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The U.S. Export-Import Bank will invest $100 billion to achieve President Trump’s plan for global energy dominance, with a first tranche of deals involving projects in Egypt, Pakistan and Europe, its new chairman said.
John Jovanovic, who was appointed in September, told the Financial Times that the government agency would fund efforts to secure U.S. and related supply chains for critical minerals, nuclear power and liquefied natural gas to counter Western dependence on China and Russia.
Ex-Im Bank was “back in a big way and open for business,” Jovanovic said in his first interview after taking the helm of the bank.
The focus would be on bringing “American energy molecules to all corners of the world” and addressing the West’s over-reliance on crucial mineral supply chains that are “no longer fair,” he said.
“We can’t do anything other than what we’re trying to do without these underlying critical commodity supply chains being safe, stable and functioning.”
Ex-Im is one of several U.S. government agencies tasked by the White House with supporting energy and minerals projects in an effort to grow domestic industry and strengthen Western supply chains.
The vulnerability of raw material flows has been brought into sharp relief by China’s imposition this year of export restrictions on rare earth metals and magnets, and by the energy crisis in Europe following Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Jovanovic said Ex-Im’s early deals would include a credit insurance guarantee for $4 billion of natural gas supplied to Egypt by New York-based commodities group Hartree Partners, and a $1.25 billion loan for the giant Reko Diq copper and gold mine being developed by Barrick Mining in Pakistan.
The bank said it had approved $8.7 billion in new transactions in the 12 months to the end of September. This does not include a $4.7 billion loan reapproved in March to support an LNG project in Mozambique led by France’s TotalEnergies.
Jovanovic said Ex-Im still had $100 billion left to deploy out of the $135 billion approved by Congress.
Ex-Im was “inundated” with requests for support for LNG projects from Europe, Africa and Asia, and a series of multi-billion-dollar LNG supply deals would be announced in the coming days, he said.
While some development banks have climate change-related mandates that prevent them from investing in fossil fuel projects, Ex-Im cannot rule them out. Jovanovic said American LNG would be a “stabilizing factor in providing energy security to parts of the world that need it most.”
Ex-Im’s increased focus on supporting LNG exports and energy security marks a shift in emphasis for the bank, which had expanded support for renewable energy under former President Joe Biden. Last year it supported $1.6 billion in green energy projects, a 74 percent increase compared to 2023.
Nuclear energy will be a focus under the bank’s new leadership. Ex-Im was “active in discussions” about several nuclear projects in southeastern Europe in which American companies such as Westinghouse wanted to invest, Jovanovic said. It also wants to support mining projects for uranium – used to make nuclear fuel – whose flows have increasingly moved to China and Russia.
The White House has emphasized the importance of breaking dependence on China for metals including copper, which is widely used in infrastructure projects, and rare earth metals, which go to the defense, energy and technology sectors.
Ex-Im planned to finance critical minerals projects “on a large scale” and was working on deals that were “very close to the finish line,” Jovanovic said. Much of what was in the pipeline was “orders of magnitude larger” than the $1.25 billion Reko Diq loan, he said.
The White House signed a mineral supply deal with Australia in October and was working on similar deals with other countries that Ex-Im was “ready to be a part of,” he added.
Last year, Ex-Im provided $5.9 billion in medium- to long-term export credit support, up from $4.7 billion in 2023. That puts it seventh behind the world’s largest export credit agencies, with China ($23.5 billion) and Germany ($18.6 billion) taking the top two spots, according to Ex-Im’s annual competitiveness report.
The report, published in June, warned that Ex-Im was being outpaced by rival export credit agencies, with James Cruse, then acting chairman of Ex-Im, writing: “Ex-Im is leading a 20th century [export credit agency] now in the first quarter of the 21st century.”
