Trump’s Takeover Of Canadian Rare Earths Miners Raises Major Concerns

By Alex Kimani - Oct 13, 2025

• U.S.–China tensions escalate as Beijing expands rare earth export controls.
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• Washington doubles down on critical minerals, with the Trump administration buying stakes in companies like Trilogy Metals, MP Materials, and Lithium Americas.
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• The Trump administration needs to strike more such deals with U.S. miners if the United States is to secure its critical minerals supply and break its heavy dependence on China.

The U.S. stock market plunged by the widest margin in six months on Friday, with the S&P 500 shedding nearly 3% after President Donald Trump threatened “a massive increase of tariffs on Chinese products” due to its continuing strict control of the rare earths market. On Thursday, Beijing announced that it was increasing export controls for five more rare-earth metals, bringing the total number of critical minerals under export control to 12. Under the previous restrictions, Beijing required exporters to apply for a license from the Ministry of Economy and also disclose the final use of materials like dysprosium, gadolinium, scandium, terbium, samarium, yttrium and lutetium, but has now added tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, indium, and molybdenum to that growing list. 

Trade talks between the U.S. and  China have been progressing at a snail’s pace. China has been hardest hit by Trump’s tariffs, with the Middle Kingdom now facing an effective tariff of 64.9%, including an additional 34% duty imposed by former President Trump on top of existing tariffs from previous administrations.

However, not all corners of the stock market are complaining about Trump’s latest tariff tantrum.

Canadian rare earths developer, Trilogy Metals (NYSE:TMQ), rocketed nearly 140% last Monday after the U.S. government purchased a 10% stake in the company with warrants to purchase an additional 7.5% stake.

The Trump administration announced that it will reverse a ban on the construction of the Ambler Road project in Alaska by the Biden administration and will start to reissue the necessary permits to construct the road. The 211-mile road from the Dalton Highway was proposed in a bid to make it easier to access the remote Ambler Mining District, rich in copper, cobalt, germanium, gallium, and other minerals. The Biden administration rejected the initial proposal, citing risks to protected species, including caribou and fish populations. Trilogy has continued its wild run in the current week, with the development-stage company now up more than 1,200% over the past 12 months with a market cap approaching $1 billion.

The Trilogy Metals takeover has raised serious ethical concerns as well as possible conflict of interests,“It is uncommon for a government to have a stake in a domestic company, but it’s even more uncommon for a foreign government,” Richard Leblanc, a professor of governance, law and ethics at York University, told Bloomberg.“To have an outside investor who can have regulatory approval, is that a conflict of interest? It absolutely is a conflict of interest,” he added.

But the Trilogy deal was hardly the first such foray by the Trump administration, with the U.S. Department of Energy having cut a similar deal with Canada’s Lithium Americas (NYSE:LAC) two weeks ago while the Department of Defense bought a stake in Las Vegas, Nevada-based MP Materials (NYSE:MP) in July. The DoD-backed investment package will see the Nevada-based producer build out a fully domestic magnet supply chain and lock in long-term pricing support for neodymium-praseodymium, the critical alloy used in everything from fighter jets to iPhones. 

The MP Materials deal wasn’t just about cash; it’s about control. Under the agreement, the Pentagon will take a 15% equity stake in MP through a $400 million preferred share issuance and secure warrants for additional common stock down the road. The government is also extending a $150 million loan, while JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are syndicating $1 billion in private financing to bring MP’s so-called “10X Facility” online. Construction is already underway, with commissioning slated for 2028. The real deal sweetener is a $110/kg floor price guarantee for NdPr magnets, nearly double today’s spot price of $63. That pricing mechanism, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, creates a bulletproof margin environment for domestic producers and resets the cost basis for long-term buyers across defense, autos, and consumer electronics, according to Reuters. 

MP shares doubled in a matter of days, with the shares now up 530% in the year-to-date and re-rating the entire Western rare earths complex. Shares of other rare companies have enjoyed similar outsized gains: NioCorp Developments (NASDAQ:NB) has rocketed 603% YTD, Ramaco Resources (NASDAQ:METC) has gained 412%, Lynas Rare Earths (OTCPK:LYSCF) has returned 288% while USA Rare Earths (NASDAQ:USAR) has gained 257%.

Maybe rare earths stocks will extend their hot streak after news emerged that Trump could be mulling more investments in critical minerals. According to Mark Chalmers, CEO of Energy Fuels (NYSE:UUUU), the Trump administration needs to strike more such deals with U.S. miners if the United States is to secure its critical minerals supply and break its heavy dependence on China. Chalmers says that multiple investments would lower the risk that comes with depending on just one company. The White House is open to this idea, and is “not ruling out other deals with equity stakes or price floors as we did with MP Materials, but that doesn’t mean every initiative we take would be in the shape of the MP deal,” a Trump administration official told CNBC.

