As the Trump administration looks abroad for critical minerals deals, the drama threatening a major American mining megaproject in Madagascar may offer a surprising cautionary tale of how growing global instability can thwart Washington’s plans to rewire metal supply chains away from China.
Just days after the African nation’s military toppled the government in a coup following weeks of protests, the country’s new self-declared leaders have canceled Denver-based Energy Fuels’ mine, Heatmap has learned.
The so-called Toliara mine was supposed to be the “crown jewel” of one of the world’s least developed economies, a megaproject designed to patch Madagascar into a new global supply chain meant to reroute trade in metals needed for everything from state-of-the-art weapons to electric vehicle batteries away from China.
Last December, Energy Fuels, the Denver-based rare earths and uranium miner, won approval from the Malagasy government to move forward on its Toliara Project, a critical minerals mine with a value analysts estimated at $2 billion. But on Thursday morning, the new president of Madagascar’s National Assembly “announced the definitive cancellation” of the project, Luke Freeman, a geopolitical consultant with 25 years of experience in Madagascar, told me by email.
Kim Casey, Energy Fuels’ head of investor relations, dismissed the legitimacy of the coup leaders’ decision in an emailed statement. The company is “watching the events in Madagascar closely, and like the rest of the world we are waiting to see how things unfold,” the statement said.
“At this time, governing bodies and areas of responsibility in Madagascar remain unclear,” she went on. “Any statements made by any individual politicians or others amid this crisis have no legal effect, nor should they be taken to represent official Madagascar government policy or the opinions of the majority of local communities.”
Still, Casey left open the possibility that the mine could be postponed. If the coup “results in any delays in our development plans for the Toliara Project,” she said, “Energy Fuels has multiple projects around the world which are advancing at the same time.” Investors seemed less confident. The company’s stock, which had soared by nearly 500% over the past six months, plunged 8% on Wednesday, and another 13% on Thursday afternoon.
Even if the project goes under, it’s unlikely to impact U.S. mineral supplies, Neha Mukherjee, a rare earths analyst the London-based battery-metals consultancy Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, told me. The mine did not have any public offtakers yet, but Energy Fuels announced plans last year to send uranium ore from the project to the White Mesa Mill in Utah for processing.
“Toliara remains at a very early stage and is still working towards a final investment decision, so immediate on-ground impacts are likely to be limited,” she told me in an email. But she warned that “investors and potential offtakers” may “take a more cautious approach until there’s greater clarity on the political environment.”
It is no accident that, despite its unique culture that blends influences from Africa and Asia, Madagascar is a place known to many Americans primarily as the setting of a series of fictional movies about cartoon animals that aren’t even native to the island nation off southeast Africa. More than 75% of the island's 32 million people live on less than $3 per day, and poverty levels have barely declined over the past decade. Less than 40% of its people have access to electricity.
On Sunday, sweeping month-long youth protests over power and water outages, dubbed a “Generation Z revolution,” evolved into a more traditional type of insurrection when an elite arm of Madagascar’s military overthrew the government in what the African Union denounced as a coup.
The upheaval highlights the challenges ahead for U.S. companies as Washington attempts to reduce its dependency on China, which controls most of the world’s mining and processing of key metals such as rare earths and lithium.
The Biden administration sought to get around the issue by making minerals extracted from countries with which the U.S. had free trade agreements eligible for the Inflation Reduction Act’s most generous electric vehicle tax credits. That strategy put a particular focus on allies with vast mining industries, including Australia, Chile, and Canada.
While President Donald Trump has phased out the tax credits, his administration has tried to broker deals across the world with developing countries whose resources China has largely monopolized in recent years. In May, Trump signed a deal with Ukraine to secure revenues from its as-yet largely untapped minerals once the war with Russia ends — a precondition for his administration’s continued assistance in the effort to repel the Kremlin’s invasion. A month later, Trump negotiated a peace deal between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, pausing a bloody conflict and setting the stage for the U.S. to secure new contracts for raw materials in the war-torn but resource-rich part of central Africa.
The administration’s ongoing pressure on Denmark to cede its autonomous territory of Greenland to the U.S. is widely considered a play for the Arctic island’s minerals. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that the administration is considering buying a stake in Critical Metals, a company prospecting for rare earths in Greenland.
Washington’s appetite for critical minerals could even redraw world maps in the next few years.
Under the terms of a peace agreement that ended a decade-long civil war in the 1980s, Bougainville, a breakaway island off Papua New Guinea, is slated to hold a referendum in 2027 over whether to become an independent nation. Polls suggest the overwhelming majority of voters will support secession. In the U.S., a former investment banker turned novelist named John D. Kuhns has taken up the cause of Bougainville’s independence, advocating that Washington support the would-be republic whose biggest economic asset is a shuttered Rio Tinto copper mine that the autonomous government wants to reopen — potentially with U.S. help.
Trump is also weighing recognizing the breakaway region of Somalia’s independence as Somaliland, which has functioned as a sovereign nation with an internationally praised democracy for more than three decades, in a bid to secure deals to mine its mineral riches. Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, called on Trump to grant Somaliland recognition as recently as August.
But the most promising potential region for critical minerals may be the one sandwiched between America’s two greatest rivals. In September 2013, then-President Joe Biden huddled with the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. From that summit came the C5+1, a partnership between the U.S. and the five Central Asian nations to work on critical minerals. Weeks after Trump returned to office, Secretary of State Marco Rubio affirmed the Trump administration’s support for the partnership in a call with his Uzbek counterpart.
After Australia and Canada, the Central Asian republics represent the “lowest-hanging fruit” for developing a U.S. critical mineral supply chain, said Pini Althaus, a veteran mining executive making deals in the region. The countries are relatively stable, have recently enacted business reforms meant to invite U.S. companies to work there, and — as a means of safeguarding their independence from Moscow and Beijing — are eager to make deals with the U.S., he said.
“We are at least a couple of decades away from having a domestic supply chain in the United States that can meet all of our critical mineral needs,” Althaus told me. “Practically speaking, we don’t have enough of these materials in the U.S., so we must partner with allied countries. Central Asia offers a lot of these opportunities.”
These days, however, political instability isn’t unique to developing countries. The Trump administration is supposed to host a meeting of the C5+1 in Washington as early as next month, Althaus said — that is, if the ongoing government shutdown is resolved.
The European CCS boom. Chart: IEA