Building a stockpile means matching exactly what industry

needs.

And so the way that it's supposed to function is it is supposed to be designed for the private sector, with the private sector and governed by the private sector.

So manufacturers say, I need this thing in this amount, at this quality, at this cost, and then work with the trading agencies to go out and get it.

and then house it until they need it.

And so you're leveraging the in-house expertise and the logistics, infrastructure, knowledge, connections that trading agencies have, trading houses.

And then you're making sure that you're actually getting things that our manufacturers truly need, right?

clearly isn't the first time Abby has heard the question, are we there yet? Here's her take.

So whether those are things like, uh, the, the recently announced Critical Mineral Sovereign Fund, uh, existing programming like the Critical Minerals Infrastructure Fund, which has been, uh, recently rebranded as the First and Last Mile Fund, or whether that's our work with allies, uh, in North America and around the world through, uh, initiatives like the G7 and the Critical Minerals Production Alliance that we launched last year, uh, whether that's through multilateral institutions or with, uh, other, uh, initiatives like the US-led FORGE.

I do have the opportunity to work closely with this administration, and hopefully I can shed some optimism on what is, you know, a tense moment.

So one of the initiatives you talked about was Project Volt, and I just wanna make sure I'm being very clear because I think there's so many initiatives being launched at such frequency, it's sometimes hard to know what does what.

Uh, Project Volt, as you talked about at the top, is an EXIM bank backed initiative by the administration to really solve the just-in-time manufacturing crunch when you have security of supply and access issues.

So essentially when we lost access to rare earth rich magnets and rare earths after the April fourth MOFCOM export controls, not just the United States, but globally, there wasn't a lever to pull in the United States to be able to release materials to go into existing supply chains to support the manufacturers whose production lines came to a grinding halt.

And so ultimately what they decided to do was stand up a private sector-led initiative for the private sector to be able to work with trading agencies to go out in the world, procure materials at price, at spec, um- And at scale for the manufacturers' needs today.

And so for the Canadian juniors, that's really not an initiative for the upstream and support.

Um, it's the processing that, uh, governments and, and, uh, investors are looking to, to stand up has to be cost-competitive.

So what does a sustainable approach to this look like so it's not a faddish, whether it's on the critical mineral side of things, that's today's shiny object or the decade's shiny object, or whether it is for more mundane but still critical alloys and steels and aluminum blends and copper that we critically need As well, right? I mean, how do we end up doing this in a sustainable fashion? Abigail?

And so it sounds like you're talking about kind of the economics sustainability, like financial sustainability of this, but we can also get into, and I can respond to kind of the environmental issues.

sustainability of this, because obviously there's impacts to the environment doing any of these processes, whether they're happening in the United States or whether they're happening abroad and kind of the hear no evil, see no evil way that we've become accustomed to in terms of receiving our embedded products filled with minerals, right? But on the financial side, I think, again, we wouldn't be having this conversation if there wasn't some market distortion happening.

So for decades, it's been made abundantly clear through China's five-year plans ever since Deng Xiaoping said in 1992, the Middle East has oil, we have rare earths, signaling this as a national priority that they were going to do everything they could over the last 30 plus years to be able to maintain market share, even if that did not necessarily mean that you were supporting the most economic projects.

So there's been incredible amounts of state support that's gone into all of the mineral sectors.

Rare Earths is $9 to $10 billion in government subsidies from 2010 to 2019 from Chinese entities.

Internationally, you've seen $57 billion from Chinese-backed support for foreign mines and processing facilities from 2000 to 2020.

Abigail, maybe start us off and then we go to Joe and then I've got one last question for the both of you and we can wrap up.