Introduction

As discussed in Part 1 of this note, Western strategies to reshore or friendshore mineral supply chains are implicitly dependent on new mine development. But given the constraints outlined above, and a geopolitical environment increasingly defined by resource nationalism, industrial policy competition, and producer-country assertiveness, this assumption is beginning to look less like a strategy and more like a hope.

If supply chains are to be secured, they cannot rely on a pipeline of large, long-cycle mining, extraction, and processing projects that are exposed to shifting trade regimes, permitting risk, and host-country demands for in-country value capture. The implication, though rarely stated outright, is difficult to avoid: reshoring will only work if it is decoupled from the traditional model of new large-scale mines and instead aligned with geopolitical realities that limit Western control over where and how supply is developed.

The constraint, however, points directly toward the solution. If the traditional mine-build model is too slow, too capital-intensive, and too exposed to geopolitical contingency to deliver secure supply chains in the required timeframe, then the only viable path is a production model built on fundamentally different logic: one that operates at faster timescales, in more distributed settings, and in genuine alignment with the development priorities of producer nations rather than in tension with them. Such a model is not hypothetical. The pieces exist, but the key question is whether they can be assembled fast enough.

1. The Focus: Radical Improvements in the Current Approach and A New Production Platform

Meeting future demand requires a fundamentally different approach to extraction: one that unlocks resources that are currently uneconomic and/or technically not feasible under the current at-scale approach. This includes many brownfield developments with stranded orebodies.

This proposed ‘new production platform’ is built on technological innovation, speed and modularity, rather than scale alone. Accelerated investment and support for western innovation is needed in multiple areas:

1. Streamline the current production platform, with a radical reduction in energy, waste and water intensity, improving recovery rates, and unlocking waste-to-value opportunities.

There are several technological improvements available for deployment in novel processing technologies that could dramatically reduce energy, water, and emissions intensity while improving recovery rates and production volumes at sites around the world.

For example, bioleaching is already deployed commercially at copper operations in Chile and Australia, enabling low-cost extraction from low-grade sulfide ores that conventional smelting cannot treat economically; and analogous approaches are advancing for nickel and cobalt recovery.

Technology also offers the potential to increase mineral recovery from existing operations. With advanced ore sorting, AI-driven process optimization, and real-time sensing, operational experience consistently demonstrates 10–20 percent recovery improvements are achievable at operating mines without additional extraction, representing a significant near-term supply increment at low incremental capital cost.

Beyond traditional extraction, the opportunity also exists to reprocess mine tailings and legacy waste stockpiles to recover stranded critical mineral value without new extraction. This is the highest-potential near-term supply lever and the clearest proof point for the “no new large mines” thesis: global tailings stockpiles contain billions of tonnes of previously extracted material at grades now recoverable with modern hydrometallurgical methods. Copper tailings routinely carry economically significant concentrations of cobalt and Rare Earth Elements (REEs); phosphate tailings contain uranium and rare earths; and commercial tailings reprocessing projects are already operating in Chile, Australia, and Southern Africa. This is far from theoretical: Australia’s Century zinc-tailings operation in Queensland (originally New Century Resources, acquired by Sibanye-Stillwater in 2023) restarted as a tailings-retreatment mine in August 2018 and is the largest such operation in Australia, with current production placing it among the top 15 global zinc producers.^[1]

2. Establish a ‘new production platform’, to unlock resources currently uneconomic or technically not feasible under current methods.

The way it has always been done is no longer working. The mining industry requires a fundamentally different production platform: one that enables distributed, lower-cost, and faster time to first production without anchoring supply strategies to large, capital-intensive projects that take decades to mature and carry systemic exposure to the headwinds described above.

Three capabilities define this platform. The first is modular, scalable extraction and processing systems capable of deployment across smaller or previously uneconomic deposits – built for repeatability across many sites rather than optimization for a single megaproject. The second is in-situ and minimally invasive extraction methods that access mineral resources without the surface infrastructure, permitting burden, and capital commitment of conventional mine development. The third is the systematic integration of digital technologies, automation, and remote operations to improve the efficiency, repeatability, and deployment speed of both. Together, these capabilities represent a shift from bespoke, site-specific project development toward technology-driven production systems that can be standardized, replicated, and scaled across many deposits.

