Resources

Brazil holds a large rare-earth endowment and, since 2024, a commercial upstream operation, yet geological abundance has not translated into secure access to separated oxides, metals and magnets. This study examines how far Brazilian rare-earth capability extends along the value chain and why. We combine official mineral and trade statistics, facility disclosures, policy documents and peer-reviewed literature to score seven stages annually from 2015 to 2026 against explicit decision rules, distinguishing technological from commercial maturity and measuring how many consecutive stages from extraction operate at each level. Commercial capability now covers mining, beneficiation and the production of a mixed chemical intermediate, while separation, metallisation, magnet manufacture and circular recovery remain at research or pilot level. The record also reveals a discontinuity: pilot separation capacity documented in the mid-2010s was not sustained. Part of the recent downstream progress is disconnected from domestic feed, and the main commercial operation has been integrated into a foreign mine-to-magnet chain. We describe this configuration as a downstreaming paradox. For resource-rich economies, the findings indicate that resilience depends on connecting conversion stages in sequence, selectively and subject to explicit environmental safeguards that should be independently assessed before scale-up, rather than on extraction alone.

This study proposes the concept of Co-exploration as a diversification strategy that enables oil and gas (O&G) companies to leverage their geoscientific capabilities to jointly assess multiple resources, such as geothermal energy, natural hydrogen, lithium in brines, geological storage, and deep-sea mining. Those resources share a reliance on traditional upstream capabilities, including geological mapping, geophysical data acquisition and interpretation, reservoir characterization, modeling techniques, risk analysis, drilling, operations in remote environments, and the management of complex projects. A compatibility matrix was developed to summarize how well these alternatives fit a Co-exploration strategy. Alternatives such as CCS and CO₂-EOR stand out for their technical and operational synergies with O&G upstream operations; however, they rely on tax incentives and an immature carbon market. Conversely, geothermal energy (EGS) and lithium production from brines represent more balanced alternatives for a Co-exploration strategy, combining geoscientific synergies, environmental and climate compatibility. Natural hydrogen offers strong strategic alignment but faces low technological maturity and market uncertainties. Finally, deep-sea mining emerges as the least viable alternative, despite its strategic appeal regarding the supply of critical elements. However, applying legacy O&G methods and tools to these alternative resources is not straightforward. Alternative projects can differ from O&G projects in investment scale, time horizons, and risk–return profiles. There are also challenges associated with permitting, resource ownership, environmental and monitoring requirements, long-term liabilities, and social acceptance.

Crop-residue burning in mainland Southeast Asia wastes a bioresource and coincides with the region’s worst air quality. We asked how projected crop-calendar shifts change the overlap between residue burning and stagnant weather by mid-century (2041–2060). Burning windows from harvest to the next planting, validated against satellite cropland fire detections, were projected with 15 bias-corrected CMIP6 models under SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5 and combined with two stagnation indices: calm days and poorly ventilated afternoons. Rice harvests advance by 6–9 days, but the calendar shift changes the share of residue burning on stagnant days by less than 0.5 percentage points in the ensemble mean, whether burning follows the harvest or the next planting, because burning peaks in late February and March, when the frequency of stagnant days changes little from week to week. The shift instead removes one to two dry days from the first month after the rice harvest, when straw is collected. The change in the ventilation climate is larger but uncertain, because models disagree on near-surface wind, and it differs between and within countries. Crop-calendar shifts are therefore unlikely to increase the exposure of residue burning to stagnant conditions.