Thoughts on resources, human capital, power and investment

Abundance is not supply.

“Rare earths aren’t rare” is a line we’ve all read countless times. It’s also where the story usually goes wrong. This short article explains why geology is the easy part — and why processing, scale, and control matter far more.

For much of the past decade, rare earth prices have remained largely disconnected from underlying demand growth. This outcome was not the result of weak end-use fundamentals, but of sustained supply expansion that absorbed incremental demand and suppressed price signals. Drawing on historical quota and pricing data, this paper shows how supply growth dominated price formation between 2015 and 2024, including the sharp price correction in 2023 driven by an additional quota issuance and a temporary slowdown in demand growth.

The paper then examines the implications of a market in which supply growth becomes more constrained, whether by policy, economics, or project lead times. It argues that as supply elasticity diminishes, prices are increasingly set at the margin rather than by average demand growth. In such conditions, even moderate demand growth can produce materially higher clearing prices, not because of absolute scarcity, but because prices must rise to induce new capacity. These dynamics have important implications for investment, policy, and the development of supply chains outside China.

Nigeria has already absorbed the political and economic pain of long-avoided macroeconomic reform. Exchange-rate unification, subsidy removal, and fiscal adjustment have restored a measure of coherence to the economy, but these steps alone cannot determine the country’s trajectory. The central risk now is not reform failure, but reversal.

This paper argues that once a population has endured the costs of adjustment, continuity ceases to be optional. The binding constraint on Nigeria’s long-term growth is no longer price distortion or capital scarcity, but a deep and widening skills deficit driven by the erosion of educational credibility. Without reinvestment in education and primary healthcare, the gains from reform will dissipate rather than compound.

Nigeria’s future is no longer pre-ordained. Whether recent sacrifices translate into sustained growth or are squandered through policy reversal will depend on consistency, institutional repair, and the intelligent redeployment of reform dividends into productivity-enhancing public goods.

For more than two decades, Western economies accepted supply-chain concentration as an efficiency trade-off. That assumption is now breaking down. What has followed is no shortage of policy papers, task forces, and declarations of intent — but far less clarity on how resilience is financed and delivered at scale.

This paper focuses on that missing link. Using the recent U.S. capital-mobilisation response as context, it explores how risk is being recalibrated, how demand certainty is being rebuilt, and how financial architecture — rather than strategy alone — determines whether alternative supply chains become viable.

Beyond China is not about disengagement. It is about understanding what must change if critical supply chains are to be rebuilt in practice, rather than simply restated in theory.

Critical minerals sit at the intersection of geology, geopolitics and capital allocation. They are indispensable to the transition economy, yet notoriously difficult for conventional markets to value correctly. Investors accustomed to fast-moving sectors often misunderstand the economic structure of these assets, particularly the relationship between capital raised and value created. Nowhere is this clearer than in the rare earth sector, where a project’s potential is often considerable but its ability to realise that potential depends entirely on its access to funding.

This essay sets out the core economic principles behind critical mineral investing, and uses Pensana’s recent funding announcement as a case study in how value is created not by avoiding dilution, but by deploying capital where it has the greatest multiplier effect.

Europe’s Strategic Blind Spot

Over the past few years, Western governments have spoken often about reducing dependence on China. But when you look at the actions being taken, a different picture appears.

In July, the U.S. Office of Strategic Capital received authority to deploy up to $100 billion. That single step makes the current situation clear:

Europe is not moving from dependency to independence.

It is moving from a Chinese monopoly to a US–China duopoly.

Why Europe’s Critical Mineral Projects Cannot Attract Capital

Europe and the UK continue to release critical-minerals strategies. These documents outline familiar aims: increasing domestic processing, reducing dependence on China, and building more resilient supply chains. On paper, the direction looks positive. In practice, almost no major project in this area has secured bankable financing.

The reason is simple. Strategy and policy are not the same. A strategy states what a government wants to achieve. A policy creates the conditions that make it possible. Europe and the UK have produced many strategies but have introduced very little policy that shifts risk in a way that attracts capital.

Over the past decade, two significant narratives have shaped the rare earth elements (REE) market: the revival of the Mountain Pass mine in California and the decline and eventual sale of the Ngualla project in Tanzania. While each story stands on its own, their interplay illustrates a critical trend: China has consistently out-strategised and out-manoeuvred Western capital markets. Mountain Pass may have remained operational, but at a cost that ultimately favoured China. Conversely, Ngualla, recognised as one of the world’s premier neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr) deposits, slipped from Western control at a fraction of its true value. This analysis is not merely commentary; it reflects two converging timelines with significant implications.

The global energy transition is shifting industrial power in real time, and Africa is at the heart of it. Since my presentation in January 2025, the continent’s role in the global transition economy has become even clearer. As electrification accelerates and demand for critical minerals reshapes industrial strategy, Africa has moved from the margins to the centre of new supply chains.

Meanwhile, Europe has hesitated. While the UK and EU debated strategies and policies, others acted. China, the United States, and African institutions have stepped in to seize opportunities. The outcomes of projects like Ngualla in Tanzania and Longonjo in Angola show what decisive partnerships achieve—and what delay costs. Africa is moving with clarity. The question is whether Europe will participate or continue to watch the transition economy move on without it.

The story of how China came to dominate the global rare earth magnet industry does not begin with China. It begins in the laboratories of Japan and the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when researchers at Sumitomo Special Metals in Osaka and General Motors in Indiana independently invented the neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnet. These were revolutionary technologies—one sintered, one bonded—that placed the West at the centre of a supply chain that would become foundational to electronics, automotive engineering, defence systems, and later the entire electrification economy. At that moment, it was unthinkable that China, then still industrially undeveloped, would one day control nearly every stage of this value chain.