The European Union has kicked off the process of choosing between eight bidders that supply its 9-million-euro joint purchasing platform for critical minerals and energy, Reuters has reported. The bloc mooted the idea of pooling together buying orders in a bid to achieve more favorable deals and prices for critical minerals shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The EU aims to finalize a contract by the end of the year, following which it will develop sections of the platform for individual products early next year.
It’s not yet clear whether the United States will join the newly carved platform.
Two years ago, the United States and its G7 partners launched the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII) to build clean energy supply chains by friendshoring clean energy supply chains. The countries also signed the Minerals Security Partnership to produce, process, and recycle critical minerals.
Subsequently, in 2023 at Davos, Switzerland, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that a key pillar of the EU’s new industrial strategy will be global partnerships to access inputs needed for industry. This fresh drive builds on existing EU initiatives, including the European Battery Alliance and the Critical Raw Materials Act, both of which aim to onshore and secure supply chains.
These initiatives marked the emergence of a “joint industrial policy” whereby the G7 states coordinate their industrial strategies at the international level and build supply chains collaboratively. This means these countries will be working together to secure supplies of needed technologies and create markets in support of net-zero industries in their home countries.
Studies done by the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins University have concluded that partnerships among democratic states would be able to produce enough minerals to enable the world to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the more ambitious target in the Paris Agreement. However, the same studies say that producing enough metals to meet these targets would require extraordinary technological and financial cooperation.
By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com
