REGION.AMERICAS
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Anomic Mining: Why Illegal Mining Is Not Always the Full Diagnosis
Anomic Mining describes the moment when illegal mining stops being only an activity outside the law and begins to reveal a deeper institutional condition, a territory where legality remains formally present, but no longer organises extraction, protects formal actors, sustains traceability, or governs mineral flows with credibility.
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Geopolitical Mining Weekly | Week of April 13–19, 2026
This week showed how mineral security is being built through sharper instruments: demand coordination in Europe, midstream support in the United States, rising sulfur risk in copper and nickel, and a stronger development finance push across the value chain.
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Peru 2026: A Presidential Election, a Central Bank Succession, and the Mining System at Stake
This is an important year for Peru because the country is facing a presidential transition and a central bank succession at the same time. In a mining economy that has remained economically coherent despite repeated political turnover, the key question is whether that continuity can still hold.
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The Return of the Material Economy
The World Bank’s new industrial policy report signals more than a technical adjustment in development thinking. It reflects a broader return of production, strategic sectors, and state capacity to the center of the debate. Read through a Geopolitical Mining lens, that shift carries a deeper implication: industrialization in the twenty first century rests on a…
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Geopolitical Mining Weekly | Week of April 6–12, 2026
This week, the U.S. Department of Energy, Canada Growth Fund’s backing of Nouveau Monde Graphite, Rock Tech’s Ontario converter push, Argentina’s glacier-law reform, the Australia–U.S. financing lane, and the Contrecœur port expansion all showed the same shift: critical mineral security is becoming a question of execution. Processing, finance, conversion, legal frameworks, and logistics are increasingly…
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Codelco (Chile): A State Operator Under Pressure in the Age of Geopolitical Mining
Codelco is worth watching not only because of its scale, but because it reveals something larger about the new era of geopolitical mining. Chile created Codelco to operate, to capture rent, and to turn copper into national development. The question now is whether that model still works under the more demanding conditions of today’s mining…
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Beyond ESG: Rethinking Sustainability in Mining
As the material economy returns, mining is forcing a more serious question: not whether sustainability matters, but whether the dominant sustainability frameworks are still fit for sectors shaped by time, permitting, legitimacy, and execution. This article revisits ESG, maps the main conceptual alternatives now emerging, and argues that mining may require a more systemic form…
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Geopolitical Mining Weekly | Week of March 30 – April 5, 2026
This week’s Geopolitical Mining Weekly examines how mineral security is moving from strategic language to operating architecture. From Section 232 changes and allied coordination to the BHP–CMRG dispute, Rhyolite Ridge’s court win, and the Chemaf transaction in Congo, the field is increasingly being shaped through tariffs, market structure, legal durability, and asset-level positioning.
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What Mining Operations Must Prove After Ramp-Up
Ramp-up is often treated as a visible milestone in mining. But the more revealing phase comes later, when an operation must prove that throughput, recoveries, mine sequence, continuity and cost discipline can hold together under real operating pressure. Using Mantoverde and Caserones as contrasting cases, this article explores why visible progress and operating maturity are…
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Geopolitical Mining Weekly | Week of March 23–29, 2026
This week, critical mineral security moved through concrete instruments rather than broad strategy language: plants, equity, licenses, trade architecture, and rising cost pressure. The common signal is clear: supply security is increasingly being built through the mechanisms that determine whether materials can actually be financed, processed, moved, and sustained.