BEV In-Depth Conference Special Episode: Beyond Extraction and Canada’s Sovereign Critical Minerals Value Chain | Ep 16

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.

There are many of those certainly, but this is really for kind of the US manufacturing base to make sure they have what they need on hand in a crunch moment, which I think people are getting more and more, uh, comfortable with acknowledging could happen at a higher frequency.

There are no tariffs right now on critical minerals moving between the United States and Canada.

The IEEPA tariffs, now the one two two tariffs that have replaced them, they have a really lengthy overwhelming exemption list of all the critical minerals.

And originally, nickel wasn't on it, which Jeff and I scratched our heads about a few years ago.

Um, but in September of last year, they actually did add all nickel, um, and nickel materials to that list.

And so you do have that, and, and even Ambassador Greer last week at an event I was at did say on the record, you know, we have an ability to kind of have that free-flowing nature.

So whether or not you're supporting a project north of the border, um, if you're the US government or if you're kind of thinking through what an integrated supply chain is, except for aluminum and copper, um, which are painful ones I know, um, we do not have, uh, tariffs on most critical minerals.