TechMet, a Dublin-headquartered business run by South African mining entrepreneur Brian Menell, did extremely well to spot the gap in the market.
It is Menell’s company that is willing to step into conflict zones recently deemed safe for investment by the US government, offering mineral services that feed directly back to Washington. When President Donald Trump pushed Ukraine into a minerals deal, it was TechMet that expressed an interest in reopening a mine there. Now TechMet has been connected to a new tantalum mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), on condition that the US-brokered peace deal between the DRC and Rwanda holds.
But there is a darker angle to all this. Trump makes peace to wage war.
According to the Critical Minerals Security Program, an initiative of the Centre for Strategic & International Studies, the US defence industry has only a two-month supply of rare earths. That is a measure of China’s stranglehold over the processing of minerals crucial to weapons and munitions, and the source of US concern.
Securing an unmined deposit, be it in Ukraine or the DRC, solves only half of the problem, however. The US already has rare earths — so called because they are hard to process, not to find and mine. Building processing units is enormously expensive, largely owing to energy costs. But the tech giants behind everything from wind farms to electric vehicles and smartphones are willing to pay the price.
What then is required is more government intervention in the form of guarantees and direct equity stakes, particularly in mineral businesses, such as TechMet, which has the US International Development Finance Corp as a shareholder.
The US defence industry does not make the business case for a new mine — volumes are too low. But it certainly is directing strategy in the sector.
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