critical minerals

In a recent opinion piece for Politico, Brigadier General John Adams (U.S. Army, ret.) author of “Remaking American Security” and President of Guardian Six Consulting, and Scott Paul, President of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, zero in on the national security implications of our mineral dependencies.

Citing Hellfire missiles and night vision goggles as examples, as well as high-tech magnets required for the manufacture of military-grade vehicles, aircrafts or naval vessels, as examples, the authors point out that we have “serious gaps in our armor,” as the United States’ “security and our ability to develop future battlefield capabilities are dependent on potentially unreliable supplier nations who might not have our best interests at heart in a crisis situation.”

Adams and Paul lament that “we’ve allowed our nation’s defense industrial base – the private companies that make all of our weapons, vehicles, and essential military hardware—to weaken in lockstep with the wider manufacturing sector.” Concluding, they outline some steps they feel should be taken to alleviate the problem, including stockpiling, enforcing and reviewing DoD’s sourcing preferences, strengthening cooperation between government agencies and the private sector, and investing in high-tech industries.

The authors’ conclusion that “we must address the vulnerabilities in our military supply chain and fill in our defensive gaps,” because “nothing less than our national security is at stake, is consistent with our findings from our 2012 study “Reviewing Risk – Critical Metals and National Security,” in which we outlined the extent of the United States’ overreliance on foreign supplies of critical minerals.

Considering that for 87% of the metals and minerals on our American Resources Risk Pyramid in our report, domestic resources exist – maximizing our mineral resource potential by developing these mineral riches should be a part of any solution to this problem.

We’ve seen a flurry of new studies focused on mineral resource security over the past few months, an encouraging signal that the issue is increasingly getting the attention it deserves. While we would be remiss not to include our Critical Metals Report and our Gateway Metals Report, two of the more recent studies were released by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and, just this week, the RAND Corporation.

While ALEC’s report is more narrowly tailored and focuses specifically on Rare Earths and Uranium mining potential in the United States, RAND’s “Critical Materials Present Danger to U.S. Manufacturing” study examines a broader set of minerals which are produced in one or just a few countries, and which meet the following criteria:

• The dominant producer is outside the United States.
• The United States has appreciable net imports.
• The dominant producers have shortfalls in their quality of governance, as measured by the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) published by the World Bank.

China, being the dominant producer for a number of key critical minerals, has more than once demonstrated its willingness to resort to market distortions – policies which, according to RAND, suggest the need for two types of actions:

(1) those that can increase resiliency to supply disruptions or market distortions and
(2) those that can provide early warning of developing problems resulting from the concentration of production.

What better way to “increase resiliency” than diversifying sources of supply by developing the resources we have beneath our own soil?

In an opinion piece for U.S. News and World Report, Eric Hannis, senior fellow in defense studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, makes the case for U.S. Rare Earths independence from China. With China having flooded the market with cheap Rare Earths in the 1990s, thus pushing U.S. and other foreign competitors out of [...]

Amidst a slowly growing awareness of our critical mineral needs and the bureaucratic obstacles to harnessing our domestic mineral potential, U.S. Congressman Mark Amodei (NV-1) has introduced H.R. 4402, the National Strategic and Critical Minerals Production Act of 2012. As per the bill’s official title, it seeks to “require the Secretary of the Interior and [...]

In this first full trading week of 2012, there is a lot of talk about what the year will bring for investors, manufacturers and consumers, with much of it revolving around the U.S. Presidential primaries and the Eurozone financial crisis. While the importance of these issues cannot be dismissed, the British daily The Independent reminds [...]

The Department of Energy officially released its 2011 Critical Materials Strategy, an update of last December’s inaugural report on metals essential to green-tech applications ranging from wind and solar power to EV batteries and CFL lighting.  Five metals made the critical risk quadrant for both the short-term (today to 2015) and medium-term (2015 to 2025); [...]

The British Geological Survey (BGS) recently released its supply risk index for critical minerals, which makes the United Kingdom the latest country to zero in on the issue of resource dependency. The study ranks 52 elements or element groups based on a number of factors that impact supply, including each element’s abundance in the Earth and [...]

In an effort to secure access to critical metals and minerals, Germany’s national industrial association, the Federation of German Industry (BDI) is exploring the formation of a “globally active profit-oriented raw materials corporation.” As the German monthly Manager Magazin reports, the envisioned procurement trust, which companies like chemicals maker Evonik and auto manufacturer Daimler have [...]

Well, you won’t see that headline atop of pieces like this one in the Alaskan press, but it’s a logical extension of policy actions like the one proposed to stop a copper/gold/molybdenum mine in Alaska.  In this case, we’re told that we can either allow the mine to proceed – or we can save the [...]

In today’s globalized world, it doesn’t take a seat at the decision-making table for one nation to influence another’s domestic policies – a near-monopoly on critical mineral resources will do.  A case in point is India, which, after a seven-year hiatus, is expanding its indigenous Rare Earth Element (REE) production over growing concerns that China [...]