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Igor Patrick

Brazil has not answered two American proposals to formalise cooperation on critical minerals, a senior US diplomat said at Latin America’s largest mining fair, leaving Washington without a bilateral deal as it races to build rare earth supply chains outside China.
Matthew Lowe, economic counsellor at the US embassy in Brasilia, said Washington invited Brazil years ago to join the Minerals Security Partnership, a US-led grouping that coordinates investment in mineral supply chains, but never received a response.
A draft framework agreement sent in February also went unanswered.
“We’ll probably have to wait till the election, no matter what happens,” Lowe told the audience in Belo Horizonte on Tuesday, referring to Brazil’s presidential vote in October.
Lowe was speaking at Exposibram, the conference run by the Brazilian Mining Institute, alongside officials from France, Canada, Australia and Britain, most of whose governments have signed the kind of agreement Washington cannot get from Brasilia.
The five spent the session describing how they intend to loosen China’s grip on mineral processing without once naming China.


Brazil holds the world’s second-largest reserves of rare earths after China, a resource base that brought the five to a fair in the Brazilian interior.
Rare earths are a group of 17 metals that are common in the ground and difficult to separate from one another, and they sit inside the wider category of critical minerals that also covers lithium, nickel and cobalt.
Lowe came closest to naming China when he turned to separation, the chemical step that splits mined ore into the individual metals used to make magnets, and where China does close to 90 per cent of the world’s work.
“A lot of us are developing the technology from scratch because it’s controlled by the one country that has really been doing rare earths, and that’s a joint problem that we all share,” he said.
Benjamin Gallezot, France’s interministerial delegate for strategic minerals, said the choke point lies in refining rather than in mining, and described a market shaped by “some dominance of some country or some restriction”.
Asked whether building that capacity outside China is realistic, he said Brazil had the energy, the workforce and the permitting to do it. “There is nothing magic about processing,” Gallezot said.
USA Rare Earth expects to complete a US$2.8 billion takeover of the Brazilian miner Serra Verde within days, once its own shareholders vote on Friday.
On Monday it finished raising US$1.55 billion for a company set up by US government agencies and private investors, which will buy the whole of the mine’s output for 15 years at guaranteed minimum prices.
Serra Verde runs the Pela Ema mine in the central state of Goias, which entered production in 2024, and is the only operation outside Asia producing all four of the rare earths that go into permanent magnets.
Those magnets sit inside electric car motors, wind turbines, drones and guided weapons, and no substitute performs as well.
Pela Ema also yields dysprosium and terbium, the two heavier elements that stop a magnet losing its strength when it gets hot and which most Western projects cannot produce at all.




The geology explains the difference, because the metals there sit loosely in soft clay near the surface rather than locked inside hard rock, the same formation that underpins southern China’s dominance in the heavier elements.
Beijing put USA Rare Earth on its export control list on June 22, alongside MP Materials and eight other American firms, barring Chinese companies from selling them equipment with both civilian and military uses. China called the move retaliation for Washington’s expansion of its own list of Chinese firms it accuses of military links.
For all that, the mine at the centre of the deal still depends on China, because Serra Verde had committed Pela Ema’s output to Chinese processors under 10-year contracts.
It renegotiated last December and cut almost eight years off the term, but the half-finished product is still shipped to China to be separated into individual metals.
Left-wing deputies have asked the Brazilian courts to annul the sale, which the country’s antitrust authority cleared this month.
The US embassy has meanwhile pursued agreements at state level, signing a memorandum with Goias in March that Lowe said “became a bit of an issue” because critics questioned whether a governor may strike mineral deals with a foreign power. It hopes to try again elsewhere once the election is over, he said.
Lowe also criticised the bill now before the Brazilian Senate, which would let a new presidential council and the mining regulator approve or block changes in the control of companies holding mineral rights.
“That’s fine as long as it’s apolitical and predictable, but it cannot be done in a way that is susceptible to a change every four years with every new government,” he said. The bill passed the lower house in May and is on the agenda for the last sitting week before voting begins in October.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is seeking a fourth term, said last week that the Senate would advance the law to defend the national interest.
“We will not allow anyone from outside to come here and exploit our mineral resources, because we want their processing and transformation to happen here,” Lula said.




Carlos Eduardo Braga Filho, who runs Brazilian operations for the cobalt and nickel processor Jervois, made the case for keeping processing in the country at a panel across the hall the same afternoon.
“You can’t take a mine to another country, but processing you can. So why do it here? You have to create value, you have to be competitive,” Braga Filho said, speaking in Portuguese.
He then named China directly, something none of the five diplomats across the hall had done.
“I want to have rare earths here, but I want to have rare earths to sell to China. We may end up deciding yes, but that is not the path we have understood to be the best,” he said.
His own plant shows how far that ambition sits from the ore, because the refinery Jervois is restarting in Sao Paulo will run on imported raw material when it opens next year with a capacity of about 12,000 tonnes of nickel a year. Almost all the nickel Brazil digs up is the grade that goes into stainless steel rather than the grade batteries and specialist alloys need.
Flavio Moraes da Mota of the state development bank BNDES said it is backing 12 critical minerals projects worth 35 billion reais (US$6.8 billion) in rare earths, nickel and lithium.
Chinese companies had filed no rare earth exploration applications of their own in Brazil as of June, according to an analysis of regulator records by the Associated Press and Reporter Brasil. China Nonferrous Metal Mining bought the tin producer Mineracao Taboca in 2024 and has said it will study the rare earth potential of its Amazon operation.


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A US diplomat says Brasilia has not responded to two overtures, even as a US-backed rare earth acquisition in Brazil nears completion


A US diplomat says Brasilia has not responded to two overtures, even as a US-backed rare earth acquisition in Brazil nears completion.


US critical minerals proposals to Brazil go unanswered as China looms

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}A US diplomat says Brasilia has not responded to two overtures, even as a US-backed rare earth acquisition in Brazil nears completion

A US diplomat says Brasilia has not responded to two overtures, even as a US-backed rare earth acquisition in Brazil nears completion