Critical Minerals, Geopolitics and Sovereignty: Brazil’s Institutional Challenge

Abstract

The acceleration of the energy transition and the digitalization of economies have elevated lithium, copper, graphite, rare earth elements and other minerals to the center of contemporary geopolitical disputes, pressing Latin America - and Brazil in particular - to formulate a critical minerals policy commensurate with its geological endowment. This paper presents an integrative and comparative review of the academic literature and main regulatory frameworks on the subject, arguing that criticality is not an intrinsic property of a mineral but a contingent relation among economic and technological importance, supply risk, substitutability, circularity and the vulnerability of the system under analysis. This relational framing carries a direct implication for producing countries: uncritically adopting lists formulated by consuming economies means incorporating a hierarchy of priorities calibrated for those on the other side of the supply chain, not for those who hold the resources. To substantiate this argument, the paper compares the criticality assessment architectures of the United States - 60 minerals on the 2025 list -, the European Union - 34 critical raw materials and 17 strategic raw materials under the 2024 Critical Raw Materials Act -, China and Australia - 31 minerals, as updated in 2024 -, showing that quantitative, qualitative and hybrid models coexist and are, in every case, technically led by the respective national geological surveys. The resulting analytical framework is applied to the Brazilian case, with a critical examination of Bill 1754/2026, which proposes a production-sharing regime and the conversion of the Geological Survey of Brazil into a mining company, and of Bill 2780/2024, approved by the Chamber of Deputies, which establishes the National Policy on Critical and Strategic Minerals (PNMCE). Both bills reproduce the conceptual conflation of critical and strategic minerals, establish no verifiable methodology for criticality assessment, and exhibit distinct institutional weaknesses: the former subordinates state geological intelligence to extractive operations; the latter institutionalises financialisation mechanisms - streaming contracts and unrestricted access to the National Climate Fund - that undermine long-term mineral sovereignty. The paper concludes that the central challenge for Brazil and Latin America is to translate geological endowment into industrial, technological and institutional capacity, avoiding a new round of subordinated re-primarisation and preserving the geological survey as the locus of state intelligence over mineral resources.

Keywords:
Mineral policy; Sovereignty; Energy transition

Resumo

A aceleração da transição energética e a digitalização das economias elevaram lítio, cobre, grafita, terras raras e outros elementos ao centro das disputas geopolíticas contemporâneas, impondo à América Latina - e ao Brasil em particular - a tarefa urgente de formular uma política de minerais críticos à altura de sua dotação geológica. Este artigo apresenta uma revisão integrativa e comparativa da literatura acadêmica e dos principais marcos regulatórios sobre o tema, argumentando que a criticidade não constitui propriedade intrínseca de um mineral, mas relação contingente entre importância econômica e tecnológica, risco de suprimento, substituibilidade, circularidade e vulnerabilidade do sistema observado. Essa formulação relacional tem implicação direta para países produtores: adotar acriticamente listas formuladas por economias consumidoras significa incorporar uma hierarquia de prioridades calibrada para quem está do outro lado da cadeia, não para quem detém os recursos. Para demonstrar esse argumento, o artigo compara as arquiteturas de avaliação da criticidade adotadas pelos Estados Unidos - 60 minerais na lista de 2025 -, pela União Europeia - 34 matérias-primas críticas e 17 estratégicas, nos termos do Critical Raw Materials Act de 2024 -, pela China e pela Austrália - 31 minerais, em lista atualizada em 2024 -, mostrando que modelos quantitativos, qualitativos e híbridos coexistem e são, em todos os casos, conduzidos tecnicamente pelos respectivos serviços geológicos nacionais. O quadro analítico resultante é aplicado ao caso brasileiro, com exame crítico do Projeto de Lei 1754/2026, que propõe regime de partilha da produção e a conversão do Serviço Geológico do Brasil em empresa de mineração, e do Projeto de Lei 2780/2024, aprovado pela Câmara dos Deputados, que institui a Política Nacional de Minerais Críticos e Estratégicos (PNMCE). Ambos os projetos reproduzem a conflação conceitual entre as duas categorias, não estabelecem metodologia verificável de avaliação de criticidade e apresentam fragilidades institucionais distintas: o primeiro subordina a inteligência geológica estatal à operação extrativa; o segundo institucionaliza mecanismos de financeirização - contratos de streaming e acesso irrestrito ao Fundo Nacional sobre Mudança do Clima - que comprometem a soberania mineral de longo prazo. Conclui-se que o desafio central para o Brasil e a América Latina é converter dotações geológicas em capacidades industriais, tecnológicas e institucionais, evitando uma nova rodada de reprimarização subordinada e preservando o serviço geológico como locus de inteligência estatal sobre recursos minerais.

Palavras-chave:
Política mineral; Soberania; Transição energética

1 Introduction

Over the past two decades, elements such as lithium, copper, nickel, cobalt, graphite, rare earths, gallium, germanium and tungsten have ceased to be treated as sectoral inputs of economic geology and have entered the vocabulary of economic security, industrial policy and contemporary geopolitics (National Research Council 2008; Erdmann & Graedel 2011; Ali et al. 2017; International Energy Agency 2024). The decarbonisation of energy matrices, the expansion of electric mobility, the digitalisation of economies, the race for semiconductors and the geoeconomic fragmentation of the international system have converged to place the reliable supply of these elements at the centre of state strategies (OECD 2025a, 2025b; European Union 2024).

For the geosciences, this agenda has particular significance. What is at stake is not the existence of deposits, but the capacity to transform resources into supply, processing, refining, manufacturing, recycling and regulatory power. Criticality, viewed through this lens, shifts the analytical axis from the mineral deposit to the value chain and to the vulnerability of the system that depends on it (Graedel et al. 2012; Schrijvers et al. 2020; Schicho & Tercero Espinoza 2024). This shift is especially relevant for Brazil and Latin America: the region combines a high level of geological availability with relatively low participation in the higher value-added segments of mineral chains (Bernal et al. 2023; ECLAC 2024a; Obaya et al. 2024).

The argument of this paper is that the opportunity opened up by the energy transition will only be captured by producing economies if it is accompanied by institutions capable of producing up-to-date geological knowledge, formulating their own criticality assessments, coordinating industrial policy and governing territories. Mineral intelligence, in this design, is the task of the national geological survey. The point is not trivial in the Brazilian context: at the time of this review, the National Congress is debating Bill 1754/2026, which proposes to rename the Companhia de Pesquisa de Recursos Minerais (CPRM) as Empresa Brasileira de Mineração de Terras Raras (TerraBras) and to assign it extractive, processing and commercial functions. This is a move that, in light of the comparative literature, demands careful scrutiny.

The paper pursues a central objective: to build a comparative analytical framework on mineral criticality that enables a critical assessment of Brazil’s emerging policy in the sector. Achieving this objective requires five analytical movements. The first consists of reviewing the literature on the concept of mineral criticality, establishing its theoretical foundations and definitional controversies. The second consists of analytically distinguishing critical minerals from strategic minerals, categories frequently treated as equivalent but with distinct logics and policy implications. The third consists of comparing the architectures for assessing and screening criticality in the United States, the European Union, China and Australia, identifying methodological convergences and institutional asymmetries. The fourth consists of examining the role of geological surveys as the institutional infrastructure underlying these assessments, a dimension habitually relegated to the status of a tacit assumption. The fifth consists of applying the resulting analytical framework to Brazil and Latin America, with a critical discussion of the National Policy on Critical and Strategic Minerals, of Bill 1754/2026 and of Bill 2780/2024. Cutting across these movements, the paper sustains that the central challenge for Brazil and Latin America is to convert geological endowment into industrial, technological and institutional capacity, without incurring a new round of subordinated re-primarisation (Prebisch 1950; Furtado 1961; Hirschman 1981).

