Cooperação Brasil-Argentina em minerais críticos

China no longer merely purchases Argentine lithium; it is advancing into extraction and processing. Agreements such as CATL’s partnership with YPF in the Salar del Hombre Muerto and Ganfeng’s expanded presence across several Puna projects illustrate a clear strategy of vertical integration (Li, Shapiro & Vecino 2025). Brazil, for its part, controls more than 90 percent of global niobium production, concentrated at the Araxá deposit operated by CBMM, and possesses metallurgical and alloy-processing capacity that Argentina largely lacks. This complementarity is already a material fact, yet it has not translated into a shared industrial strategy capable of retaining added value and reducing external dependence. The intensifying race for these inputs has brought extraregional actors, particularly China, deeper into South American supply chains (Carr-Wilson, Pattanayak & Weinthal 2024; Figueiredo & Sanchez Badin 2026). The practical question is therefore how Brazil and Argentina can organize cooperation that survives political cycles and delivers concrete returns for both sides.

ABACC AS INSTITUTIONAL PRECEDENT

The Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC), established in 1991, remains the strongest institutional precedent available. It demonstrated that the two countries can build technical confidence mechanisms insulated from electoral volatility and ideological divergence. Its resilience rested on institutional insulation from foreign ministries, continuity among technical elites, symmetrical verification, and a shared vital interest in avoiding a nuclear arms race. Those conditions do not map neatly onto critical minerals. The domain is governed by competition for economic rents rather than mutual restraint from catastrophic risk. Brazil already holds a dominant position in niobium and a more diversified industrial base; Argentina’s lithium sector is deeply penetrated by Chinese capital and exposed to greater macroeconomic and institutional volatility. The shared interest that anchored ABACC must therefore be constructed deliberately through tangible economic returns rather than assumed by historical analogy. This recognition has direct implications for institutional design: ambition must be calibrated to the incentive structure that actually exists.

CURRENT STATE OF COOPERATION

Empirically, binational industrial integration remains thin. The most advanced Argentine lithium projects–Cauchari-Olaroz, Pozuelos-Pastos Grandes, and the Mariana project among others–are controlled or strongly influenced by Chinese firms. This pattern has been accelerated by the Régimen de Incentivo para Grandes Inversiones (RIGI), in force since 2024, and by the more recent Súper RIGI, which explicitly targets the industrialization of lithium and uranium rather than mere extraction (El Economista 2026). By early 2026, more than USD 25 billion in committed investment had been approved under RIGI, including the POSCO lithium-chloride complex in Salta (USD 1.5 billion) and the Galán Litio project in Catamarca (USD 700 million), overwhelmingly from Chinese and Western sources rather than regional ones (Pampa Investment Advisory 2026). Brazilian processing capacity has not been systematically paired with Argentine feedstock.

Even established technical partnerships advance unevenly. Negotiations on the next construction phase of Brazil’s Multipurpose Reactor (RMB) and its Argentine counterpart RA-10 were still underway in late 2025, more than a decade after the projects were conceived (Comissão Nacional de Energia Nuclear 2025). The joint SABIA-Mar satellite mission, originally expected years earlier, is now projected for launch only in 2027 (Consortium for Earth Observation Satellites 2025). These delays illustrate the practical difficulty of sustaining multi-year technical projects across desynchronized political and budgetary cycles on both sides of the border.

STRUCTURAL CONSTRAINTS

Any serious proposal for strategic cooperation in critical minerals must confront a set of structural obstacles that are not merely circumstantial but reflect durable features of both economies and political systems. These constraints do not make cooperation impossible, but they impose clear design requirements and help explain why a gradual pathway is more realistic than an immediate institutional leap.

The first and most evident obstacle is economic and industrial asymmetry. Brazil possesses a larger industrial base, superior technological capacity in several strategic sectors (aerospace, defense, and mineral processing), and a substantially larger domestic market. This asymmetry is already visible even in the most mature area of bilateral technical cooperation. The binational nuclear reactor program offers a useful illustration: Brazil’s Reator Multipropósito Brasileiro (RMB) and Argentina’s RA-10 are both based on the same Australian OPAL design and involve technical cooperation between CNEN and INVAP, yet contractual negotiations for the next construction phase of the RMB were still ongoing in late 2025, more than a decade after the projects were launched (Comissão Nacional de Energia Nuclear 2025). The pattern is one of uneven and slow progress even under relatively favorable institutional conditions.

A second obstacle is the persistent preference of economic elites in both countries for global rather than regional value chains. The dominance of Ganfeng Lithium and of CATL through its agreement with YPF in Argentina’s most advanced lithium projects reflects this pattern directly. Faced with a choice between a slower regional integration project and readily available Chinese capital, offtake agreements, and processing technology, both Argentine project sponsors and, to a lesser extent, Brazilian processing firms have generally chosen the latter. The recently approved Súper RIGI, with its explicit focus on lithium and uranium industrialization, could in principle alter this calculus by making local and potentially regional value addition more commercially attractive (El Economista 2026). However, the regime remains very recent, its implementing regulations are not yet fully defined, and it has so far continued to attract predominantly extraregional capital (Pampa Investment Advisory 2026). The structural preference for global partners therefore remains largely intact.

A third obstacle is the structural need for external capital and technology. Neither Brazil nor Argentina currently possesses, on its own, the full financial and technological package required to develop critical-mineral extraction and processing at the scale demanded by global energy-transition demand. The success of RIGI in attracting more than USD 25 billion in committed investment by early 2026–overwhelmingly from Chinese and Western rather than regional sources–illustrates the gravitational pull of extraregional capital even when adjacent regional complementarities exist on paper (Pampa Investment Advisory 2026). Any binational mechanism that ignores this reality and assumes that political will alone can redirect capital flows is likely to remain underfunded.

