Six Banks Rewrite the Critical Minerals Playbook

Six of the world's biggest development banks published a joint outline on Saturday for reshaping how critical minerals move from the ground to the market. The plan landed one day after the World Bank announced it wants to quintuple its critical minerals financing, a one-two punch aimed at the raw materials inside phone batteries, electric cars and wind turbines — and at the countries that have been exporting them cheap.

Critical minerals are the unglamorous ingredients of the energy transition. Lithium powers the rechargeable batteries in smartphones, laptops and electric vehicles; cobalt, nickel and rare earth elements turn up in everything from jet engines to the magnets inside wind turbines, according to the Idaho National Laboratory. The lab notes that while the United States holds deposits of nearly all of these materials, most processing happens abroad, a concentration that governments now treat as a strategic weak point. Demand keeps climbing as electrification spreads, and the hunt for supplies that do not bottleneck in a single country is already underway.

The new framework pulls together the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the European Investment Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, according to Reuters. Instead of financing mines in isolation, the banks say they will coordinate support across the full critical minerals chain: processing plants, refineries and factories, plus the power lines, roads, ports and policy frameworks that make them viable. The outline names four payoffs — jobs, domestic value added, private investment and support for the low-carbon transition — and promises closer alignment on environmental and social standards.

The fivefold bet

The scale of the ambition showed up a day earlier in Bangkok. World Bank President Ajay Banga told a plenary session of the IMF and World Bank annual meetings that the bank plans to quintuple its critical minerals business in five years, with $19 billion in financing targeted over the coming five fiscal years against $3.6 billion in the previous stretch, according to Reuters. Banga said the bank has named twenty countries where it can partner on projects, and that the first country compacts with fellow development banks launched this week, meant "to build local industries and keep more jobs and value at home." The timing was deliberate: the announcements landed during the annual meetings, where development finance was already under scrutiny as governments hunt for alternatives to concentrated supply chains.

The push has a heavyweight backer. The United States is the World Bank's largest shareholder, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier in the week that he wants the bank doing more on critical minerals mining and processing — de-risking projects, financing them and investing in the infrastructure around them, including deep-sea mining. Banga did not mention deep-sea mining. The bank's plan takes what it calls a "precautionary approach" to the sector, with any engagement required to follow bank policy.

What changes on the ground

The framework's most concrete proposal is the mineral corridor: a mining project bundled with the power, transport, logistics, water and digital infrastructure it needs to support processing nearby, according to Reuters. The banks also plan to strengthen project preparation, deploy co-financing and guarantees to pull in private capital, and coordinate their support to governments so critical minerals projects connect to industrial development instead of sitting apart from it. The joint outline marks a shift from banks financing mines one by one to a shared plan for the factories, grids and ports that turn minerals into manufactured goods.

Right now, too many mineral-rich countries export raw ore and import the finished goods made from it. The banks are betting that coordinated financing can flip that equation, and that governments will show up with clear rules and credible project pipelines. The framework is still an outline. If it works, the countries that dig up the ingredients of the energy transition might finally get to manufacture the finished products too. The test will be whether the billions land as refineries and factories or as another decade of extraction deals.