2 Methodology and Sources

This review is integrative and comparative in the sense proposed by Whittemore and Knafl (2005) for syntheses that combine theoretical and empirical studies with institutional documents on topics situated at the strong interface between science, public policy and governance. The search strategy was conducted in three databases (Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar), covering the period from 2008 to 2026, using combinations of the descriptors critical minerals, strategic minerals, criticality assessment, raw materials, supply risk, energy transition and Latin America. The main references were complemented by official documents (geological survey reports, regulatory acts and legal texts) and by studies from Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Energy Agency, used as institutional evidence and not as substitutes for the academic literature.

The corpus was delimited through thematic searching and cross-checking of the most recurrent references in the literature on mineral criticality. The initial search returned 86 records. After removal of duplicates and documents clearly outside the scope, 71 records remained for screening. The reading of titles and abstracts reduced this set to 48 texts evaluated in full. In the end, 37 studies and institutional documents formed the analytical corpus effectively mobilised in the paper. The following were excluded: purely geochemical works without discussion of criticality, supply security or mineral governance; studies focused on a single deposit or mine without scope for generalisation to value chains; opinion notes without explicit methodology; journalistic material; and working papers or not peer-reviewed, except when replaced by official documents or institutional technical reports.

Screening favoured review articles, methodological studies and texts with a strong comparative component, discarding articles whose contribution was restricted to a single mineral or a single jurisdiction without theoretical articulation. The four jurisdictions selected for the comparative analysis - the United States, the European Union, China and Australia - were chosen because (i) they encompass the principal methodological architectures of criticality currently in use, (ii) they represent distinct institutional models (mature federation, supranational bloc, developmentalist state and allied producing federation) and (iii) they operate at scales sufficient for their regulatory influence to traverse the international system. The comparison follows the logic of most similar systems design with respect to the fact that all jurisdictions have recognised criticality as a problem of state, and the logic of most different systems design with respect to the institutional responses chosen.

The analysis of the Brazilian case drew, in addition to the cited literature, on the full text of Bill 1754/2026 (Brasil 2026a), the National Policy on Critical and Strategic Minerals (Brasil 2026b), Bill 2780/2024 and independent technical analyses of its substitute bill approved in the Chamber of Deputies (Cardoso & Milanez 2026; Andrade 2026; Figueiredo 2025; Rosendo 2026), as well as the history of the Pró-Minerais Estratégicos programme (Brasil 2021). The criteria for the critical discussion of the bills were derived from the comparative matrix constructed in the analysis section.

3 Analysis and Conceptual Framework

3.1 Conceptual Framework: Criticality as a Relational Construct

Over fifteen years, the academic literature has converged on the understanding that criticality should not be treated as an absolute attribute of a substance but as a function of the observing system - country, sector, company or technology - and of the temporal horizon adopted (Erdmann & Graedel 2011; Graedel et al. 2012; Helbig et al. 2016; Schrijvers et al. 2020). The canonical formulation can be summarised in the Equation 1.

$$Cᵢ=f(EIᵢ,SRᵢ,SUBᵢ,RECᵢ,Vᵢ|t,u)$$ (1)

in which Cᵢ denotes the criticality of mineral i; EI denotes its economic and technological importance; SR represents supply risk; SUB measures substitutability; REC captures circularity and recycling potential; V expresses the system’s vulnerability; “t” and “u” refer, respectively, to the temporal horizon and the unit of analysis. The advantage of this formulation is that it makes explicit why different studies arrive at distinct results: they do not observe the same system, do not use the same indicators and do not pursue the same objectives (Schrijvers et al. 2020).

Two analytical consequences follow from this point. The first is the rejection of the idea of a universal and permanent list of critical minerals: the same element can be highly critical for an importing country and relatively non-critical for a diversified producer, can be decisive for defence and secondary for other sectors, and can shift position as technologies, prices and recycling capacity change (Helbig et al. 2016; Schicho & Tercero Espinoza 2024). The second is the recognition that every criticality assessment implicitly carries a definition of who the relevant subject is. Producing countries that uncritically adopt lists formulated in consuming economies incorporate, together with the category, a hierarchy of priorities that may not correspond to their own strategic interest - an observation that will become decisive when addressing Brazil and Latin America.

3.2 From Criticality to Strategic Status: Distinction and Overlap

The recent literature increasingly distinguishes critical minerals from strategic minerals (Andersson 2020; European Union 2024; Australian Government 2024; Government of the United Kingdom 2026a). In a strict sense, the critical category identifies bottlenecks and risk exposures: a mineral is critical when an interruption in its supply produces high vulnerability in relevant systems. The strategic category, in turn, incorporates a state-level vision regarding technology, defence, industrial policy, foreign relations and productive autonomy. A mineral can be strategic without being critical in the present, because the government wishes to build future capacity; and it can be critical without receiving the same industrial priority, when the state response is confined to mitigating supply risk.

Figure 1 summarises this point. It also helps clarify a frequently neglected distinction: a critical mineral is one whose supply interruption produces high vulnerability in relevant systems; a strategic mineral, in turn, is one that the state considers a priority for long-term objectives, whether industrial, defensive, diplomatic or related to economic sovereignty. In some cases, the two sets overlap; in others, they diverge (Andersson 2020; European Union 2024; Australian Government2024).

Figure 1
Conceptual diagram: two logics for mineral classification.

The distinction has operational consequences. When a regulatory framework treats critical and strategic minerals as synonyms, it loses the capacity to hierarchise responses: what requires the diversification of suppliers is not necessarily what requires investment in domestic refining; what calls for strategic reserves is not the same as what calls for the support of basic research. The conceptual elegance of the European design - in which strategic raw materials constitute a signalled subset within the universe of critical raw materials - derives precisely from this effort at differentiation (European Union 2024; European Commission 2023).

3.3 Comparative Architectures for Assessing and Screening Criticality

The operationalisation of criticality varies substantially across jurisdictions. In some cases, the assessment relies on quantitative metrics with explicit thresholds; in others, qualitative screening anchored in technological and geostrategic priorities prevails. The four architectures analysed below share a decisive institutional feature: all are technically led by the respective national geological surveys or by networked structures that include these institutions - the U.S. Geological Survey, the British Geological Survey in partnership with the European Joint Research Centre, Geoscience Australia, and the China Geological Survey. This feature will be revisited in Section 3.6.4. In terms of scope, the most recent lists include 60 minerals in the United States (2025 list), 34 critical raw materials and 17 strategic raw materials in the European Union (European Union 2024), 31 minerals in Australia (list updated in February 2024) and 24 strategic minerals in China (2016-2020 catalogue, currently under review). Table 1 summarises the comparative logics for these four jurisdictions.

Table 1
Comparative architectures for the assessment or screening of mineral criticality.

