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ASSISTANT SECRETARY PYATT: And then the area of future focus – and I think we’ll see more on this in the weeks ahead – are the issues around critical minerals, which is an issue where ENR has led the State Department’s work internationally, including through our flagship initiative, the Mineral Security Partnership, which seeks to bring together likeminded countries around the world to mobilize resources and mobilize our private sectors to reduce our dependence on a single country as the principal supplier of the energy minerals that are so important to our transition.  As some of my European colleagues put it in Houston, we have to work very, very hard to ensure that an era of European dependence on Russian oil and gas is not followed by an era of collective dependence on China for all of these processing and extraction of critical minerals.

In that regard, there were some really interesting conversations, especially with our private sector companies, looking at what the State Department is doing through MSP, through MINVEST, our private sector partnership; with SAFE, the energy security NGO here in Washington.  And as I said to Dan Yergin at one point, I think in some ways the conversation around critical minerals is a little bit like where the conversation around oil was in the 1970s after the oil shocks and the creation of the International Energy Agency.

We are starting to think about these critical minerals not just as a commodity issue but as a question of national security.  And it’s in that spirit that we approach this issue, and it’s in that spirit that we are working with the 14 [correction: 15 MSP partners] countries and economies that are part of the MSP coalition, significantly now representing more than half of global GDP.  You will see a bit more on this, I think, next week when Secretary Blinken will be back in Europe.  But you’ve also seen the statements from Under Secretary Fernandez, including around the SAFE Summit two weeks ago, and all of the work that we are doing in the MSP context to mobilize partners, to mobilize resources, to leverage what the White House has done through the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, and to, as I said, approach these questions not just as an issue of industrial policy or as a commodity question but as a matter of national security.

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Source: U.S. Department of State

Speaker: Geoffrey R. Pyatt, Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources

Format: Press Briefing

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