Welcome back to CMJ,
Here are the 20-second highlights:
The United States and India signed a bilateral minerals framework on the margins of a QUAD meeting that committed $20 billion to supply chain diversification. We compiled every US critical minerals agreement signed since October 2025. The cadence tells a story that the individual announcements don't.
Arafura's Nolans rare earth project reached financial close backed by export-credit agencies from four sovereign governments. The funding structure is a template for how allied supply gets built when project economics alone won't clear the bar.
A Strait of Hormuz disruption cut more than half of the world's seaborne sulphur in the same week China held its suspension of sulphuric acid exports. We mapped the acid dependency of copper, nickel, lithium, and rare earths process by process. The exposure is not where consensus assumes it is, and one mineral has its dominant production route sitting directly in the blast zone.
Allied governments are subsidizing capital costs to build ex-China supply. The acid shock is raising operating costs that those subsidies were never designed to cover. The asymmetry between who feels the squeeze and who doesn't may be the most underpriced variable in critical minerals right now.
This edition maps the acid exposure of copper, nickel, lithium, and rare earths process by process, with the mineral sitting most directly in the blast zone identified.
It also compiles the U.S. critical minerals agreements signed since February 2025. The cadence is the argument.
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