LONDON — The U.K. will break China’s stranglehold over crucial net zero supply chains, Energy Minister Chris McDonald has pledged.

McDonald, a joint minister at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the Department for Business and Trade, told POLITICO he is determined to bolster domestic access to critical minerals.

Critical minerals like lithium and copper are used in essential net-zero technologies such as electric vehicles and batteries, as well as defense assets like F35 fighter jets.

China currently controls 90 percent of rare earth refining, according to a government critical minerals strategy published last week.

McDonald said China’s dominance of mineral processing risks driving up prices for the net zero transition.  The U.K. has made a legally-binding pledge to reduce planet-damaging emissions to net zero by 2050.

McDonald fears China has become a “monopoly provider” of critical minerals and that its dominant role in processing allowed China to control the costs for buyers.

“We want to capture this supply chain in the U.K. as part of our industrial strategy. To do that … means, ultimately, we’re going to have to wrest control of critical minerals back into a broad group of countries, not just China,” he said.

The government’s critical minerals strategy includes a target that no more than 60 percent of U.K. annual demand for critical minerals in aggregate is supplied by any one country by 2035 — including China.

“So, if there is an investment from China that helps with that, then that’s great. And if it doesn’t help with that, or it sort of compounds that issue that isn’t consistent with our strategy, then we judge it on that basis ultimately,” McDonald said.

Additional reporting by Graham Lanktree.