Welcome back to CMJ,
Here are the 20-second highlights of what we’ll cover:
Copper’s record rally: Tariff anxiety pulled U.S. buying forward and exposed how little inventory buffer remains. With a thin project pipeline, the market is treating tightness as structural, not cyclical.
Uranium holds its bid: Prices stayed in the low $80s, as contracting chatter and investor sentiment reinforced nuclear’s ‘security-grade baseload’ re-rating in an AI era. Execution risk still rules.
Lithium’s ‘new’ demand driver: The energy storage sector (especially China’s) is increasingly seen as the marginal driver, while U.S. pilots quietly de-risk real supply pathways.
Tech at the margins: A Utah brine pilot reported high recovery and battery-grade output, while Tiangong’s microgravity battery work underscored that chemistry can reshape demand curves.
Friend-shoring hardens: G7 alignment continues to translate into policy support, public capital, and offtake mechanisms aimed at reshaping project economics outside China (and, for nuclear fuel, Russia).
Projects keep moving: From rare earth drilling permits to midstream buildouts and uranium bulk sampling, the pipeline is expanding—incrementally, but in the right direction.
Copper
Copper began 2026 by repricing sharply as policy risk intersected with thin inventories, reaching over $13,200 per metric ton on the London Metal Exchange, a level that has refocused attention on a question the market repeatedly revisits:
Does the project pipeline support the next decade’s electrification buildout, or does the system remain vulnerable to episodic squeezes (again)?
Several factors converged for this:
Tariff scramble: Reports that the U.S. is considering tariffs on copper and copper-rich products appear to have pulled demand even further.Traders and manufacturers moved to position material into U.S. warehouses ahead of potential duties. The consequence can be higher ‘U.S. premia’ and a more fragmented global market, with metal concentrated in the wrong places and non-U.S. buyers bidding harder for availability. This is the definition of ‘rush’. We are just not sure of its dimensions yet.
Supply stumbles:The supply side again highlighted how quickly disruptions can matter in a market with limited slack.We are noticing disruptions and delays across key producing regions.Even when individual events are modest in tonnage/volume, they can move sentiment when inventories are this tight. More important than any single incident is the structural backdrop: years of underinvestment, rising capex, and permitting friction have left the pipeline of large, high-quality new mines thin. With cost structures moving higher, incentive-price arguments are back in discussion (especially with the whole ‘critical minerals’ policies), and the market is increasingly treating copper as a metal that may need sustained price support to catalyze new supply.
Structural demand and reflexive flows:Electrification remains copper-intensive across EVs, grids, renewables, and charging infrastructure. Data centers add a power-driven vector that is not purely cyclical, especially when infrastructure buildouts sit on multi-year planning horizons.Against that backdrop, momentum flows can amplify moves once key levels break. The speed of a rally can outpace near-term fundamentals, yet the market is also signaling that dips have been shallow and the bid persistent.
Impacts and industry response:Record pricing forces adaptation. Substitution to aluminium is likely to accelerate where engineering allows, and elevated prices tend to pull scrap into the system. These are real release valves, but they do not replace new primary supply. The strategic question for 2026 should be whether price strength translates into approvals, capital formation, and construction, or whether it mainly translates into cost inflation and political scrutiny. Either way, high prices are already reshaping downstream behavior and procurement strategy (and it looks like it’s the new norm).
Strategic moves and consolidation chatter: High prices invite strategic positioning (of course).Some miners will prioritize returns over expansion, scared by past boom-bust cycles, especially compared to other critical minerals. While others will treat this as a window to rationalize portfolios. And as anticipated, market speculation around large-scale consolidation resurfaced.
Copper’s rally may cool, consolidate, or reverse. But the deeper framing, however, is increasingly set: copper is being traded as a geopolitical metal, where tariff headlines and security narratives can move prices as quickly as mine output data.
Uranium
Uranium continues to be framed less as a purely cyclical trade and more as a security-driven market (as all critical minerals).
This week, a mix of investor survey data and industry commentary reinforced the idea that electricity demand in an AI era may be underappreciated, and that nuclear is being pulled back into baseload planning.
Surveys are not forecasts (of course), but sentiment is influencing positioning and contracting discussions.
Market signals and contracting:
Spot pricing held broadly in the $80s per pound range.
The more meaningful development is the tone around utility contracting. Market participants have argued that utilities are returning to longer-dated coverage for the late 2020s after years of drawing down inventories.
That matters because term prices, not spot prints, tend to be the primary mechanism through which mine restarts and new builds are financed.
This is how the uranium market typically tightens: not only through spot volatility, but through a gradual shift in contracting behavior.
Project moves:
Developers with permitted assets and shorter restart timelines are positioning accordingly and taking advantage of timing.
IsoEnergy began a bulk sampling campaign at its Tony M mine in Utah, extracting ore for test processing at the White Mesa Mill.
Bear in mind, bulk sampling is not production, but it can serve as a practical bridge between studies and operational decisions, especially when existing milling infrastructure is available.
The broader context remains that U.S. policy has emphasized domestic fuel-cycle resilience, and projects with shorter pathways can receive greater attention.
Policy and enrichment capacity:
A consequential signal this week came from U.S. government support for domestic enrichment.
The Department of Energy announced $2.7 billion in awards intended to expand U.S. enrichment capacity over the next decade, with Centrus Energy’s Piketon, Ohio, facility referenced as one of the potential nodes given its work on High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU). Full announcement here
The policy objective is to reduce reliance on Russian-enriched uranium and support advanced reactor fuel needs. Timelines remain long, and execution risk is material, but at least there is a policy direction.
