Trump’s Latest Metals Play: A $12 Billion Mineral Stockpile

Current conditions: Yet another snow storm is set to powder parts of the Ohio Valley and the Mid-Atlantic • Cyclone Fytia is deluging Madagascar, causing flooding that left at least three dead and 30,000 displaced in a country still reeling from the recent overthrow of its government • Scotland and England are bracing for a gusty 33-hour blizzard, during which temperatures are forecast to drop below freezing.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump is starting a $12 billion critical minerals stockpile

He’s fashioned the military’s Defense Logistics Agency into a tool to fund mineral refineries. He’s gone on a shopping spree that made Biden administration officials “jealous,” taking strategic equity stakes in more than half a dozen mining companies. Now President Donald Trump is preparing to launch a strategic stockpile for critical minerals in what Bloomberg billed as “a bid to insulate manufacturers from supply shocks as the U.S. works to slash its reliance on Chinese rare earths and other metals.” Dubbed Project Vault, the venture will be seeded with a $10 billion loan from the Export-Import Bank of the U.S. and another $1.67 billion in private capital. More than a dozen companies have committed to work on the stockpile, including General Motors, Stellantis, Boeing, Google, and GE Vernova.

The shale industry, meanwhile, showed it’s matured enough to go through some consolidation. Oklahoma City-based gas giant Devon Energy is merging with Houston-headquartered Coterra Energy in an all-stock deal that CNBC said would create “a large-cap producer with a top position in the Permian Basin. The deal would establish a combined company with an enterprise value of $58 billion, marking the largest merger in the sector since Diamondback bought Endeavor Energy Resources for $26 billion in 2024. The deal comes as low prices from the global oil glut squeeze U.S. shale drillers — and as the possibility of more oil from Venezuela threatens the sector with fresh competition.

2. Trump notches his fifth straight legal loss on offshore wind

Offshore wind is now five-for-five in its legal brawls with Trump. With Orsted’s latest victory in the Sunrise Wind case on Monday, I’ll let Heatmap’s Jael Holzman serve as the ring announcer spelling out the stakes of the legal victory: “If the government were to somehow prevail in one or more of these cases, it would potentially allow agencies to shut down any construction project underway using even the vaguest of national security claims. But as I have previously explained, that behavior is often a textbook violation of federal administrative procedure law.”

3. Germany’s solar capacity is set to quadruple by 2045

Germany is set to quadruple its installed solar capacity to 425 gigawatts by 2045, according to a forecast from a trade group representing utilities and grid operators. The projections, Renewables Now reported, mean the country needs to expand its transmission system. Installed onshore wind capacity should triple to around 175 gigawatts by that same year. Battery storage is on track to rise about 68 gigawatts, from roughly 2 gigawatts today. Demand is also set to grow. Data centers, which make up just 2 gigawatts of demand on the grid today, are forecast to balloon to nearly 37 gigawatts in the next 19 years.

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4. China aims to ‘build a strong energy nation’

In northwestern China, a new 100-megawatt solar farm. Lintao Zhang/Getty Images

In October, the Chinese Communist Party published the framework of its next Five-Year Plan, the 15th such industrial strategy. The National People’s Congress is set to formally approve the proposal next month. But on Monday, the energy analyst John Kemp called the latest five-word phrase, articulated in the form of “formal input” from the party’s Central Committee, “the most succinct statement of China’s energy policy.” Those words: “Building a strong energy nation.” The suggested edits from the committee described “accelerating the construction of a strong energy nation” as “extremely important and timely” and called its “main shortcomings” the ongoing reliance on imported oil and gas.

Unlike in the U.S., where the Trump administration is working to halt construction of renewables, the officials in Beijing boast that China’s “installed capacity of wind and solar has ranked first in the world for many consecutive years.” Like the U.S., the Central Committee pitched the plan as “an urgent requirement” for “gaining the initiative in great power competition.”

5. Japan steps up deep sea mining push

Japan is mounting a new push to implement a decade-old plan to extract rare earths from the ocean floor. A state-owned research vessel just completed a test mission to retrieve an initial sample of mineral-rich mud from a location 20,000 feet below the surface, the South China Morning Post reported. The government of Sanae Takaichi wants to start processing metal-bearing mud from the seabed for tests within a year. “It’s about economic security,” Shoichi Ishii, program director for Japan’s National Platform for Innovative Ocean Developments, told Bloomberg. “The country needs to secure a supply chain of rare earths. However expensive they may be, the industry needs them.”

With global negotiations over a licensing framework for legalizing deep sea mining in international waters has stalled, the U.S. just finalized a rule to speed up American permitting for the nascent sector, clearing the way for Washington to fulfill Trump’s pledge to go it alone if the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority didn’t act first.

THE KICKER

A week after signing an historic trade agreement with the European Union, India has inked another deal with the U.S. That means the world’s two largest consumer markets are now wide open to Indian industry, which relies heavily on coal. New Delhi isn’t just going to scrap all those coal-fired factories and forges. But the government’s latest budget earmarks about $2.4 billion over five years to speed up deployment of carbon capture equipment across heavy industry, Carbon Herald reported. The plan focuses on steel, cement, power, refining, and chemicals.