The Trump administration killed MSP. That’s the headline nobody wants to lead with, but it’s the reality shaping your 2026 project financing decisions right now.
The Minerals Security Partnership: Biden’s flagship critical minerals framework: has been replaced by FORGE (Framework for Resilient, Global, and Equitable Trade). Not reformed. Not rebranded. Replaced.
If you’re evaluating financing options for a lithium, cobalt, or rare earths project this year, you’re choosing between a framework that no longer exists and one that’s barely four months old. That’s not a comfortable position. But it’s where we are.
What FORGE Actually Is
FORGE isn’t a funding vehicle. It’s a preferential trade zone spanning 54 countries, built around price stabilization rather than capital deployment.
The core mechanism: reference prices at each stage of the critical minerals value chain: mining, processing, refining. These aren’t market prices. They’re administratively set benchmarks enforced through adjustable tariffs designed to counter Chinese price dumping.
South Korea chairs the framework through June 2026. That’s not random. Seoul has spent the last decade building domestic battery supply chains and understands the difference between theoretical trade agreements and functional industrial policy.
Membership is conditioned on adherence to shared trade rules. You don’t pool capital. You don’t commit to joint ventures. You participate in a plurilateral market framework that keeps bilateral investments bilateral while creating pricing guardrails across the network.
The strategic calculus here isn’t subtle: Washington wants to prevent Beijing from flooding markets with below-cost materials to kill Western competition, without requiring U.S. taxpayers to fund every critical minerals project from Australia to Argentina.
MSP: What We’re Leaving Behind
The Minerals Security Partnership was fundamentally different in structure and ambition. Launched in 2022, it focused on coordinating investment across member countries to secure supply chains for battery metals, rare earths, and other strategic materials.
But the search results don’t provide detailed operational specifications about MSP’s financing terms. That’s telling.
What we know: MSP emphasized multilateral coordination, joint capital deployment in some cases, and alignment with ESG standards that FORGE explicitly doesn’t prioritize. The framework involved 14 partner countries and aimed to diversify supply chains away from Chinese dominance through collaborative investment.
What we don’t know: specific pricing mechanisms, capital commitments per project, or binding enforcement provisions. That opacity made MSP difficult to evaluate against traditional project finance structures.
And now it’s gone.
The Price Stabilization Play
FORGE’s reference pricing model matters more than most project developers realize.
If you’re advancing a spodumene project in Western Australia, traditional offtake agreements expose you to spot price volatility. Lithium carbonate prices swung from $85,000/tonne in late 2022 to under $13,000/tonne by late 2023. That’s an 85% drawdown that kills IRRs and terrifies lenders.
FORGE’s reference prices create a floor and ceiling. The exact benchmarks aren’t public yet: South Korea is hammering out the first-year pricing structure now: but the mechanism adjusts tariffs on imports from non-FORGE countries when prices deviate significantly from reference levels.
Translation: if Chinese producers flood markets with lithium at $8,000/tonne to undercut your project, tariffs rise to protect FORGE-aligned production. If prices spike to $100,000/tonne due to supply constraints, tariffs fall to moderate consumer costs.
You’re not getting price guarantees. You’re getting price bands. That’s vastly different from traditional market exposure, but it’s also not the fixed-price offtakes that some projects need to reach FID.
Project Vault: The Complementary Tool
FORGE operates alongside Project Vault, which is closer to traditional project finance.
Project Vault deploys $10 billion in EXIM Bank financing plus $2 billion in private capital through long-term purchase commitments at fixed prices. That’s supply security through guaranteed offtake, not trade policy.
If your project needs:
- Bankable offtake agreements to secure senior debt
- Price certainty for equity investors who can’t tolerate commodity risk
- U.S. government counterparty exposure you can take to rating agencies
Then Project Vault is probably more relevant than FORGE membership.
But here’s the complication: Project Vault capacity is finite. $12 billion total, spread across multiple commodities and dozens of projects globally. First-come, first-served doesn’t formally apply, but pragmatically, projects reaching advanced stages in 2026 have better access than those still in feasibility studies.
FORGE, by contrast, doesn’t have capacity constraints. Membership is open to any project operating in the 54 partner countries that meets trade compliance requirements.
Decision Framework for 2026 Projects
The choice between leveraging FORGE or pursuing MSP-era strategies (which now means bilateral deals outside any framework) depends on five variables:
1. Jurisdiction
If your project sits in one of FORGE’s 54 member countries, you automatically benefit from preferential tariff treatment when exporting to other members. That’s non-trivial for Australian lithium, Chilean copper, or Canadian rare earths destined for U.S. or European markets.
If you’re operating outside the FORGE network: say, in the Democratic Republic of Congo for cobalt: you face the tariff headwinds FORGE was designed to create. That doesn’t kill projects, but it changes your netback pricing assumptions.
2. Price Sensitivity
High-cost projects operating near the top of the cost curve benefit most from FORGE’s price floor protection. If you’re in the second or third quartile of the global cost curve for your commodity, reference pricing reduces downside risk during price corrections.
Low-cost projects in the first quartile may prefer full market exposure to capture upside during supply crunches. FORGE’s price ceiling mechanisms limit your ability to monetize scarcity premiums.
3. Financing Requirements
Projects that need bankable offtake agreements to reach FID should prioritize Project Vault or traditional streaming/prepay structures over FORGE membership. Trade preferences don’t satisfy debt covenants.
Projects with sufficient equity backing or government support that can tolerate commodity price exposure may find FORGE’s tariff protection adequate without fixed-price contracts.
4. Counterparty Preference
FORGE creates a preferential trading network, but it doesn’t specify end-buyers. Your offtake counterparties still determine pricing within the reference bands.
If your target customers are Chinese battery manufacturers or processors, FORGE membership may complicate rather than simplify commercial relationships. Beijing isn’t participating in the framework and has already announced retaliatory measures on certain materials.
5. Timeline
FORGE is four months old. Reference prices are still being finalized. Enforcement mechanisms are untested. If you need financing certainty in Q2 or Q3 2026, betting your capital structure on an unproven framework carries execution risk.
MSP may be defunct, but the bilateral relationships it fostered: between Australia and the U.S., between Canada and Japan: remain operational. Those country-to-country investment partnerships may provide more near-term certainty than FORGE’s multilateral structure.
What’s Actually Better
There’s no universal answer. FORGE is better if you’re operating in a member country, producing commodities vulnerable to Chinese dumping, and have financing sources that don’t require fixed-price offtakes.
Traditional bilateral arrangements (the remnants of MSP-era thinking) are better if you need bankable contracts now, operate outside FORGE’s geographic scope, or target Asian markets that view the framework as protectionist.
Project Vault is better if you need U.S. government-backed offtake to close your financing gap and can compete for limited allocation slots.
Most sophisticated projects will use multiple tools. FORGE membership for tariff protection. Project Vault offtake for a portion of production to satisfy lenders. Bilateral commercial agreements for the balance.
The luxury of choosing one framework and ignoring the rest disappeared with MSP. Welcome to 2026, where critical minerals financing requires navigating overlapping, partially contradictory policy frameworks while Chinese producers still control 70-80% of global processing capacity.
The strategic question isn’t which framework is “better.” It’s which combination of tools gets your specific project to FID, and whether you can execute that strategy before reference prices, tariff schedules, and allocation priorities shift again in 12-18 months.
That’s the uncomfortable reality. The frameworks are moving faster than project timelines. And there’s no guarantee the rules in place when you reach FID will still apply when you start production.