Jurisdiction	Analytical unit	Core variables	Decision rule
United States	Mineral commodity and supply chain	Economic effects of trade disruptions; scenario probabilities; import dependence; production concentration; single point of domestic failure (Nassar et al. 2025).	Risk is classified by scenarios; inclusion is recommended when the annualised, weighted GDP loss exceeds the statistical threshold; if not, the existence of a single domestic producer is tested.
European Union	Raw material for the Union economy	Economic importance; supply concentration; governance of supplier countries; import dependence; substitution; recycling (European Union 2024; European Commission 2023).	A material is critical when it simultaneously exceeds the EI and SR thresholds; an additional subset is classified as strategic by virtue of its centrality to priority technologies.
China	Strategic mineral and supply security	Importance for economic development; defence; supply risk; substitutability; relevance for emerging industries; in some cases, national comparative advantage (Andersson 2020; Yu et al. 2021; Zhang et al. 2018).	There is no single transparent official formula equivalent to the European one; a state catalogue, an early-warning mechanism and multi-criteria academic models coexist.
Australia	Mineral associated with priority technologies and the national interest	Alignment with priority technologies; Australian geological potential; demand from strategic partners; supply-chain vulnerability (Australian Government 2023, 2024).	A mineral enters the critical list when all four criteria are present; if relevant to the transition and to partners but not yet sufficiently vulnerable, it is classified as a strategic material.

3.3.1 United States: Economic Modelling of Trade Disruption

The U.S. federal methodology underwent a significant overhaul in 2025, led by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS 2025; Nassar et al. 2025). The USGS grouped 84 mineral commodities into supply chains and modelled the effects of more than 1,200 scenarios of foreign trade interruption on the U.S. economy. The core calculation can be represented, in simplified form, as Equation 2.

$$Rᵢ=\Sigma ⱼpⱼ·\Delta GDPᵢⱼ$$ (2)

in which Rᵢ represents the aggregate risk of mineral i, pⱼ is the probability of scenario j and ΔGDPᵢⱼ corresponds to the economic impact of that scenario for the mineral in question. The results were classified using the Jenks natural breaks method; minerals with an annualised, weighted GDP loss exceeding US$2 million were recommended for inclusion in the list, and those failing to meet the threshold underwent a second test, which verifies the existence of a single domestic producer - the single-point-of-failure configuration (Nassar et al. 2025).

The architecture has three analytical advantages. It makes mineral risks comparable in principle to other economic risks. It shifts the focus from simple import dependence to the systemic effects of trade shocks. And it introduces explicit economic logic into the construction of the federal list. Its principal limitation is that it privileges a macroeconomic- and manufacturing-oriented reading, distinct from approaches centred on the security of specific materials (McCullough & Nassar 2017; Nassar et al. 2025).

3.3.2 European Union: Two Axes, Explicit Thresholds and a Strategic Subset

Among the methodologies currently available, the European one is probably the most transparent in its analytical architecture. The Critical Raw Materials Act and the 2023 study calculate criticality on the basis of two main axes: economic importance and supply risk (European Union 2024; European Commission 2023). In a simplified version, economic importance (EI) can be expressed as Equation 3.

$$EIᵢ=\Sigma sAᵢs·VAₛ·SIᵢᴱᴵ$$ (3)

in which Aᵢs is the share of the end use of material i in sector s, VAₛ is the value added of the corresponding sector and SIᵢᴱᴵ is the substitution index applied to economic importance. Supply risk (SR) combines supplier concentration (CONC), governance of supplier countries (GOV), importance dependence risk (IR), substitution (SI), and recycling (RI) (Equation 4):

$$SRᵢ=f(CONCᵢ,GOVᵢ,IRᵢ,SIᵢˢᴿ,RIᵢ)$$ (4)

Materials that simultaneously exceed the EI and SR thresholds enter the list of critical raw materials. From 2024 onwards, the European Union added a second regulatory layer: the strategic raw materials, defined by their centrality to green, digital, defence and aerospace technologies and by the difficulty of rapidly expanding supply (European Union 2024). The distinction is conceptually elegant: criticality measures bottleneck and exposure; strategy prioritises the materials decisive for the European industrial project.

3.3.3 China: State Catalogue, Strategic Early Warning and Multi-Criteria Models

The Chinese case operates in a different register. Since the 2016-2020 National Mineral Resources Plan, China has had an official catalogue of 24 strategic minerals and a state monitoring and early-warning mechanism, with indicators, critical values and a comprehensive model for supply security (NDRC 2016). The 2024 revision of the Mineral Resources Law reinforced the orientation towards reserves, production capacity and state support for minerals of strategic importance (China 2024). Unlike the European Union, however, there is no single, transparent, standardised public formula that would allow an external reconstruction of a Chinese criticality indicator.

The literature on China therefore operates on two scales. At the institutional scale, the state constructs the space of the strategic through catalogues, regulation, stockpiles, refining capacity and the differentiated management of resources (Andersson 2020; NDRC 2016; China 2024). At the academic scale, Chinese researchers employ multi-criteria methods such as Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Preference Ranking Organisation Method for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMETHEE) and Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis combined with ELECTRI TRI (SMAA-TRI) to assess supply risk and mineral security (Zhang et al. 2018; Yu et al. 2021). Schematically Equation 5,

$$Sᵢ=\Sigma kwₖ·xᵢₖ$$ (5)

in which S _i expresses the strategic or risk position of mineral i, w _k is the assigned weight to criteria k, x _ik is the score of mineral i on criterion k. As Andersson (2020) summarises, Chinese debates mobilise at least six recurrent parameters: importance for economic development, importance for national defence, supply risk, substitutability, relevance for emerging strategic industries and, in some cases, national comparative advantage. In sum, the Chinese case is less a criticality formula than a political construction of the strategic articulated to supporting technical models.

3.3.4 Australia: Qualitative Screening Driven by Technology and Alliances

Australia adopts a model that is publicly less mathematised yet institutionally coherent. The critical minerals list includes minerals essential to priority technologies, to the economy and to national security, for which the country possesses geological potential, which are in demand among strategic partners and whose supply chains are vulnerable (Australian Government 2024). Abstractly Equation 6:

$$Aᵢ=g(Tᵢ,Gᵢ,Pᵢ,Vᵢ)$$ (6)

in which Ai is the mineral i assessment, T denotes alignment with priority technologies, G domestic geological potential, P demand from strategic partners and V supply-chain vulnerability. When the first three criteria are present but vulnerability is not yet sufficient, the material enters the list of strategic materials, rather than the critical list. The creation, in 2026, of the Critical Minerals Strategic Reserve further refined this logic by selecting an initial subset of minerals for a public reserve based on three criteria - suitability, priority and the potential of projects in the pipeline (Australian Government 2026). The result is a governance architecture that privileges qualitative screening, periodic review and coordination with allies.

3.4 Convergences and Divergences Across National Definitions

If the academic literature shows that criticality is always relational, the comparison among national policies confirms that this relation is politically situated. There exists a common core - systemic importance and supply risk - but each jurisdiction translates it from its productive structure, its geoeconomic insertion and its state project (USGS 2025; European Union 2024; Government of Canada 2022; Australian Government 2024; Government of the United Kingdom 2026b). Table 2 and 3 summarise this heterogeneity.

Table 2
National definitions of criticality and their relation to the idea of the strategic mineral.

