London-listed lithium developer Savannah Resources is pursuing a secondary listing in Lisbon or Australia to tap the growing investor appetite for battery materials, illustrating the renewed interest in the lithium sector as the prices rebound and the Western governments seek to reduce their reliance on China.

The company, developing a lithium project in Portugal, is looking to list via Euronext or the Australian Securities Exchange to gain exposure outside the UK and support its financing strategy, reflecting the broader recovery in the lithium sector and the strategic importance that the European lithium development has assumed.

The United Kingdom has modified its proposed steel safeguards after businesses that use the alloy warned that the curbs designed to prop up the country’s ailing steel industry would damage their own production, illustrating the difficult balance between protecting domestic steelmaking and avoiding harm to the broader supply chain that depends on imported steel.

The modification, reducing the quota cut and exempting certain products, reflects the government’s response to the concerns of the steel-using businesses that the initial proposals were too draconian, a tension between the protection of the steel producers and the interests of the steel consumers that the safeguards must navigate.

China has set a target for half of its electricity to come from non-fossil sources by 2030 in a new five-year plan for the energy sector, an ambitious goal that analysts nonetheless consider conservative relative to the sector’s recent growth trajectory, suggesting that the actual renewable deployment may outpace the official targets.

The plan, raising the non-fossil target from 42.3 percent for 2025 to fifty percent for 2030, reflects China’s continued commitment to the energy transition even as the targets appear modest relative to the country’s recent renewable growth, the same pattern of conservative targets that the country has repeatedly exceeded.

The European Commission has joined the US initiative Pax Silica, a group of US-allied countries cooperating to secure the supply chains needed for artificial intelligence, marking another step in the formation of an allied bloc aimed at securing the critical inputs that AI development requires.

The initiative, an effort by the US State Department on securing access to AI and supply chain security spanning energy, critical minerals, high-end manufacturing, and AI models, reflects the broadening of the strategic competition over AI into a coordinated effort among the allied nations to secure the comprehensive supply chains that the technology requires.

India has increased its supplies of liquefied petroleum gas to non-household users and removed caps on commercial sectors after an improvement in availability, marking a significant step in the country’s recovery from the supply disruption that the Gulf conflict inflicted on its LPG imports.

The restoration of supplies, following the recent improvement in the LPG supply situation, illustrates the gradual normalization of the Indian energy market as the conflict’s effects ease and the diversification of supply sources takes hold.

The European Commission’s plans to limit exports of aluminum scrap have been delayed until September, illustrating the difficulty of balancing the competing interests in a debate that pits the aluminum producers seeking to retain the scrap for domestic recycling against the recyclers who oppose the export restrictions.

The delay, pushing the measures back from the originally planned spring adoption, reflects the challenge of finding a balance between the producers who favor the export ban and the recyclers who oppose it, a balance that the Commission has struggled to strike.

Canadian miner Titan Mining and US-based REalloys have been selected by the US Army to develop critical minerals processing facilities on military bases, advancing the Pentagon’s broader push to secure defense supply chains and reduce reliance on China for the materials used in weapons, batteries, and advanced manufacturing.

The selections, part of the military’s development of critical minerals refineries on its bases, illustrate the integration of the defense establishment into the broader effort to build the domestic critical minerals supply chains that the Chinese dominance and the strategic competition have made an urgent priority.

The copper smelting industry has been transformed by an unprecedented implosion in processing fees, with the metal’s value to smelters collapsing even as the copper price hovers near all-time highs, forcing the companies that convert mined concentrate into refined metal to rely on the by-products of the conversion process for their financial survival.

This curious state of affairs, in which the gold, silver, and sulfuric acid that come with the copper have become as important as the copper itself to a typical smelter’s bottom line, reflects the consequences of China having expanded its smelting capacity far faster than the world’s miners can deliver the raw materials.