovered.
But accessing those minerals has been prohibited. All 17 rare earth elements (all of which are on the American critical mineral list) are based on the element thorium, which is radioactive. This class of elements, called the lanthanides, are all radioactive. Under New Zealand’s nuclear ban, companies could not get a prospecting licence for them.
Hardie said his company hit such a snag nearly 15 years ago, and ended up in a legal stalemate. The prohibition was dropped over a decade ago, but Hardie still thought it set New Zealand’s critical minerals portfolio back considerably.
Josie Vidal, chief executive of the New Zealand Minerals Council, told Newsroom that New Zealand had a “small, but potentially valuable” role to play in the global supply of critical minerals.
Vidal said titanium, vanadium, zirconium, aluminium and rare earth elements were already being mined in New Zealand.
She identified antimony and tungsten as byproducts of gold mining which had yet to be produced. Magnesium, platinum and phosphate group metals could also be in the shovel-ready category.
Vidal said the recent developments had tremendous potential for New Zealand’s mining industry, “but it does not mean there will suddenly be a lot more mines”
Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick told Newsroom the New Zealand public had been told critical minerals were about preparing for a transition to green energy, but didn’t think that was what the Americans had in mind.
The coalition Government announced its critical minerals list with a cleaner future at the forefront. “Now it seems as though, through backroom deals, they’re going to be funnelling those resources into Donald Trump’s militaristic expansion,” Swarbrick said.
University of Auckland emeritus professor Jane Kelsey drew national attention to the critical minerals deal last month, when she warned “secret” meetings with the American Government could constitute a breach of the Crown’s obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
With those talks confirmed and negotiations on a trade framework underway, Kelsey told Newsroom the details of the summit squared with her expectations.
Kelsey said the focus on shovel-ready or active projects made sense, as “the US time frame is very short and Trump is very impatient”.
For Kelsey, it came down to a question of what the New Zealand public did and didn’t know.
In the latter category was how the trade framework was being developed, how far along the track it was, what role New Zealand played, what threats of tariffs had been deployed or how any of that interfaced with the projects presented.
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters told Newsroom it was too early to make any statements on the status of those negotiations.
What New Zealanders did know, Kelsey said, was to expect any deal struck to be made on the US’ terms. She doubted the US Government was concerned with what these deals would mean for the partner nations’ relationships with China, “let alone their own indigenous, environmental, climate, obligations and democratic processes”.
“That’s what makes the secrecy so dangerous,” she said. Resources Minister Shane Jones pushed back against claims of secrecy, and said the summit and trade frameworks had been widely reported overseas.
But Kelsey questioned the lack of publicity from Jones’ office in the lead-up to the summit. “If it’s so good for us, why not sing it from the rafters?”