A fourth obstacle is Argentina’s institutional volatility and the desynchronization of political cycles between the two countries. Frequent shifts in Argentine economic and regulatory policy discourage long-term Brazilian commitments. The SABIA-Mar satellite mission provides a clear illustration: jointly developed by CONAE and AEB to monitor the South Atlantic, it was originally expected to fly years earlier and is now projected for launch only in 2027, with repeated delays attributable in large part to shifting budgetary and political priorities on both sides (Consortium for Earth Observation Satellites 2025). A long-horizon scientific and technological project of direct relevance to seabed governance has itself struggled to maintain a stable schedule. This experience should temper expectations for any new critical-minerals institution that lacks strong continuity mechanisms.

Finally, there is a real risk of de facto Brazilian dominance in any binational structure, given the asymmetry in administrative and economic capacity. This concern is a recurring theme in Argentine assessments of regional integration projects and cannot be wished away. It would need to be addressed explicitly through decision-making rules, financing formulas, and benefit-sharing arrangements rather than assumed to dissolve through goodwill. Taken together, these five constraints indicate that any proposed mechanism must be designed not only as a confidence-building instrument modeled on ABACC, but explicitly as a vehicle for creating and distributing tangible economic value. Trust alone, without material stakes for both parties, is unlikely to survive the political and economic turbulence either country can be expected to experience over the coming decade.

A GRADUAL PATHWAY

These constraints counsel a gradual pathway. An immediate leap to a new binational agency would confront the same political and economic headwinds that have slowed existing projects such as RMB/RA-10 and SABIA-Mar. A more feasible sequence begins with low-stakes technical cooperation capable of generating early, measurable value and thereby building constituencies–among technical agencies, economic actors, and political elites–for deeper collaboration. Early tangible results also reduce the political cost of sustaining cooperation when bilateral relations at the presidential level are strained. In short, the mechanism must earn its own survival rather than relying on political goodwill alone.

In the near term, the two governments could establish joint technical working groups focused on mineral traceability and certification standards for lithium and niobium. These groups could build on existing OECD Due Diligence Guidance and industry frameworks already familiar to international buyers. Pilot adoption by a limited number of voluntary projects in each country would test whether a common certificate reduces compliance costs and improves market access. Parallel regulatory coordination on environmental and social performance standards would create practical interoperability without requiring the creation of new formal institutions. Success at this stage would be measured by concrete indicators: adoption of a shared certificate by at least one major offtaker, or measurable reductions in due-diligence costs for participating firms.

A second phase could focus on joint financing and offtake arrangements deliberately structured to qualify under Argentina’s RIGI and Súper RIGI frameworks. Projects that combine Argentine lithium feedstock with Brazilian processing technology, metallurgical expertise, or capital would deliver local value addition and create material stakes for both sides. Aligning binational initiatives with existing Argentine industrial-policy incentives, rather than asking Buenos Aires to choose between them, substantially improves political feasibility. Concrete success metrics remain essential: a pilot refining or battery-precursor facility that ships product, or a financing vehicle that reaches financial close within a defined window. Only after such pilots demonstrate that cooperation can generate returns neither government can easily replicate alone would a more formalized binational mechanism become politically and economically credible.

At that later stage, a dedicated technical body with multi-year mandates, balanced decision-making rules, and a modest joint budget could be considered. Until then, the South Atlantic dimension offers a particularly suitable domain for early technical collaboration. The Rio Grande Rise, an oceanic plateau roughly 1,500 km off the coast of Rio Grande do Sul, hosts cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts containing nickel, manganese, and rare earth elements (Jovane et al. 2026). Significant scientific uncertainty remains regarding crust thickness, spatial distribution, and the ecological baseline of the area. Japan’s multi-year experience with rare-earth-bearing muds at extreme depth confirms that technical feasibility does not equal near-term commercial viability: extraction efficiency remains low, separation and refining require more than two hundred processing steps, and full-scale demonstration is still years away (Nakano 2026). Joint scientific characterization, environmental baseline studies, and coordinated positioning within the International Seabed Authority can therefore proceed at relatively low political cost while cultivating the habits of joint technical governance that later stages would require.

POLICY IMPLICATIONS

Policy recommendations follow this sequencing logic. The immediate priority should be the creation of technical working groups on traceability and certification within the next twelve to eighteen months. Any industrial projects should be designed to align with, rather than compete against, existing Argentine incentive regimes. Once SABIA-Mar becomes operational, joint continental-shelf monitoring and environmental data-sharing can serve as early pilots for coordinated technical operations. Positions in international forums such as the Minerals Security Partnership, the G20, or the International Seabed Authority will carry greater weight once domestic technical cooperation has begun to deliver visible results. Joint, transparent baseline studies of Rio Grande Rise resources should precede any discussion of extraction-oriented governance arrangements. Throughout, the emphasis should remain on generating early units of shared value rather than on institutional form for its own sake.

The Brazil-Argentina alliance has already demonstrated that technical institutions can outlast governments. Whether that capacity can be mobilized for economic rather than existential stakes depends less on institutional ambition than on the early generation of shared value. A gradual pathway that begins with working groups, certification mechanisms, and targeted financing offers a more realistic and politically feasible route than an immediate leap to a new binational agency. ABACC proved that the two countries can build mechanisms that survive political alternation. The open question is whether they will do so again when the stakes are commercial rather than strategic in the classic sense.

References

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Submitted: June 18, 2026

Accepted for publication: August 27, 2026

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