By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com

Canadian Oil Producers Prioritize Buying Over Building

By Tsvetana Paraskova - Oct 13, 2025

• Canada's oil patch is undergoing significant consolidation, with companies preferring to acquire existing operations rather than invest in new, expensive oil sands production.
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• The acquisition battle for MEG Energy, ultimately won by Cenovus Energy, highlights this trend of boosting production and resources through mergers.
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• Despite lower oil prices, Canadian oil sands production is projected to reach record highs in 2025 and continue growing, driven by optimization of existing assets and increased pipeline capacity.
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A two-month-long bidding war in Canada’s oil patch signaled there is another way for a company to boost its production and resources than investing in new oil sands production, which is considered the world’s most expensive source of new oil supply.  

The acquisition saga for MEG Energy appears to have ended after the hostile bidder, MEG’s shareholder Strathcona Resources with a 14% stake, terminated its takeover pursuit on Friday. This followed a sweetened offer by the rival bidder, Cenovus Energy, which earlier last week sweetened its offer for MEG Energy, and MEG’s board accepted it.   

“While Strathcona is disappointed with this outcome, it is pleased that its actions, along with those of its fellow MEG shareholders, delivered something which the MEG Board could not, namely a more equitable transaction with Cenovus which allows MEG shareholders to participate more meaningfully in future upside,” the rejected bidder said. 

Strathcona dropping the takeover pursuit was unexpected for some analysts who had anticipated a sweetened offer from Strathcona, too. 

One of the most contested and unusual M&A battles in Canada’s oil and gas sector may be over, but the companies’ pursuit of additional existing resource base and production is not. 

Consolidation Favored Over New Oil Sands Development

Consolidation has become the key growth driver for bidders who prefer buying existing operations to pouring the same or higher amount of money into new oil sands production, Reuters Breakingviews columnist Robert Cyran argues. 

The breakeven costs for existing oil sands operations are below US$50 per barrel WTI, according to estimates by S&P Global Commodity Insights. 

On the other hand, oil sands remain the most expensive source of new supply, intelligence firm Rystad Energy has estimated. 

New oil sands production breakevens average $57 per barrel, but can go as high as about $75, according to Rystad Energy. 

“One of the greatest misconceptions about oil sands, defined as synthetic crude oil and undiluted bitumen, continues to be the cost of supply,” S&P Global Commodity Insights said in June. 

While new projects need huge upfront expenditures over many years, “that is not the cost structure required to continue to maintain and even optimize existing production,” S&P Global Commodity Insights noted.  

Existing production has much lower breakeven costs than new oil sands supply. That’s why major producers prefer buying developed assets to embarking on costly development of new resources. 

Canadian Producers Are Boosting Output Without New Projects 

Canadian producers are boosting crude production even if they aren’t starting up new projects. The secret sauce appears to be reducing maintenance times and extending maintenance cycles to squeeze more oil and raise efficiencies, Bloomberg reported earlier this year. 

Encouraged by the expanded Trans Mountain pipeline, which increased takeaway capacity from Alberta to the British Columbia coast and to global markets, Canadian producers are raising output even as oil prices have declined this year from last year.  

A new pipeline with a capacity of up to 1 million barrels per day (bpd) proposed by the province of Alberta could also be considered by the federal government as Prime Minister Mark Carney set up a Major Projects Office to back and accelerate critical energy infrastructure to make Canada an energy superpower and diversify its energy exports to reduce dependence on the U.S. market.

Despite lower oil prices, Canada’s oil sands production is expected to reach an annual all-time high of 3.5 million bpd this year, thanks to optimization and efficiency at producing assets, S&P Global Commodity Insights said in June in its latest outlook.

Oil sands volumes are expected to top 3.9 million bpd by 2030, per S&P Global Commodity Insights. The projection for 2030 is 500,000 bpd higher compared to the 2024 production level and is 100,000 bpd – or almost 3% -- higher compared to the previous 10-year outlook. 

M&A Driven by Efficiency and Scale

Riding the growth momentum, major Canadian producers seek to add producing assets via acquisitions. 

“It might not be quite merger mania in Canada’s oil and gas sector this year, but activity has been steady and filled with several headline-grabbing items,” analytics firm RBN Energy said last month. 

