The US Department of Defense intends to create a program to estimate prices and forecast supplies of nickel, cobalt, and other important minerals, a step aimed at increasing market transparency but introducing a new, unknown variable into global metals markets.

The program, which drew little attention after being revealed on a Pentagon website in October, is part of Washington's larger attempts to boost US production of crucial minerals needed in weapons manufacturing and energy transition.

US output trails that of market leader China, in part because attempts to establish new American mines are significantly influenced by commodity price fluctuations. Jervois Global, for example, said last year that it would halt building of an Idaho cobalt project due in part to low market pricing, despite Chinese cobalt miners - financially backed by Beijing - saying they will increase production of the battery metal in a quest for a larger market share.

According to two insiders who were not permitted to talk publicly, an official rubric that Washington uses to estimate how much a certain metal should cost might confound metals markets by generating competing price-determining systems.

Futures markets and pricing agencies have historically installed metals expenses based totally on what buyers are geared up to pay and sellers are willing to accept, deliberating delivery, demand, and other issues.

The Pentagon's effort is overseen by way of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) division, which changed into mounted in response to the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite tv for pc and contributed to the improvement of the Internet and the mRNA vaccination for COVID 19.

Transform prices

Last November, representatives from DARPA's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters outlined the program's objective to potential contractors as follows: "Revolutionize the construction and dissemination of price, supply, and demand predictions and forecasts in critical materials markets."

Pentagon authorities may be able to schedule purchases for national stockpiles by anticipating price fluctuations and figuring out what may be a fair value for a metal, according to one of the people.

According to a Pentagon paper, the 2021 coal price hike resulted in a 200% increase in magnesium costs, which "further increased the opacity of the U.S. critical material supply chain." In addition to coal, magnesium can be generated and is utilized in the manufacture of weapons and missiles.  

It is unclear how mining corporations, their clients, and metals exchanges—all of whom have created the current market structure over hundreds of years—would react to a U.S. government assessment of the price or supply of metals.  

Long-term contracts are used to sell most metals. On markets like the London Metal Exchange (LME), a market of last resort with lower pricing than the physical market, consumers, producers, and traders frequently sell their unwanted metal.