Critical Minerals Are Like Roast Dinners: enabling local ingredients

A rock in amongst the green stuff - I can imagine this rock as a red cabbage on my critical minerals dinner plate (Photo source: unsplash.com)

In a previous post, I came up with the tenuous metaphor of critical minerals and roast dinners. In this follow up, I hope you’ll indulge the metaphor one more time (briefly) as I write about the need for the UK to enable itself to shop local for these key ingredients, build resilience to the genuine risk of empty shelves and come up with a long-term meal plan so that we know what ingredients we can get locally, and which ones need to be imported from trusted suppliers.

There are lots of metals in the ground within UK borders that could help satisfy the national appetite for critical minerals. As a nation proud of its farming produce, we should be proud of our mineral produce, and we have several equivalents of the Vale of Evesham to provide a crop of ‘market garden’ minerals.

Critical minerals are now very much on the menu when it comes to government discussions and the security of supply to our high-end manufacturing industries. However, sourcing our own minerals domestically requires some key grow-your-own policies that are a cornerstone of successful mining jurisdictions that are not just lacking in the UK, but are met with resistance when brought up in focus groups and political forums.

Of course that directly links into my final topic for this post, the meal plan - or rather long-term strategy. I am not talking about planning for short term but working on a decadal policy that will require cross-party buy-in and a commitment from all so that should there be a new in government in the near future, the chefs will stick to the plan and not change the menu.

Now, before I get chased out the kitchen, let’s discuss what is broken in our approach to a revived mining industry and a secure supply of critical minerals…

The Policy Gap

Most countries have gone through the process of writing new shopping lists in recent years when it comes to critical minerals and the UK is no different. In late 2024, the Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre at the British Geological Survey released and updated list of 34 elements or minerals that the UK considers to be critical. Whatever your opinion of this list, and how it compares to others, it really doesn’t matter without the infrastructure, policies and investment mechanisms to empower UK PLC to go out to find and develop these mineral deposits.

The forthcoming UK Critical Minerals Strategy will be telling. However, I am concerned that the powers that be are going to remain focused on trade, rather than a joined up policy document that looks at how minerals are found, extracted, and integrated into a final product at the end of a manufacturers assembly line - the mineral equivalent of farm-to-fork.

The real value the UK will reap from its extractive industry is if a vertically integrated manufacturing sector can be developed that takes upstream minerals through the midstream and into a definitive downstream consumer product. Any break in that chain will result in lost value either through export of an underdeveloped product, or simply squandered as the industry struggles along in limp mode before eventually failing.

There are numerous areas for improvement, but for me, the most notable is at a grass-roots level by de-risking the exploration process through pre-competitive data such as geophysics, geochemistry and environmental baselines to allow prospects to be properly assessed and ranked early and form an exploration pyramid for the private sector companies and create a domestic bottom-up raw materials feed for our consumer appetite.

The Pre-Competitive Data Problem

In my experience trying to convince people the UK is a good bet for mineral exploration the lack of pre-competitive data to help a desk study to stake ground is a glaring gap and a complicated licensing process to then get said ground - or rather the archaic mineral rights system - that creates significant barriers to entry.

When you look around at successful mining jurisdictions in western nations, the gold standard is Australia. In growing this mining industry, Australia has repeatedly invested in pre-competitive data at a national and state level. These datasets cost millions of dollars to conduct, but reap up to 15x in returns to the government coffers whilst simultaneously empowering the private sector to explore and develop mineral deposits from Bunbury to Bundaberg.

Now it is perhaps unrealistic to compare Australia’s budgets to the UK, but it is a common trait when you look closer to home, too. Perhaps the best example is the Finnish with total country coverage in airborne geophysics explicitly commissioned for mineral exploration backed up by national scale geochemical surveys that hit multiple horizons in the soils profile (necessary because of the glacial till). That has enabled widespread mineral exploration and arguably the most successful mining jurisdiction in Europe at present. But there are success stories even closer to home across the Irish Sea. With the Tellus programme nearing full coverage of the Island of Ireland and an easy to use online data portal, an active mineral exploration sector is now thriving.