Companies are looking to raise the value for shareholders by boosting efficiency in operations and reducing operating costs. They also seek to scale up to compete with both domestic and international rivals, RBN Energy said.  

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

 

The AI Race Sparks Unprecedented Demand for Gas Turbines

By Irina Slav - Oct 13, 2025

• The rapid growth of AI and data centers is causing a significant increase in demand for electricity, leading to a global shortage of gas turbines needed for new power generation capacity.
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• Despite the urgent need, many gas turbine manufacturers are cautious about dramatically increasing production due to past experiences where oversupply led to market crashes, and the long lead times for building these precision machines.
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• The imbalance between supply and demand is driving up costs and extending wait times for new gas-fired power plants globally, highlighting a critical challenge in meeting the energy requirements of the expanding AI industry.

There are not enough gas turbines being manufactured in the world right now. The message has been flashing on and off in the media for months now as the AI race drives demand for electricity sharply higher and, with it, demand for new generation capacity. Despite the spike, however, not all gas turbine makers are in a rush to go all in on the AI hype. They’ve been burnt before.

In September, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that there were 114 GW of new natural gas generation capacity under construction and in pre-construction in the country. This amount represented a more than twofold increase over last year and came in response to the mad dash to build data centers to handle the growing demand for artificial intelligence. But there is a problem: the supply of gas turbines for those power plants is falling far behind demand.

Bloomberg was one of the publications warning about a turbine shortage earlier this year. The outlet reported that some data center operators, notably Stargate, were deploying single-cycle gas turbines to secure generation for their facilities in the absence of enough combined-cycle turbines being manufactured fast enough.

“There is a high level of urgency in the industry to get power fast,” a senior executive from Crusoe, the company that is building the first Stargate project, told Bloomberg. “We have tried to be creative about the energy component of data centers.”

However creative one might try to get, there is a limited pool of options. And turbines take a long time to be built because they are precision machines, and building precision machines cannot be rushed. What compounds the supply problem is the fact that data center operators are not the only ones in need of more gas turbines. Gas, for all the bad rap it has been getting from climate activists, is what the developing world is replacing coal with, so that growth in demand for turbines is a global trend.

Transition advocacy outlet the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis recently reported that the imbalance between supply and demand for gas turbines was driving costs for new gas-fired power plants higher in Vietnam and the Philippines and extending wait times to seven or even eight years. The outlet recommended “the rapid expansion of low-cost renewables and storage”, which “could ultimately limit the long-term role for gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG).”

The problem is, they can’t. If they could, data center operators would be causing a shortage of solar panels and inverters. Instead, the shortage is looming in gas turbines because there is one fundamental difference between wind/solar and gas: the latter generates dispatchable electricity, and that is the kind that data center operators need.

In such a context, turbine makers should be rushing to boost their production capacity, or so some would assume. Yet that is not what they are doing—at least not all of them. “How do we manage what’s real, what’s not?” the chief executive of Mitsubishi Power Americas, Bill Newsom, said recently, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal, expressing concern that all the bombastic forecasts about AI and the related electricity demand surge may turn out to be wrong.

It has happened before, the Wall Street Journal noted in its report. About 20 years ago, gas turbine makers rushed to boost output in expectations that the internet would drive a surge in electricity demand. That surge never materialized, sinking some manufacturers and leaving others with surplus capacity. What makes things even more uncertain is the possibility that it would only take one manufacturer to boost capacity to tank prices for everyone, even with all the bombastic demand forecasts.

“If nobody increases their output, prices will stay really high. If one person raises their output, it could crash the prices for everybody,” Enverus’s director of energy transition research, Ryan Luther, told the Wall Street Journal.

Yet this may be too cautious an outlook. According to Bloomberg, some $400 billion worth of new gas-fired generation capacity could face delays or even cancellation because of the shortage in gas turbines. This does not, on the face of it, sound like a situation where one manufacturer raising capacity could tank prices for all the rest of them. Indeed, one turbine major is trying to ramp up capacity, and it has not tanked prices—because the ramp-up will take a while.

The major trying to boost capacity is Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, one of the three companies dominating the global gas turbine market alongside Siemens and GE Vernova. “It’s not so easy to ramp up,” Joern Schmuecker, a vice president at Siemens Energy told Bloomberg in an interview earlier this month. “The whole supply chain is struggling to also keep pace.”

Challenging as this may be for Big Tech and adjacent industries, the time factor could provide the ultimate test of how serious the world is about AI and whether reality would live up to the hype or not.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com 

 

Chickening out – why some birds fear novelty

Major new study discovers diet and migratory behaviour shape neophobia

Anglia Ruskin University

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image: 

Blue-fronted Amazon parrot (Amazona aestiva) pictured with the novel object used in the testing.