Jurisdiction	Dominant definition	Relationship between “Critic” and “Strategic”	Analytical reading
United States	Mineral essential to the economy or to national security, with a vulnerable supply chain and an essential function in manufacturing (U.S. Geological Survey 2025).	The dominant official term is critical mineral; the strategic dimension appears more as a function of economic and national security.	Legal and economic focus, oriented to systemic risk.
European Union	Raw material of high economic importance and high supply risk (European Union 2024; European Commission 2023).	The strategic is a subset of the critical: the materials most decisive for green, digital, defence and aerospace technologies.	Clearer conceptual distinction between current risk and strategic priority.
China	Strategic mineral linked to economic security, defense, emerging industries, and state governance capacity (National Development and Reform Commission of the People’s Republic of China, 2016; Andersson, 2020).	The dominant vocabulary is that of the strategic; the term critical appears more in academic literature and comparative translations.	Greater external opacity and deeper integration among resources, industrial policy, and market power.
Australia	Mineral essential to priority technologies, with geological potential, partner demand supply-chain vulnerability (Australian Government, Department of Industry, Science and Resources 2024).	Double list: the strategic includes important materials whose vulnerability does not yet warrant classification as critical.	Functional distinction between opportunity and bottleneck.
Canada	Mineral essential to economic security or to the low-carbon transition, or capable of positioning Canada as a sustainable supplier to allies (Government of Canada 2022).	Dominant term: critical minerals; the strategic component appears in alliance diplomacy and in decarbonisation.	Combines economic security, climate, and partnership geopolitics.
United Kingdom	Mineral essential to the economy, national security and the energy transition (Government of the United Kingdom 2026b).	The United Kingdom adds the category of growth minerals, which captures materials important for future growth without necessarily classifying them as critical today (Government of the United Kingdom 2026a).	Introduces a strong prospective component.
Brazil	Mineral essential to technology, defence and the energy transition, with risk of scarcity or concentrated dependence; strategic minerals are also associated with external dependence, high technology and the trade balance (Brasil, Ministério de Minas e Energia 2025, 2021, 2026).	The two vocabularies tend to converge within recent national policy, but the Brazilian tradition of “strategic” is broader and development-oriented.	A potentially decisive case for escaping green re-primarisation, provided that geology, industry and diplomacy can be coordinated.

Table 3
Comparison of international frameworks.

Country/Region	Main criteria	Method	Responsible institution	Update frequency	Number of minerals (2024 -2025)
USA	Economic importance, supply risk	Qualitative	USGS	Periodic	50
EU	Economic importance, supply risk	Quantitative (2D matrix)	European Commission + JRC	Triennial	34 critical, 17 strategic
China	National security, industrial development	Hybrid	China Geological Survey	Variable	Not disclosed
Australia	Economic importance, vulnerability	Qualitative	Geoscience Australia	Periodic	26

Two conclusions follow from the comparison. The first is that criticality is selective and driven by national interests; there is no pure technical neutrality in the construction of the lists (Andersson 2020; Schicho & Tercero Espinoza 2024). The second is that the weight of the prospective horizon is growing: governments seek not merely to identify present bottlenecks but to anticipate future dependencies in batteries, permanent magnets, power electronics, defence, hydrogen and electrical grids (IEA 2024; European Union 2024; Australian Government 2023; Government of the United Kingdom 2026b). The category of growth minerals, recently introduced by the United Kingdom (Government of the United Kingdom 2026a), exemplifies this prospective opening by identifying materials relevant to future growth even without a current classification as critical. This temporal orientation has a direct implication for the Brazilian case. If consuming economies already formulate their assessments on a ten- to fifteen-year horizon, a producing country that merely reacts to others’ lists - uncritically adopting their priorities and their methodological cuts - runs the risk of orienting its mineral policy by the projected demand of third parties rather than by a sovereign reading of its own geological base and its own development objectives. Brazil therefore needs a national criticality methodology with an equivalent prospective horizon: one that asks not only which minerals are presently vulnerable in the international market, but which capabilities the country will need to have built by 2035 in order not to repeat, in the cycle of energy-transition minerals, the technological dependence that characterised earlier cycles of commodity exports.

The plurality of national criticality assessment methodologies documented in Sections 3.3 and 3.4 is not a mere technical artefact: it reflects the geopolitical dispute underlying the control of mineral value chains. Understanding this dispute - and the mechanisms through which it manifests itself in market structures, in instruments of economic coercion and in development strategies - is a condition for properly framing the Brazilian case. It is to this context that the next section turns.

3.5 The Geopolitics of Critical Minerals: Supply Chains, Refining and Structural Power

The geopolitics of critical minerals derives less from absolute geological scarcity than from the concentration of key stages of the chain. The OECD emphasises that the extraction, processing, refining and trade of industrial raw materials are strongly concentrated in a small number of countries and corporate structures, which amplifies vulnerability to shocks, restrictions and coercive uses of trade (OECD 2025a, 2025b). The IEA, in turn, shows that demand linked to the energy transition raises the strategic weight of lithium, copper, nickel, cobalt, graphite and rare earths, while simultaneously placing pressure on investment, diversification and recycling (IEA 2024).

As a consequence, the international dispute has shifted from supply security to the control of the links with the greatest structural power: refining, metallurgy, advanced materials, intellectual property, financing, technical standards and logistics. The Chinese experience is emblematic, because it shows that mineral power can derive both from the possession of resources and from command over processing, productive scale and state coordination (Andersson 2020; China 2024). In response, the United States, the European Union, Japan, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom articulate policies of de-risking, friend-shoring, strategic reserves, support for domestic processing projects and partnerships with producer countries (European Union 2024; Australian Government 2026; Government of the United Kingdom 2026b; Government of Canada 2022).

This movement revalues Latin America’s position, but under ambivalent conditions. The region gains centrality as a potential supplier of indispensable minerals (Bernal et al. 2023; ECLAC 2024a). At the same time, it becomes the target of competition among major blocs that seek to diversify procurement without necessarily transferring technological capacity or value-added activity. The regional mineral agenda must therefore be read in terms of development rather than mere supply: those who export resources without expanding competences tend to absorb the territorial costs of the transition while capturing only a limited share of its benefits (Ali et al. 2017; ECLAC 2024b; Obaya et al. 2024).

The economic mechanism underlying this risk is well documented in the literature on resource-based development. Geological endowment generates growth when it produces linkages (Hirschman 1981; Sachs & Warner 2001; Van der Ploeg 2011).

3.6 Brazil and Latin America: Geological Endowment, Industrial Fragility and Institutional Challenges

The comparative analysis of the U.S., EU, Chinese and Australian frameworks reveals common elements that inform the assessment of the Brazilian case: (1) all adopt explicit and verifiable methodologies; (2) all designate geological surveys as the technical locus of assessment; (3) all distinguish, to a greater or lesser degree, the technical assessment of criticality from strategic designations. The following discussion examines the extent to which the Brazilian proposals incorporate or diverge from these elements.

3.6.1 The Region as a Mineral Province for the Energy Transition

Latin America and the Caribbean occupy a singular position in the new mineral geopolitics. The region combines large reserves and significant production of copper, lithium, nickel, molybdenum, graphite and other elements important for electrification, grids, batteries and digital technologies (Bernal et al. 2023; ECLAC 2024a, 2024b). Chile and Peru stand out for copper; Argentina, Chile and Bolivia for lithium; and Brazil for a more diversified basket that includes graphite, lithium, nickel, rare earths, manganese, bauxite and niobium (Bernal et al. 2023; Brazil 2026b).

This geological centrality does not automatically translate into industrial centrality. The regional literature emphasises that Latin America remains strongly positioned in the upstream links of the chains, while refining, fine chemistry, cathode materials, battery cells, magnets and equipment remain concentrated outside the region (Castillo et al. 2024; Obaya et al. 2024; ECLAC 2024a). The window opened by the energy transition can therefore either sustain an upgrading strategy or deepen a neo-extractivist pattern in which the region continues to export low processing and to import embedded technology.