And that’s worth emphasising further - it isn’t just collecting the data, but making it available via an integrated platform. Free access, easy downloads and basic visualisation help to engage and empower private sector companies to explore and stake ground.

The UK would be foolish not to at least commission focused programmes of data collection for pre-competitive data in key areas such as Cornwall & Devon, the Scottish Central Belt and parts of northern England and Wales. However, there is one fly in the ointment.

Most returns on investment from pre-competitive data in successful mining jurisdictions are realised through permits and tenements granted by the government or a devolved authority. That is fine for Northern Ireland, but is problematic in the rest of the UK. Yes, some metals are the property for the Crown Estate or Mines Royal, but most base metals are not, and the rights to those minerals lie in private estates for the most part. That means there would be little leverage for direct returns and the government would have to be satisfied with indirect income through taxes and the gross-value add that can come with well-considered inward investment into deprived areas.

Would that be enough? I’d hope so, especially if part of a long-term strategy…

Planning for Decades; not Election Cycles

To make all this a success will require a lot more than what I can discuss in one blog post, but it needs to be carefully mapped to a long-term strategy.  In fact, it is exactly the short-sightedness of election cycle planning over the last 30 years that has lead to most western nations losing control of their supply chains and allowing the development of a Chinese monopoly on most raw materials around the world.

Data will be key in unlocking much of the potential that lies dormant beneath our feet and long-term planning of managing that data is crucial. The British Geological Survey should be the key actor in pre-competitive data acquisition but it needs the funding behind it to do so. Storing that data is also important but it also requires sophisticated spatial data integration capabilities. Converting archive material to truly digital data, and handling diverse data formats to enable advanced analytics will make this data truly accessible and usable for modern exploration workflows. The Survey needs to be empowered to not only collect new data but be given powers to enforce the legal requirement to deposit data - physical and digital - and minimise confidentiality periods so it can be available for future exploration.

An overhaul of the planning and permitting processes would be revolutionary for the industry. Projects constantly spend time navigating a patchwork of legislation that was rarely designed with the mining industry in mind. New legislation such as Biodiversity Net Gain is a practical challenge and requires interpretation when it comes to its application to mining projects. Whilst rewriting all these planning laws is unrealistic, reviewing hurdles and providing clear guidelines on how to apply them that is accepted across all the relevant governing bodies and industry players seems to be the best we could currently hope for.

Going beyond that, the UK needs to decide how it will support its fledgling critical minerals sector in an industry where China isn’t playing fair with market principles. The USA’s recent tariff policies are concerning but designed to protect US domestic production and price floors for some commodities are also on the table. Will the UK, a bastion of free market capitalism, bend and commit to a guaranteed pricing?

The long-term plan needs to consider what happens after the mineral project itself, too. There are many opportunities to remediate mine sites - I’d recommend 102 Things To Do With A Hole in the Ground by Pete Whitbred-Abrutat. However, the local communities deserve lasting legacies that continue to give value beyond the life of mine, lest we leave communities adrift again as happened in the 1980s and 1990s when the last mines closed.

There is so much else to cover, not least skills gaps and an absence of any tangible talent pipeline in the UK workforce; how machine learning and AI are transforming geological analysis; and the way projects engage with their community stakeholders. All represent fundamental shifts in how we approach mineral exploration - something I'll explore in detail in later posts.

A Framework for Success

Make no mistake, this is a complex ask. However, there are some clear and tangible steps that need to be taken to make the UK a competitive mining jurisdiction at a basic level, then comes the more challenging discussions of how to build an industry that is resilient and not left to collapse at the whims of China dumping material into the market and securing long-term prosperity for those communities once extractive activities have been completed.

Building on my recent discussion of why geology matters in 2025, the UK needs to recognise that our relationship with Earth's resources requires both technical innovation and long-term strategic thinking.

A clear formula needs to be developed that encapsulates policy, data, investment, community and long-term resilience and prosperity. Without a concerted effort to unite all these areas, the UK will lag behind other countries and exposes itself to supply chain risks it will be powerless to mitigate.

The longer we delay building this foundation, the more difficult and expensive it becomes to establish a competitive position. The question isn't whether the UK can develop a successful critical minerals sector - it's whether we'll commit to the long-term investment required to make it happen.