4. There is a desire to explore joint stockpiling, using their existing national systems. It sounds like a good idea, so not everyone stocks the same stuff. But it would demand a lot of trust and intelligence sharing. Japan may be more open to it, but Europeans surely would be doubting this more.

I'm not sure how this will work for Europe: competition law perhaps?

3. There’s fresh focus on regulating the sale of mines outside home jurisdictions. So if a Western firm owns a mine abroad, governments need to step in before it changes hands (there were recent cases, such as Anglo American's nickel mines in Brazil being sold to Chinese miners).

If Washington deals with the EU, one question would be how projects already selected under the CRMA would fit into the scope. If Washington deals directly with Berlin, Paris, Rome (all G7) there may be a deal of aligning their respective national raw material funds (€2.5bn total) with this framework

Unlike the US-AUS deal, which had a $1bn financing target within the first 6 months, no $$ target is mentioned here.

2. Both sides intend to jointly select mineral projects (including downstream ones like magnets, batteries, and catalysts) and to support them through grants, guarantees, loans, equity, offtake agreements, insurance, or regulatory help.

Conversations with EU countries and the UK are already ongoing, and Canada has made similar proposals in the G7. How these price floors will be determined, esp. between different countries, will be interesting to see.

Materials would move freely within that market. But imports priced below that would face a tariff. This discussion on trusted standards has been around for a few years, but the Trump administration is now moving ahead strongly and bilaterally, rather than slow G7 talks.

1. The most important element is what was already in the US-AUS framework: a 'high-standard' marketplace that reflects the real costs of responsible extraction, processing, and trade. This means setting a price floor for each mineral within this high-standard market.

Lets hope that is what the Commission has in mind with ReSourceEU. It could become a geoeconomic bazooka that helps Europe (and her allies) build more independent material supply chains.

Conditioning public contracts on increasingly diversified raw material inputs (like the US IRA did) could give a big demand boost to European miners, processors, and recyclers.

The other big item is public procurement. EU governments are spending hundreds of billions on defence, yet do not seem to care when defence contractors use that money to buy all their materials from China.

So the EU needs to fix the demand problem. EU (or allied) mineral producers must be able to sell at minimum slightly above the price of their production. That means guaranteeing a price floor, either through tariffs or production subsidies (or both).

As long as European industries can buy cheaper materials from China (or possibly the US, which is also subsidizing now), other producers do not stand a chance.

Money has been a real bottleneck for Europe’s raw materials agenda. Mining, processing, recycling, and stockpiling all need serious financing. But funding more supply alone is not enough.

There are still many hundreds of billions of unspent €€ in that fund and spending plans could be adjusted to meet the crisis at hand.

ReSourceEU seems to suggest the EU should copy the playbook for phasing out fossil fuel dependencies (RePowerEU) for raw materials. That could mean member states can draw loans and grants from the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) for CRM-related projects.

ah! thanks