3.6.2 The Lithium Triangle and the Dilemmas of Value Addition

Lithium has become the paradigmatic case of these dilemmas. The recent literature shows that Argentina, Bolivia and Chile do not respond homogeneously to the same geological opportunity (Murguía & Obaya 2024; Obaya et al. 2024). Argentina has articulated federal and provincial policies aimed at expanding production and gradually building productive and technological capacities; Chile seeks to combine regulation, state participation and greater value capture; Bolivia has historically pursued a more sovereigntist and verticalised model, with difficulties of scale and implementation (Castillo et al. 2024; Obaya et al. 2024).

The decisive point is that the lithium opportunity does not depend on the resource alone. It depends on institutions, coordination across government levels, infrastructure, research and development, technological agreements and the capacity to negotiate with investors without abandoning development objectives (Obaya et al. 2024; Murguía & Obaya 2024). The Argentine experience analysed by Obaya et al. (2024) shows precisely this: without strategic vision and multi-level articulation, the abundance of resources does not translate into enduring productive linkages.

The comparative experience of the lithium triangle offers Brazil a set of lessons that transcends the specific mineral. The Bolivian trajectory is, in this sense, the most instructive counter-example. Bolivia pursued the most formally ambitious sovereigntist model - nationalisation, full verticalisation of the chain, refusal of partnerships entailing transfer of control - but ran into constraints that geological abundance does not resolve on its own: the absence of prior industrial scale, a deficit of specialised technical personnel, difficulty of access to processing technology and instability in long-term financing conditions (Castillo et al. 2024; Obaya et al. 2024). The result was productive capacity well below the geological potential and a window of opportunity partially squandered while global lithium markets were reorganising themselves. The lesson is not that sovereignty is incompatible with productive insertion, but that sovereignty without institutional, technical and industrial capacity is a declaration without operational substance. For Brazil, whose geological base is more diversified and whose competences in geology, mining and metallurgy are more developed than were Bolivia’s at the opening of the lithium cycle, this suggests a different strategy: not the forced and immediate verticalisation of the entire chain, nor unrestricted opening oriented solely by the attraction of foreign investment, but a deliberate sequence of capability accumulation - beginning with the strengthening of geological intelligence, proceeding through investment in processing and refining via selective partnership with technology holders, and progressively advancing to higher-value-added segments as domestic competences consolidate. This sequence requires, precisely, the kind of institution that Bill 1754/2026 threatens to disfigure.

3.6.3 Brazil: Mineral Diversity, National Policy and the Production-Sharing Debate (Bill 1754/2026)

Brazil’s comparative advantage is less concentrated in a single mineral and more distributed across a broad geological base. This profile opens the possibility of a strategy less dependent on a specific commodity and closer to a policy of materials and technological chains. The formulation of the National Policy on Critical and Strategic Minerals signals this shift by emphasising geological knowledge, mineral transformation, reduction of external vulnerability and qualified insertion into global chains (Brasil 2026b).

There is, however, a distinction that Brazilian policy has not yet formulated with sufficient clarity and that this paper proposes to make explicit. A mineral may be highly critical for the major consuming powers - because their industrial chains depend on it and because its supply is geographically concentrated - and, at the same time, not be the most strategic element for Brazil’s development project. Criticality, as demonstrated in Section 3.1, is a function of the observing system: it measures the vulnerability of those who depend on the mineral, not the potential of those who possess it. A producing country that uncritically adopts lists formulated in Washington, Brussels or Tokyo incorporates, together with the category, a hierarchy of priorities calibrated for consuming economies - a hierarchy that may not correspond, and often does not correspond, to its own development objectives, its accumulated industrial competences, the structure of its productive chains or its horizon of technological autonomy (Schicho & Tercero Espinoza 2024; Andersson 2020). For Brazil, this means that the central challenge is not to identify which minerals are critical for the world but to define what is critical for its own national project - a question that demands a sovereign criticality assessment, built from indicators calibrated for a producing country with a diversified geological base, rather than the passive incorporation of methodologies developed by and for economies on the other side of the chain. This own assessment presupposes, precisely, the institution that Bill 1754/2026 threatens to disfigure: a national geological survey with analytical capacity, technical independence and a long-term horizon.

Brazil’s advantage can be organised along four dimensions. The diversity of the mineral base reduces the risk of a strategy dependent on a single niche. The competences accumulated in geology, mining and metallurgy offer a starting point for upgrading. The relative availability of electricity with lower carbon intensity is an important factor for processing activities. And the size of the domestic market makes possible the articulation between mineral policy and missions of reindustrialisation, energy transition, defence and digitalisation (Brazil 2026b; ECLAC 2024a).

Against this backdrop, Bill 1754/2026 (Brasil 2026a), authored by Deputy Pedro Uczai and others, proposes three articulated movements. The first is to establish a production-sharing regime for minerals classified as critical or strategic, with explicit inspiration from the pré-sal oil model: the Union, as the granting authority, would be entitled to a physical share of the extracted resource, in a proportion that may range between 10% and 80% of the mining output. The second is to rename the Companhia de Pesquisa de Recursos Minerais as Empresa Brasileira de Mineração de Terras Raras (TerraBras) and to assign it competences for prospecting, mining, processing, refining and commercialisation. The third is to create a National Programme to Incentivise the Recycling of Critical or Strategic Materials and to establish strict export-control rules for military uses.

Examined in light of the comparative literature reviewed in the previous sections, the bill exhibits five conceptual weaknesses that warrant discussion. The first is the conflation of the critical and the strategic. The text treats the two categories as synonyms, in the recurrent expression “critical or strategic minerals” - the exact opposite of the analytical effort that distinguishes bottleneck from industrial priority and that organises, for example, the European

The second weakness lies in the laconic, delegated definition. Article 3, II, defines critical or strategic minerals as those “defined by a normative act of the Executive Branch” by virtue of their “importance for economic development, national security, the energy transition or the high-technology industry”, whose national or global supply presents “risk of scarcity or shortage”. The formulation is descriptively correct, but it establishes no verifiable methodological criterion (economic importance, supply risk, substitutability, vulnerability), which contrasts sharply with the U.S. and European models presented in Section 3.3.

The third weakness - and here lies the central argument of this paper at the institutional level - is the categorical error regarding the geological survey, examined in detail in the following section.

The fourth weakness concerns regulatory dispersion. The proposed amendments to Law 13.575/2017 place the National Mining Agency as the regulator of production-sharing contracts, but the governance design remains unclear regarding the articulation among the National Mineral Policy Council, the ANM, the Ministry of Mines and Energy, and the new TerraBras. The risk is to multiply layers of authority and weaken the sector’s legal stability.

The fifth weakness is the analytical privileging of rare earths. The proposed name - Empresa Brasileira de Mineração de Terras Raras - suggests a focus on a specific class of minerals, at odds with the conceptual breadth of “critical minerals” mobilised in the literature, which covers dozens of elements with different market logics, scales and processing requirements.

In addition, the minimum 50% share allocated to TerraBras in the contracts it signs (Article 16, I) is high when compared with international experiences and with the pré-sal production-sharing arrangement itself, and demands an economic analysis of the governmental take that the bill does not provide. In sum, Bill 1754/2026 incorporates legitimate concerns about mineral sovereignty, but does so in an institutional design that mixes heterogeneous instruments - production sharing, reorganisation of the geological survey, recycling policy, export controls - without providing a robust conceptual matrix to organise them.