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Credit: Photo by Jimena Lois-Milevicich

The largest-ever study on neophobia, or fear of novelty, has discovered the key reasons why some bird species are more fearful of new things than others.

Published in the journal PLOS Biology, the global multi-species study was led by Dr Rachael Miller while at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) and the University of Cambridge – with ARU funding the publication of the research – alongside a core leadership team from the ManyBirds Project.

Neophobia plays a crucial role in how animals balance risk and opportunity. While caution can protect individuals from potential threats, it can also limit their ability to adapt to new nesting sites, foods or changes in the environment.

The research involved 129 collaborators from 82 institutions. Testing, and other associated research tasks, took place in 24 countries across six continents – including lab, field and zoo sites – and investigated why some birds are more cautious than others when encountering unfamiliar objects when feeding.

Using standardised methods, in separate tests each bird was presented with familiar, desirable food items, both alone and alongside a novel object. The novel objects were designed with consistent colours and textures, and scaled proportionally to the size of each species.

Researchers then measured the time taken to touch the food in both scenarios, with increased hesitation in the presence of the object interpreted as neophobia.

Grebes and flamingos exhibited the highest neophobia while falcons and pheasants were among the least neophobic species, approaching food quickly regardless of the unfamiliar item.

Overall, across all 1,439 birds and 136 species tested – representing 25 taxonomic orders from penguins to parrots – the study found that two ecological drivers strongly predicted neophobia: dietary specialisation and migratory behaviour.

Species with narrower diets may experience fewer variations in environmental stimuli and therefore may perceive changes as being more threatening than feeding generalists, which are typically faster to explore and exploit different food types.

Migratory species may face increased risks associated with interacting with a wide range of potentially dangerous novel items and environments, and neophobia may be evolutionary beneficial for these species.

Individuals typically behaved consistently in their responses over time – a bird that was hesitant to approach novelty in one trial was similarly hesitant when tested again several weeks later – suggesting neophobia to be a stable trait.

Birds tested together were more neophobic than those tested alone, which is contrary to expectations that social presence might reduce fear through shared risk. Instead, individuals may be affected by other birds’ fear cues or may wait to allow others to take the risk of approaching first.

Dr Rachael Miller, who carried out the research at Anglia Ruskin University alongside Dr Julia Mackenzie, currently has roles at both the University of Cambridge and the University of Exeter. Dr Miller said: “Neophobia comes with benefits and costs. Neophobic responses can protect an individual from potential risks, but may also decrease opportunities to exploit novel resources, such as unknown food or nesting sites.

“Neophobia plays an important role in assessing how species might respond to change. Species that are more wary of unfamiliar objects or situations may struggle to adapt to factors such as climate change or urbanisation, while those with lower neophobia may be more flexible or resilient.

“Our study also highlights the power of big team science. Through the ManyBirds Project, we were able to pool data and expertise from across the globe, helping us to uncover the hidden rules shaping animal behaviour on an evolutionary scale.”

The ManyBirds Project was co-founded by Dr Miller and Dr Megan Lambert in February 2021. Dr Lambert, of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, said: “Our findings have important implications, particularly for species experiencing habitat change or being reintroduced into the wild from captive breeding programmes.

“By better understanding these behavioural tendencies, conservationists can tailor strategies to improve the chances of survival in at-risk species.”

The new research – A large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia – also had significant input from the other members of the ManyBirds Project core leadership team: Dr Vedrana Šlipogor (University of Lausanne), Dr Kai R. Caspar (Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf), Dr Jimena Lois-Milevicich (University of Buenos Aires), Professor Carl Soulsbury (University of Lincoln), Dr Stephan Reber (Lund University) and Professor Claudia Mettke-Hofmann (Liverpool John Moores University).

Caption

Blue-fronted Amazon parrot (Amazona aestiva) pictured with the novel object used in the testing.

Credit

Photo by Jimena Lois-Milevicich

Caption

Southern Ground Hornbill (Bucorvus leadbeateri) pictured with the novel object used in the testing.

Credit

Photo by Jimena Lois-Milevicich

Black-legged Seriema (Chunga burmeisteri) pictured with the novel object used in the testing.

Credit

Photo by Jimena Lois-Milevicich

Journal

PLOS Biology

DOI

10.1371/journal.pbio.3003394 

Article Title

A large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia

Article Publication Date

14-Oct-2025