DTI wants to regulate sale of mineral ores

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is pushing for government regulations that will stop the direct sale of mineral ores and instead encourage investments in minerals processing in the country.

“The aspiration of the DTI is to really find it in our regulations to stop direct sale of ore because that’s a depletable resource, and only encourage new entrants if they will invest in processing of the ore into high value-added products,” DTI commercial counselor and special trade representative in Tokyo Dita Angara-Mathay told reporters in a virtual interview.

“And that doesn’t only apply to nickel, but also copper, etc. So we have to move up the value chain,” she said.

Mathay said the DTI wants to convince Japan’s Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. Ltd., which already has operations in the country, to pursue higher value processing of ore in the Philippines.

She said the Japanese firm has two subsidiaries in the country, namely the Coral Bay Nickel Corp., operating in Palawan, and the Taganito HPAL Nickel Corp., operating in Surigao del Norte.

“So there is an environmentally friendly way of processing our nickel ore in those areas, but what we want to really do is to convince them to migrate the processing to even higher value-added stages of the production chain to include, aspirationally, the manufacturing of lithium ion batteries,” Mathay said.

Trade Assistant Secretary Glenn Peñaranda said the DTI has created a working group to study the exact policy move that the agency would push for in attracting investments in the mining sector.

“There’s no final decision yet on what specific policy move that we will do. But definitely, in all opportunities, the Secretary (Alfredo Pascual) strongly promotes our interest to export value-added minerals, especially for the in-demand minerals for battery manufacturing,” he said.

Pascual has been pushing for the shift into the processing of minerals instead of exporting raw ores, given the country’s resources of green metals.

“Mineral processing is crucial given our resources of green metals such as nickel, copper and cobalt. These minerals can be used for downstream industries, such as electric vehicles battery manufacturing, hyperscaler data centers and renewable energy projects,” Pascual said during the recent meeting of the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines.

“The Philippines can be a vital partner for these critical minerals, not as an exporter of raw ores, which is what is happening now, but as a processor and producer of semi-finished and finished products.We have Indonesia as a model,” he said.

Pascual said that pushing for mineral processing falls under the industrial, manufacturing and transport (IMT) cluster.

“Across these IMT subsectors that I have discussed, the common thread is the electronics and electrical parts that are now part of the global value chains,” he said.

Apart from mineral processing, the IMT sector includes industries such as aerospace, electric (EV) vehicle, advanced electronics chips and products, semiconductors and advanced manufacturing technologies.

Pascual earlier called for more investments in the EV sector as part of the DTI’s green metals initiative.

“To join the EV or electric vehicle global value chain, we invite investments in relevant technologies, such as producing and developing pollution reduction and green vehicles, IT in vehicles, and precision metal components of EVs,” Pascual said at the recent Norway-Philippines Energy Conference.

“Together with EV technologies, those related to renewable energy and battery form part of the DTI green metals initiative. This program is anchored on the need for an immediate global transition to clean-energy technologies,” he said

Among the green metals used in cleaner-energy applications are copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth metals.

Citing the World Bank Group, Pascual said the production of these minerals is estimated to increase by nearly 500 percent by 2050 to meet the demand for clean-energy technologies.

In addition, over three billion tons of minerals and metals are estimated to be needed to deploy low-carbon technologies.

“Fortunately, the Philippines is rich in these green metals. We have estimated two billion metric tons of nickel reserves, 1.1 billion metric tons of copper and 260,000 metric tons of cobalt,” Pascual said.