Policy paper

Critical minerals refresh

Our refreshed approach to delivering resilient critical mineral supply chains for UK businesses.

• From: Department for Business and Trade
• Published: 13 March 2023

This was published under the 2022 to 2024 Sunak Conservative government

Documents

Critical minerals refresh: delivering resilience in a changing global environment

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Details

The critical minerals refresh sets out to refresh how we are delivering the strategy for UK businesses, in light of a changing global landscape and the sharpening of geopolitical competition.

It reinforces the government’s commitment to the Critical Minerals Strategy, highlights our progress and sets out upcoming delivery milestones. It reflects the government’s Integrated Review Refresh (IR2023) priorities.

Main announcements

They include:

• government is launching an independent Task and Finish Group on Critical Minerals Resilience for UK Industry to investigate the critical mineral dependencies and vulnerabilities across UK industry sectors and opportunities for industry to promote resilience in its supply chains - they will deliver a report at the end of this year
• government is accelerating its collaboration on critical minerals with international partners, including recent partnerships agreed with Canada and South Africa and engagement through the Minerals Security Partnership, International Energy Agency and G7
• UK Research and Innovation’s Circular Critical Materials Supply Chains (CLIMATES) fund launched with an initial £15 million in current spending window to focus on making the UK’s rare earth element supply chains more resilient and boost the circular economy
• a £65.5 million accelerate-to-demonstrate (A2D) Facility, under the umbrella Clean Energy Innovation Facility (CEIF) platform through the £1 billion Ayrton Fund commitment, includes a dedicated funding pillar on technology innovations for critical minerals in developing countries

Published 13 March 2023