Table 4 synthesises this institutional pattern. In every jurisdiction analysed, the national geological survey defines and periodically updates the list of critical minerals but does not operate mining. The proposal contained in Bill 1754/2026 is, within this set, an isolated case: it is the only architecture in which the same institution would accumulate the functions of technical assessment and mining operation.

Table 4
Geological surveys and institutional functions in the jurisdictions analysed.

Jurisdiction	Geological survey	Defines critical list?	Periodically updated?	Operates mining?
United States	U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)	Yes	Yes	No
European Union	Joint Research Centre / national geological surveys in network†	Yes	Yes	No
China	China Geological Survey	Yes*	Yes*	No
Australia	Geoscience Australia	Yes	Yes	No
Brazil (Bill 1754/2026)	CPRM / TerraBras (proposed)	Yes	Undetermined	Yes

• Sources: USGS (2025); Nassar et al. (2025) ; European Commission (2023); European Union (2024); NDRC (2016); China (2024); Australian Government (2024, 2026); Brazil (2026a).
• Notes: * In the Chinese case, the China Geological Survey feeds the state monitoring and early-warning system, but no single transparent public formula equivalent to the U.S. or European one exists; the classification results from the articulation among state catalogue, early-warning mechanism and multi-criteria academic models without externally verifiable standardisation (see Section 3.3.3).

3.6.4 Geological Surveys as the Institutional Locus of Criticality Assessment

Throughout this paper, a recurring observation has been that each of the jurisdictions analysed has a national geological survey performing an intelligence function over mineral resources. This institutional design is no accident, and its importance for the Brazilian case warrants explicit treatment.

In the United States, the U.S. Geological Survey is the institution that produces the federal criticality assessment methodology, calculates the risk indicators, publishes the periodic list of critical minerals and maintains the database that informs the decisions of other federal agencies (USGS 2025; Nassar et al. 2025; McCullough & Nassar 2017). In the United Kingdom, the British Geological Survey operates, in partnership with the Department for Business and Trade, the Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre, which provides technical intelligence for the design of the national strategy (Government of the United Kingdom 2026a). In Canada, the Geological Survey of Canada technically informs the Canadian Critical Minerals Strategy (Government of Canada 2022). In Australia, Geoscience Australia is part of the Critical Minerals Office and participates directly in the selection of materials included on the critical and strategic lists, as well as in defining the criteria for the Critical Minerals Strategic Reserve (Australian Government 2024, 2026). In the European Union, the assessment is conducted in network form by the Joint Research Centre and the national geological surveys (BGS, BRGM, GTK, among others), gathered in technical consortia under the coordination of the European Commission (European Commission 2023). Even in China, where opacity prevails regarding the classification formula, the China Geological Survey feeds the monitoring and early-warning system operated by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC 2016; China 2024).

There is, therefore, a consistent international pattern: the function of mapping, modelling, classifying and updating criticality is exercised by geological surveys, in an institutional arrangement that separates this activity from extractive operation proper. The separation has both an epistemological foundation - intelligence about mineral resources requires distance from the direct economic interests of extraction - and a practical one: maintaining long-term capacity in mapping and modelling is incompatible with the short-term operational priorities of a mining company.

From this observation follows a critical diagnosis of Bill 1754/2026. The proposal to transform the CPRM into a mining and refining company under the name TerraBras contradicts the institutional design adopted in every jurisdiction analysed here. By subordinating the analytical function to the extractive function, three predictable effects can be anticipated. First, an internal conflict of interest is generated between those who map the territory and those who extract resources from it. Second, long-term trajectories in basic research, regional geophysics, hydrogeology, geological hazard surveys and support to other public policies are compromised - activities that constitute the historical core of the CPRM. Third, the Brazilian state is deprived of precisely the capacity that the bill itself recognises as indispensable: that of defining, by normative act of the Executive Branch, which are the country’s critical or strategic minerals. Such definition is a technical task, with strong geological and economic content, and requires a dedicated institution, not one captured by operational interests.

An alternative path, aligned with the comparative literature, would be to institutionally strengthen the Geological Survey of Brazil as the state’s mineral intelligence unit - entrusted with producing the periodic criticality assessment, technically informing the National Mineral Policy Council and operating in network with the National Mining Agency and the Ministry of Mines and Energy - and, separately, if this is the political choice, to organise a public vehicle for participation in strategic mining projects. Institutional separation preserves the analytical function and opens space for a coherent mineral policy.

3.6.5 Territory, Conflict and Social Legitimacy

The governance of critical minerals cannot be dissociated from territory, water, Indigenous peoples, prior consultation, income distribution and the social licence to operate (Ali et al. 2017; Murguía & Obaya 2024; ECLAC 2024a). The recent ESG literature on critical minerals reinforces this point: pressure to accelerate projects can amplify conflicts if it is not accompanied by robust standards of governance, traceability, transparency and social participation (Ali et al. 2017; Schrijvers et al. 2020). For Brazil and Latin America, this means that future competitiveness will depend not only on ore grade or logistical cost but also on the capacity to combine territorial legitimacy with regulatory predictability.

Recent experience provides cases illustrating both possible directions of this dilemma. In Chile, lithium extraction projects in the Salar de Atacama faced judicial and administrative challenges by the Lickanantay communities, who argued the absence of adequate prior consultation under the terms of ILO Convention 169; the result was the temporary suspension of licences and the renegotiation of operational agreements, with direct impact on production schedules and on investors’ perception of regulatory risk (Murguía & Obaya 2024). In Brazil, the overlap between areas of mineral potential and territories of traditional peoples is structural: the lithium deposits of the Jequitinhonha Valley in Minas Gerais - currently the central axis of national production - are surrounded by quilombola communities and rural populations whose rights to consultation and benefit-sharing are rarely incorporated from the outset of the licensing cycle. The Yanomami case, although associated with illegal gold mining rather than regulated mining, demonstrated in extreme form what occurs when the absence of territorial intelligence and institutional control allows extractive pressure to advance onto protected territories: the 2022-2023 humanitarian crisis exposed the state’s incapacity to overlay, in real time, geological information, territorial boundaries and enforcement capacity (ECLAC 2024a). These cases converge on a common conclusion: social legitimacy is not an externality manageable at the end of the licensing process but a condition for the viability of projects from their inception.

This point connects directly to the institutional argument developed in the previous subsections. Without a strong geological survey, the task of identifying areas of mineral potential compatible with social and environmental restrictions - including Indigenous lands, environmental protection areas and regions of high water vulnerability - loses its technical basis, and licensing comes to operate under permanent uncertainty. The proposal to convert the CPRM into a mining company exacerbates this problem: an institution with direct operational interests in extraction cannot simultaneously perform, with impartiality, the function of mapping territorial conflicts and supporting environmental and social licensing. Strengthening mineral intelligence is therefore also a condition for the social and environmental sustainability of critical mineral policy - not merely for its economic efficiency.

3.6.6 Bill 2780/2024 and the National Policy on Critical and Strategic Minerals: Normative Advances and Structural Weaknesses

Approved by the Chamber of Deputies in 2026 in the form of an extensively reformulated substitute bill - expanding from 21 to 51 articles, presented by Deputy Arnaldo Jardim - Bill 2780/2024 proposes to establish the National Policy on Critical and Strategic Minerals (PNMCE) and represents, in this respect, a normative advance over Bill 1754/2026: instead of regulating only specific production-sharing instruments or punctual institutional reorganisation, it seeks to establish a comprehensive state policy for the sector. The more advanced legislative progress of Bill 2780/2024 - with approval in the Chamber and referral to the Senate - gives it a centrality in the regulatory debate that this paper cannot ignore. Its critical analysis is therefore indispensable for an integrated assessment of the Brazilian institutional challenge surrounding critical minerals.