In short, Uranium supply is inelastic. Restarting idled capacity takes time and capital, and building new mines takes longer.
Financial vehicles that hold physical uranium can tighten spot availability on the margin, but they do not change the core constraint: new supply.
Remember: Uranium is increasingly being discussed through an energy security and industrial policy lens, not solely a commodity-cycle lens.
Lithium
This week was less about a single blockbuster ‘discovery’ and more about demand re-rating + execution signals, with China’s energy-storage pull tightening the narrative just as Western projects pushed incremental (but meaningful) progress.
In market terms, the strongest fresh signal came from the Energy Storage Sector (ESS).Yes, apparently, grid-scale storage demand (particularly in China), has become the marginal driver improving lithium’s outlook after years of oversupply.We saw significant growth in ESS demand in 2025, and with forecasts showing further acceleration in 2026, potentially swinging the market back into deficit depending on supply discipline and restarts.
In the U.S., the week’s most concrete development was technical, not geological (at this time).Intrepid Potash reported results from demonstration testing of its Wendover, Utah, brine, showing a 92.9% lithium extraction rate and >99.5% lithium chloride purity, with subsequent conversion validating battery-grade lithium carbonate (≥99.5% purity).This is not yet their Final Investment Decision (FID) (or construction decision), but it is the kind of de-risking step that matters in a market moving from stories back to deliverables.
And on the other side of the spectrum, China delivered the most unusual lithium datapoint from orbit: astronauts aboard Tiangong completed a lithium-ion battery experiment designed to isolate how microgravity affects internal electrochemical processes tied to performance and lifetime.This is fundamental research, not a near-term supply, of course. But it does remind us that battery demand is shaped not only by geology and permitting, but by the chemistry/scientific frontier as well.
Finally, here is a good look at the lithium price:
Rare Earths
Rare earths remain a strategic hinge of electrification and defense supply chains.
The baseline has not changed: China dominates refining and magnet manufacturing, and that concentration is increasingly treated as a geopolitical risk factor rather than an ordinary industrial structure.
New supply and midstream moves:
In the U.S., Apex Critical Metals received permits to begin drilling at its Rift Rare Earth Project in Nebraska, targeting the Elk Creek carbonatite complex. This remains early-stage exploration, and timelines are long, but the permitting signal is notable in a market where Western projects often face process constraints before geology is tested at scale.
In the midstream, ReElement Technologies announced a $200 million strategic investment to expand its Indiana processing facility using chromatographic separation technology.The thesis, combining modular separation with feedstocks that can include recycled materials and concentrates, addresses a Western bottleneck: separation capacity, including for heavy rare earths. Whether the ambition translates into sustained throughput and product qualification will determine its strategic value, but the stated direction aligns with the capacity gap the West is attempting to close.
The rare earth market sits in a familiar equilibrium: China’s dominance as the baseline, and non-Chinese projects treated as strategic options.
That is why headlines continue to move sentiment disproportionately.
Alternative supply chains are being built, but they are not yet scaled. Until they are, the magnet lever remains one of the more consequential tools in industrial geopolitics.
The week’s geopolitical theme was friend-shoring: allied governments aiming to reduce dependence on concentrated supply chains, with China dominant across multiple critical mineral midstream and Russia central to parts of the nuclear fuel cycle.
Allied coordination:Reports indicated that G7 governments are looking to align critical minerals policy more tightly, including investment coordination, strategic stockpiles, and shared offtake mechanisms designed to reduce financing risk for projects in aligned jurisdictions.The logic is straightforward: parallel supply chains rarely emerge on market signals alone when an incumbent supplier holds scale, cost advantage, and administrative control.Note: G7 members will gather in Washington on January 12 (Monday) to discuss and address (amongst other things) the Chinese dominance of rare earths and other critical minerals. Apparently, Australia and India were also invited to this meeting.
China’s leverage: On the other side, rare earth and magnet licensing remain one of China’s stronger levers.Even the perception of tighter controls tends to trigger stockpiling behavior among downstream manufacturers.The short-term effect can be disruption and higher costs outside China. The longer-term effect can be the acceleration of diversification efforts, which China likely weighs against the value of leverage.
Russia and nuclear fuel:Western efforts to reduce reliance on Russian enrichment and fuel services are advancing, but that does not eliminate near-term constraints, and it does not remove geopolitical risk.It does change the investment ‘calculus’ for domestic enrichment, conversion, and fuel fabrication. Timelines remain long, yet the direction is increasingly evident.
The core point is that geopolitics is now part of mineral market mechanics (as the CMJ community is well aware). What started as consern for the Chinese over dominance on rare earths, is now spreading to all markets and critical minerals. Every nation is hunting for resources.
And in 2026, more than ever, access to processing and permits is as strategic as access to ore.
Questions we should all be asking
Is copper’s rally a price signal that translates into approvals and construction, or a signal that mainly accelerates substitution, recycling, and political scrutiny?
Does uranium’s re-rating persist as utilities contract forward and governments fund enrichment, or does it remain vulnerable to policy shifts and execution slippage?
Which lithium pathway becomes the Western workhorse: hard-rock expansions, clay-hosted development, or DLE scale-up, and which one earns durable social license?
Can allied governments translate coordination rhetoric into bankable offtake and financing structures quickly enough to matter before policy and trade dynamics shift again?
Thank you for reading and for being part of the CMJ community.In markets driven by geopolitics, foresight is power. If you found it valuable, share it with a peer who needs the same edge (or keep it close and use it to your advantage).
