Why Brazil? Australia is the world's biggest producer of lithium minerals and has the second biggest proven reserves. They're also probably the US's closest ally.
Lithium ion batteries don't use rare earth minerals (which are the lanthanides plus yttrium and scandium [1]). Nickel metal hydride batteries contain some light lanthanides, but these new battery factories are all for lithium ion batteries.
I don't know if Brazil is eager to "team up" with the USA. Famously, places in South America have not been treated very well by the USA gov. I also believe Brazil is very focused on being self-sufficient and not reliant on others, as evidenced by the large taxes imposed on foreign goods and, for example, their use of Ethanol grown and processed in-country. I believe they could take advantage of the mining opportunities, but I don't think the USA will have any special place in line to buy the mined minerals.
We don’t really need a special place in line, right? We’re right here and our economy is biased toward high-value-add applications so we should be a natural partner.
I mean, they might (honestly, reasonably) be inclined to give us an artificially bad place in line, given the fuckery we’ve gotten up to on their continent, but it would probably be a decision to prioritize history and politics over economics. Or they might want to own battery manufacturing as a whole, I’m which case… fine, whatever, it would be nice to manufacture them in the US, but we should be happy with buying from in our general neighborhood.
I would guess it would be something like "X% of minerals must go to battery manufacturing locally" and the target would be to produce at least enough batteries to support any electrification needed in Brazil.
If I were in charge, I would want to keep nearly all of that manufacturing and minerals in-country and export battery cells initially, and later full systems that integrate the battery cells, and as the manufacturing capabilities expand I would start to add tarriffs to battery cell exports but ensure the systems that integrate the cells are able to be exported pretty easily. I would ensure to define the "system" as something more than a few battery cells wired together, it would have to be a fully integrated battery pack for a home or commercial building or a car maybe, or some other product that is similar. I would want to focus on vehicular and grid based energy systems, not consumer products because those batteries should eventually get replaced with supercapacitors and battery tech that is less unstable. I would never export minerals for batteries, though, I would just force companies to invest in manufacturing in Brazil.
heh. the high tafifs were explicitly asked for apple in the early 80s.
brazil had 68k and 8080 clones that were sometimes better than the originals. mostly sold to Soviet bloc countries and yoguslavia.
until they decided to also ship full mac clones instead of only the 68k cpus. the lore says jobs pushed for demands to dept of state, and got that brazil both closed the two cpu clone factories and also added a high eletronics tarif to further make inroads into a viable competition harder. the leverage state dpto used was cutting imports of oranges, from brazil, which was provided by most of the farms from corrupt military-politicians in power at the time.
Raw materials. The mining industry in Peru and Chile is huge. I think drugs were ever really exported from Colombia and maybe Bolivia? But Bolivia also has a huge trove of raw materials.
https://natural-resources.canada.ca/our-natural-resources/mi...