Careful reading of the substitute bill reveals, however, that Bill 2780/2024 reproduces the same conceptual problem identified in Bill 1754/2026 and discussed in Section 3.2: the conflation of critical minerals and strategic minerals. The text treats the two categories as interchangeable and introduces no verifiable methodology for the periodic classification of the materials that will compose the policy. By delegating to the Executive Branch the definition of the minerals covered, without setting minimum technical parameters - such as quantified economic importance, supply risk, substitutability or supply-chain vulnerability indicators - the bill reproduces the definitional weakness that enfeebles mineral-policy design in Brazil and contrasts with the U.S. and European models described in Section 3.3.

Beyond this baseline conceptual limitation, the technical analysis by the Instituto de Estudos Socioeconômicos identified four mechanisms introduced by the substitute bill that warrant close scrutiny in light of the comparative framework built in this paper (Cardoso & Milanez 2026). The first is the creation of the Low-Carbon Mineral Certificate (CMBC), a climate-certification instrument that overlaps with the still-ongoing regulation of the Brazilian Emissions Trading System (SBCE), established by Law 15.042/2024, and which operates on a database self-declared by mining companies - without independent accounting of emissions across the logistics cycle - opening space for institutionalised greenwashing in a sector whose actual emissions tend to be systematically underestimated in voluntary declarations (Milanez, Costa & Wanderley 2024). The second mechanism is the authorisation for the BNDES to allocate a portion of the resources of the National Climate Change Fund (FNMC) to the mineral sector, with a concrete risk of diverting climate resources to subsidise the extraction of raw materials whose final destination may be predominantly external to the country - a risk that is not hypothetical, given the recent history of financing for projects with significant social and environmental liabilities documented in the Jequitinhonha Valley (Andrade 2026).

The third mechanism - and the most problematic from the standpoint of long-term mineral sovereignty - is the creation of a special regime for streaming contracts and private mineral royalties. In these instruments, a financing company injects capital into a mining company in exchange for the right to purchase a share of future production at a predefined price, generating contractual restrictions on the eventual domestic destination of the minerals (Cardoso & Milanez 2026). To institute this mechanism in the very legal instrument that purports to establish a national policy on critical and strategic minerals is a deep contradiction: any subsequent public policy seeking to direct these minerals into a domestic industrial chain will encounter, in the previously signed contracts, a legal obstacle difficult to overcome. It amounts to mortgaging sovereignty over the resource at the very moment it is declared to be instituted. The fourth mechanism is the creation of the Mineral Activity Guarantee Fund (FGAM), with an initial federal contribution of up to R$ 2 billion, which socialises the private risk of mineral exploration without industrialisation conditionalities - and which, in the approved version, converted the original provision requiring large companies to invest in mineral science and technology into a mechanism for capitalising a guarantee fund, further reducing the incentive for sectoral technological innovation (Cardoso & Milanez 2026).

Analysis of the provisions on technological densification deepens the critical diagnosis. Article 36 of the substitute bill allows mandatory investments in research and innovation to be applied in mineral exploration and extraction - stages in which Brazil already holds consolidated technical competences - rather than in the industrial phases of higher value added, where lies the technological frontier the country needs to reach. Article 16 exempts from withholding income tax the remittances paid to companies domiciled abroad for the use of trademarks, patents or technology licences, deepening the structural dependence that the literature on resource-based development identifies as one of the main traps of mineral-commodity-producing countries. Article 19 institutes a special customs regime without local-content or technology-transfer conditionalities (Andrade 2026). Taken together, these provisions configure a framework that incentivises the extraction and export of raw minerals without building the productive linkages - backward, forward and fiscal - that Hirschman (1981) identified as conditions for escaping the primary-exporter trap.

At the social and environmental level, Bill 2780/2024 maintains the structural weaknesses of the current mining framework. The provision of licensing priority for projects classified as critical or strategic - a category defined in overly broad terms - introduces a fast-track corridor that may exacerbate territorial conflicts rather than mitigate them. The absence of binding mechanisms for free, prior and informed consultation of Indigenous and traditional communities contravenes ILO Convention 169 and ignores the tensions documented in mineral projects in territories such as Minaçu (GO), Pitinga (AM) and the Jequitinhonha Valley (MG) - cases whose relevance to the critical-minerals debate was underscored in Section 3.6.5 (Figueiredo 2025; Murguía & Obaya 2024). The comparative experience reinforces that social legitimacy is not an externality manageable post hoc but a condition for project viability from their inception.

It is finally worth noting that the 51-article substitute bill was approved in the Chamber without expanded substantive debate or qualified social participation - a condition that compromises the democratic legitimacy of a regulatory framework with long-term consequences for territories, communities, mineral resources and the profile of Brazil’s sovereign insertion into the global economy of the energy transition (Cardoso & Milanez 2026). A state policy on critical minerals built on an accelerated legislative agenda, without systematic public hearings and without consistent dialogue with the geoscientific community, with affected peoples and communities, with organised civil society and with independent experts, reproduces the deficit of collective intelligence that this paper identifies as a central trait of the Brazilian institutional challenge.

3.7 Two Bills, One Crossroads: the Challenge of Institutional Coherence

The coexistence of Bill 1754/2026 and Bill 2780/2024 in the Brazilian legislative debate reveals the scale of the institutional challenge announced by the title of this paper. These are two instruments that depart from partially convergent diagnoses - the strategic centrality of transition minerals for Brazil and the insufficiency of the current regulatory framework - but that arrive at distinct institutional designs that are, on critical points, contradictory. Analysed jointly in light of the comparative framework built in the previous sections, they allow us to identify with greater precision what Brazil needs to build, what it should avoid, and where the opportunities for learning from international experiences lie.

Three convergences structure the common horizon of the two bills. Both recognise that mineral criticality constitutes a problem of state demanding specific regulation, overcoming the perception that general mining legislation is sufficient to confront the contemporary geopolitics of resources. Both identify - even without adequately operationalising the distinction - that there are minerals whose relevance transcends ordinary market logics and demands differentiated treatment by public authority. And both signal that Brazil will need mechanisms combining geological intelligence, industrial policy, legal certainty and state participation in the exploitation of reserves. These convergences are the starting point for a coherent policy; the divergences reveal where the debate is still incomplete.

The divergences, however, are substantive. Bill 1754/2026 proposes the state as direct extractor - through production sharing and the reorganisation of the CPRM into TerraBras - compromising state geological intelligence by subordinating it to extractive operation. Bill 2780/2024 proposes the state as facilitator, with financial instruments (CMBC, Climate Fund, FGAM) and special contractual regimes (streaming), but it compromises long-term mineral sovereignty by mortgaging future production without conditioning benefits on domestic industrialisation. Two models, two symmetrical weaknesses.

A problematic point of convergence warrants particular attention: both bills replicate the conflation between critical minerals and strategic minerals, identified in Section 3.2 as a central weakness of Brazilian mineral policy. Neither establishes a verifiable methodology for the periodic assessment of criticality - an absence that contrasts with the U.S. model, which bases the classification on economic modelling of trade disruption with explicit criteria and regular updates (Nassar et al. 2025), and with the European model, which operates on two transparent quantitative axes with a clearly delimited strategic subset (European Union 2024). Without such a methodology, any list of critical or strategic minerals published by the Executive Branch will remain technically fragile and politically vulnerable, subject to sectoral pressures and electoral cycles rather than anchored in systematised geological intelligence and transparent risk assessment.