The most developed proof of concept for this model is in-situ recovery, which has already transformed uranium production. In Situ Recovery (ISR) accounts for more than half of global primary uranium output. Kazakhstan, the world’s largest single national producer at roughly 38 percent of supply, sources virtually all of its production via ISR. In the United States, Cameco operates the country’s only large-scale ISR uranium facilities at Smith Ranch-Highland in Wyoming and Crow Butte in Nebraska, both currently in care and maintenance pending market recovery but with the infrastructure and operational knowledge in place to respond rapidly when conditions permit.

Application of in-situ recovery to copper is advancing. Taseko’s Florence Copper project in Arizona harvested its first cathode in March 2026 – the first new greenfield copper production in the United States in more than a decade – and is ramping toward a planned production rate of approximately 85 million pounds of copper cathode per year, at capital intensity well below conventional open-pit development and with a surface footprint a fraction of its scale equivalent. Florence Copper is a deployable template: a repeatable wellfield-style approach that could, in principle, be applied across compatible deposits without the permitting exposure or infrastructure commitment of a conventional open-pit or block-cave operation.[2]

The same repeatable logic applies to the processing stage. Containerized or skid-mounted processing units – modular leaching and refining equipment designed to be deployed across multiple smaller or stranded resources and relocated as deposits are worked through – are moving from pilot toward commercial deployment. In November 2024, Lifezone Metals produced first refined nickel, copper, and cobalt cathode from its Kabanga Nickel Project in Tanzania using its hydromet refining platform, a smelter-free pathway to Class 1 battery-grade nickel from sulfide ore that bypasses the high-capital, fixed-infrastructure model of conventional nickel refining.[3]

Speed and capital efficiency, rather than scale, define the platform’s competitive logic. Direct lithium extraction (DLE) offers the most commercially developed illustration of what this looks like in practice. Conventional brine lithium production relies on solar evaporation ponds that require 12 to 18 months to process brine, a method that is both slow and geographically constrained. DLE recovers lithium from brine in hours, compresses development timelines from decade-long projects to modular, phased deployment cycles, and is commercially viable at brine concentrations below the threshold evaporation methods require. The deployments are no longer theoretical. Eramet brought its Centenario-Ratones DLE plant in Salta, Argentina, into production in 2024 at a planned first-phase capacity of approximately 24,000 tonnes per year of lithium carbonate equivalent.[4] Standard Lithium operates a demonstration plant in southern Arkansas and is advancing its South West Arkansas project.[5] ExxonMobil has entered the Smackover Formation lithium-from-brine play.[6] Multiple independent technology providers, including Schlumberger’s NeoLith Energy, Sunresin, Lilac Solutions, Summit Nanotech, and Vulcan Energy, are each commercializing distinct DLE technology stacks, and a service-provider ecosystem is consolidating around them.[7]^,[8] The market structure that is emerging features many independent operators, rapidly iterating standardized technology, and a competitive service layer providing technical execution. This structure is materially closer to how unconventional oil and gas operates than to traditional brine or hard-rock lithium development. (See Satish Rao’s 2024 article on this topic in CIM Magazine.[9])

That structural parallel to oil and gas is not incidental. The shale revolution replaced megaproject logic with pad drilling, standardized completions, and rapid iteration, with production scalable up or down with commodity price cycles rather than locked into decade-long payback commitments. The same logic – flexible production systems that allow producers to respond to market conditions rather than be captive to them – is precisely what the new mining production platform requires.

The platform cannot scale without a corresponding shift in the ecosystem that finances, equips, and operates it. Two structural enablers are essential. The first is integrated service models analogous to those developed by Schlumberger and Halliburton in oil and gas: companies that standardized the technical execution of complex extraction processes, enabled operators to deploy advanced technology without building proprietary competencies, and compressed the cost and timeline of field development. An equivalent service infrastructure for modular ISR, DLE, and hydromet processing does not yet fully exist for mining at commercial scale; building it is as much a priority as the underlying technologies themselves. The second is the capital architecture. Blended capital stacks combining project finance, venture investment, and offtake agreements will be necessary to accelerate the commercialization of novel mining technologies at the speed the supply gap requires. Early-stage Western innovators, including Novamerra and The Stealth Mining Company, are advancing through pilot stages with financing structures that do not yet match the scale or certainty available to conventional mine development from established project finance markets. Closing that gap requires deliberate design, including development finance institutions structured to absorb the technology and commercialization risk that private capital cannot yet price. Beyond capital, collaboration with resource-rich nations must extend meaningfully beyond memoranda of understanding: genuine innovation partnerships that embed in-country technical capacity and share the value created by new extraction methods, rather than simply exporting that value.

