Search Results

Last month, the American Geosciences Institute ran a webinar entitled “Tracking the Global Supply of Critical Materials.” 

Speakers for the event, which discussed “efforts to gather information and develop tools that can be used to ensure a secure national and global supply of mineral resources, and identify and quantifying vulnerabilities in this supply, among others,” included:

• Nedal Nassar, Chief of the Materials Flow Analysis Section at the USGS’s National Minerals Information Center, and
• Vitor Correia, President of the European Federation of Geologists, and coordinator of the EU’s INTRAW project.

If you missed it, the video and supporting documents are now online:

Of particular interest for ARPN followers, Mr. Nassar, who authored a study on the issue of what he and his co-author Prof. Thomas Graedel called “byproduct metals” in 2015,  also highlighted the crucial nature and inter-relationship between Gateway Metals and their Co-Products.

The video and slides serve as a great resource for stakeholders looking to engage in the national policy discourse over the formulation of a federal action plan to implement the recent executive order on critical minerals.

We have barely taken down the Christmas decorations, but stores have their Valentine’s Day merchandise out, and we’re already halfway through January.  It may feel that way, but it’s really not to early to highlight an event coming up in June – Summer will be here before we know it.

So mark your calendars, ladies and gentlemen, for this year’s Resources for Future Generations (RFG2018) conference, to be held in Vancouver, Canada from June 16-21, where several Canadian associations and organizations are partnering with the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) to discuss resource and related sustainability issues.

The speakers’ lineup promises a great event, and includes representatives from academia and industry from all over the world.  Among the speakers hailing from the United States are Yale professor emeritus Thomas Graedel, with whom ARPN followers may be familiar because we have highlighted his work on “companion metals” – or “co-products” as we have referred to them, and Allyson K. Anderson Book, who is executive director of the American Geosciences Institute (AGI), whose forthcoming webinar at the end of January we have also featured. Many others will round out the picture over the course of the four-day event.

The conference, which will “feature a range of innovative and provocative special sessions and events including panels, debates, thematic keynotes, public lectures and events for Early Career professionals,” comes at a critical juncture for North American mineral resource development, as for the first time in decades, the United States has set out to make domestic resource development a policy priority.

Against the backdrop of the release of USGS’s landmark Professional Paper 1802, and the executive order on critical minerals, the event will serve to further the – long overdue – debate on how to responsibly and sustainably harness the resources we’re blessed to have beneath our own soil.

Click here to learn more about the conference.

If you’re one of nearly half of all Americans, you will have already made a few New Year’s resolutions for 2018.   Among the most popular are personal betterment goals like “losing weight,” and “exercising more.”  While we’re all for making personal resolutions, at ARPN, we’re more concerned with the goals our policy makers are [...]

Over the course of the past few months, we have featured two classes of metals and minerals, which we believe deserve more attention than they are currently being awarded.  Expanding on the findings of our 2012 “Gateway Metals and the Foundations of American Technology” report, in which we focused on a group of five “Gateway” metals which [...]