The question of the Geological Survey of Brazil cuts across both bills in asymmetric fashion. Bill 1754/2026 places it at the centre of its architecture and commits the categorical error of proposing the conversion of the CPRM into a mining company, contradicting the institutional pattern of all the jurisdictions compared (Table 4). Bill 2780/2024, in turn, creates the Special Council on Critical and Strategic Minerals as a governance instance, but it does not strengthen the Geological Survey of Brazil as the technical unit of mineral intelligence, nor does it assign it an explicit role in the periodic definition of the list of minerals - a function that, in every jurisdiction analysed in Section 3.3, is exercised by the respective national geological survey. The omission of Bill 2780/2024 is, in this sense, complementarily problematic to the error of Bill 1754/2026: one establishes for the geological survey a function incompatible with its institutional mission; the other simply does not include it in the governance architecture of the national policy.

The integrated reading of the two bills points to what a coherent institutional architecture would need to combine: the normative framework of national policy that Bill 2780/2024 sketches, purged of the financialisation mechanisms that compromise long-term sovereignty; the state participation in the value chain that Bill 1754/2026 pursues, but in a public vehicle separate from the Geological Survey; a national system for the periodic assessment of criticality, conducted by the Geological Survey of Brazil with strengthened analytical capacity; and robust social and environmental safeguards, with binding prior consultation and traceability of the final use of the minerals. This architecture requires correcting and articulating the two bills, anchoring them in a criticality methodology that Brazil has not yet built - and that Section 4 develops as the central imperative.

4 Conclusions

The integrative review presented in this paper allows seven main conclusions to be formulated. They synthesise the comparative analytical framework built in Sections 3.1 to 3.5 and the examination of the Brazilian legislative debate around Bill 1754/2026 and Bill 2780/2024 developed in Sections 3.6 and 3.7, offering an integrated diagnosis of the institutional challenge identified in the title of this paper.

Mineral criticality is a relational construct, dependent on the observed system, the temporal horizon and the indicators mobilised; it is not an essential and immutable property of the mineral (Erdmann & Graedel 2011; Graedel et al. 2012; Schrijvers et al. 2020). The distinction between critical and strategic minerals is substantive: the first category answers the question of vulnerability and bottleneck, the second introduces national project, industrial ambition and geopolitical intentionality (Andersson 2020; European Union 2024; Australian Government 2024). Producing countries that uncritically adopt lists formulated by consuming economies incorporate, with the category, a hierarchy of priorities calibrated for those on the other side of the chain - an observation that remains without adequate response in the two bills analysed.

There is no single standard for calculating criticality. The United States has moved towards a sophisticated economic modelling of trade disruption; the European Union operates with two transparent quantitative axes and a strategic subset; China combines a state catalogue, differentiated management and multi-criteria models without a single public formula; Australia employs qualitative screening and parallel lists to differentiate vulnerability from opportunity (Nassar et al. 2025; European Commission 2023; NDRC 2016; Australian Government 2024). Contemporary mineral geopolitics is a dispute over supply chains, refining, technology and state coordination, more than a race for deposits (OECD 2025a, 2025b; IEA 2024).

In every jurisdiction analysed, the function of intelligence over mineral resources - mapping, modelling, classifying, updating and informing public policy - is exercised by the respective national geological survey, in arrangements that separate this work from extractive operation. This institutional pattern constitutes the cognitive infrastructure of critical-mineral policy and cannot be treated as a marginal variable.

Brazil and Latin America face both a historical opportunity and a structural risk. The opportunity lies in using mineral centrality to promote industrial upgrading, research, processing, recycling and greater technological autonomy. The risk lies in deepening the condition of an extractive platform of low processing, with high territorial pressure and limited value capture. In analytical and normative terms, the decisive question is no longer whether the region is important for the energy transition, but under which institutional, productive and territorial conditions this importance can be converted into sustainable development and economic sovereignty.

The integrated examination of Bill 1754/2026 and Bill 2780/2024 reveals that Brazil now has, before it, two bills that recognise the problem without resolving it coherently. Bill 2780/2024 represents a normative advance by proposing the establishment of a National Policy on Critical and Strategic Minerals, with comprehensive framework and more advanced legislative progress. However, it reproduces the conceptual conflation between the two categories, establishes no verifiable methodology for criticality assessment, does not strengthen the Geological Survey of Brazil as the technical unit of mineral intelligence, and introduces mechanisms - streaming contracts, unrestricted access to the Climate Fund, a Low-Carbon Mineral Certificate without an independent database, a Guarantee Fund without industrialisation conditionalities - that compromise long-term mineral sovereignty and deepen Brazil’s subordinated insertion into global chains (Cardoso & Milanez 2026; Andrade 2026). Bill 1754/2026, in turn, contains a legitimate ambition of sovereignty but commits a categorical error in proposing the conversion of the CPRM into a mining company: it subordinates the function of geological intelligence to the extractive function, contradicts the institutional design adopted in every reference jurisdiction, and weakens the analytical capacity that the Brazilian state itself will need in order to implement a coherent critical-minerals policy.

A coherent institutional architecture would require combining what the two bills do not deliver in isolation: the normative framework of national policy from Bill 2780/2024, corrected to eliminate the financialisation mechanisms that mortgage future sovereignty; the state participation in the value chain that Bill 1754/2026 seeks, but in a public vehicle institutionally separate from the Geological Survey; a national system for the periodic assessment of criticality, conducted by a strengthened Geological Survey of Brazil as the technical unit of mineral intelligence; domestic industrialisation conditionalities tied to the incentives granted; and robust social and environmental safeguards, with binding prior consultation and traceability of the final use. This path is more aligned with the comparative literature and more coherent with the position of a producing country with a diversified geological base that aspires to convert its mineral endowment into industrial, technological and sovereign capacity - without incurring a new round of subordinated re-primarisation (Prebisch 1950; Furtado 1961; Hirschman 1981).

As a research agenda, five lines of future research articulated from the Brazilian geosciences are proposed: (i) the construction of a national methodology for criticality assessment, anchored in the Geological Survey of Brazil and articulated with the ANM and the CNPM, adapted to the country’s productive and geological profile and with a prospective horizon equivalent to that adopted in the reference jurisdictions; (ii) empirical studies on the value chains of specific minerals of national relevance, with emphasis on niobium, graphite, rare earths and lithium; (iii) research on territorial governance in areas of strategic mining, with the participation of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities; (iv) the opening of a research line on the recycling and urban mining of critical elements in the Brazilian context; and (v) comparative analysis of the emerging legislative architectures on critical minerals in Latin America, examining the interactions and complementarities among national regulatory frameworks and the opportunities for regional coordination. These lines situate the theme of critical minerals within the broader horizon of the country’s science, technology, industry, environment and sovereignty policies.

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Data availability statement

All data included in this study are publicly available in the literature.

Funding information

Not applicable.

E-mails:

[e-mail]; [e-mail]

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Editors-in-chief

Dr. Claudine Dereczynski

Dr. Fernanda Cerqueira Vasconcellos

Associate Editor

Dr. Gerson Cardoso da Silva Jr.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  14 Aug 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  06 May 2026
• Accepted
  01 June 2026