2. Call to Action: Build the Next Production Platform Now

The window to secure mineral supply chains may be narrower than policymakers assume and closing faster than they would like. Incremental approaches will not suffice. Policymakers, industry leaders, and investors must align around a new production paradigm that deprioritizes large, long-cycle mining projects in favor of faster, modular, and technology-enabled supply models.

This requires coordinated action and bold leadership: accelerating deployment of breakthrough technologies, reshaping capital formation to support distributed production systems, and forming strategic partnerships with mineral-rich nations that align with their development ambitions.

Policy already provides much of the scaffolding, though it remains incomplete. In the United States, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022 originally created a production tax credit under Section 45X set at 10 percent of production cost for qualifying critical minerals (it has since been phased out).[10] It conditioned the consumer EV credit (Section 30D) on critical-minerals sourcing from the U.S. or its Free Trade Agreement partners. The Defense Production Act has been invoked since March 2022 to support domestic processing of lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese, and the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has financed multiple critical-minerals projects.[11] The European Union’s Critical Raw Materials Act, which entered into force in 2024, sets benchmark targets that no more than 65 percent of any “strategic” raw material come from a single third country, with EU-based capacity supplying at least 10 percent of annual extraction, 40 percent of processing, and 25 percent of recycling by 2030.[12] The Minerals Security Partnership, launched in June 2022 by the U.S. State Department, today comprising fourteen partner countries (Australia, Canada, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Norway, Republic of Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States) plus the European Union, provides a coordination platform for diplomatic, financial, and technical support of priority projects.[13] These instruments collectively recognize the geopolitical stakes; what they have not yet done is bend the supply curve, because they remain anchored to a long-cycle, conventional-mine production model that the underlying physics, capital requirements and politics no longer support. We need to move beyond adherence to a model that no longer serves strategic interests, and to move beyond MoUs.

The policy architecture needs to be aligned towards the new production platform described in Section 3: faster permitting pathways for modular, lower-footprint technologies; concessional capital for commercial-scale tailings reprocessing, DLE, and ISR deployment; offtake-backed federal lending for Western refining and separation capacity and investment in accelerating innovation to get these facilities into the lowest cost quartile; and bilateral investment vehicles that meet producer-country demands for in-country value capture rather than treating those demands as obstacles.

Defense-critical minerals warrant a distinct policy track within this framework. Because demand for rare earth elements, gallium, germanium, and other strategic inputs is decoupled from commercial price signals – driven by strategically critical but small volumes in weapons systems, guidance, and communications platforms – the conventional case for waiting on private investment does not apply. Strategic stockpiling at scale, sovereign offtake commitments at non-commercial prices, and direct public-sector capitalization of Western separation, refining, and magnet manufacturing capacity are all justified on national-security grounds alone. These should be pursued in parallel with the broader platform investments, not bolted on as a special case, and the capital math should be evaluated against the cost of strategic dependence rather than against commercial returns.

Critically, this is not a purely technical challenge: it is a geopolitical one. China already has a version of this platform, built over decades through state-directed investment in refining capacity, processing infrastructure, and offtake relationships across the Global South. Producer nations are not passive actors waiting for Western capital; they are assertive partners who will demand in-country value creation, technology transfer, and genuine industrial development as the price of access.

A Western strategy that deploys the new production platform while leaving the geopolitical architecture unchanged – still extractive, still routing value away from host countries, still neglecting the refining and processing stages – will encounter the same resistance that has stalled conventional mining. The platform must be built in full partnership with resource-holding nations, and it must address the complete value chain from extraction through refining. A supply chain that ends at the mine gate but routes through Chinese refineries is not a secure supply chain. The objective is not simply to increase supply, but to redefine how supply is created. A “no new large mines” future will not emerge organically – it must be intentionally built, starting now.

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