In a little over a week, Chileans may redraw the global road map for the mining of metals crucial to the world’s clean energy transition.
Even if they don’t, global demand for metals like nickel, cobalt and lithium is running into a new global wave of resource nationalism and environmental activism. For miners that means higher costs—and that the bumper profits of the last commodity supercycle may be hard to replicate. High inflation and competition with China for resources will hand further leverage to metal-rich low-income countries.