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Critical Minerals policy-wonks:  if you wagered that Rare Earths would be the leading elements in the Biden 100-Day Report in terms of mentions, you’d be wrong.

That’s right — we took a look at the Biden Administration’s just-released 100-day supply chain assessment, and created a word cloud based on the number of mentions (footnotes included) of the metals and minerals that made the official U.S. Government Critical Minerals List of 2018 — and the two that didn’t but should have (Nickel and Copper).

Here’s what it looks like:

It may come as no surprise that Lithium and Cobalt are prominently featured (Lithium is mentioned 315 times and Cobalt appears 167 times) — after all we find ourselves in a “battery arms race.”

And, of course, the Rare Earths made the cut with 105 mentions[1], but what may surprise you is that Nickel — a non-Critical, at least in terms of the official U.S. Government Critical Minerals List of 2018 – takes the bronze with a whopping 146 references.   And fellow non-Critical Copper also racks up a Top Ten appearance, with 29 references.

In the Department of Energy-led supply chain assessment chapter, DoE notes under the Nickel sub-header for “Mapping the Supply Chain” that “if there are opportunities for the U.S. to target one part of the battery supply chain, this would likely be the most critical to provide short- and medium-term supply chain stability.”

DoE continues:

“In contrast to cobalt, nickel content per battery will increase in the coming years, as R&D focused on high-nickel in cathodes has shown significant and accelerated commercial adoption. The potential shortfall from this increase in demand poses a supply chain risk for battery manufacturing globally, not just in the United States; given the pervasive need, the established nickel industry is ramping up production and processing, and the United States is falling further behind China in this critical material.”

Copper is highlighted in the 100-Day Report as an integral component of Lithium-ion battery technology, in the context of being what we have called a “gateway metal” to other critical materials, and for its “use across many end-use applications aside from lithium-ion cells, including building construction, electrical and electronic products, transportation equipment, consumer and general products, and industrial machinery and equipment.”

ARPN followers can claim an I-told-you-so here.  After all, ARPN’s Daniel McGroarty urged the U.S. Government to include both Nickel and Copper in the 2018 official government list of critical minerals in his Public Comment submission.

With that brief moment of vindication, let’s move on to say that the Biden Administration is right to give prominence to Nickel and Copper in its strategy.

As Reuters’s Andy Home points out,

“Nickel isn’t on the U.S. list of critical minerals. Although the country depends on imports, 68% of supplies come from what the report calls “allied nations” such as Canada, Australia, Norway and Finland.

But the Department of Energy (DOE) has identified Class 1 nickel, the type best suited to lithium-ion batteries, as both a key vulnerability and key opportunity. (…)”

As the White House 100-Day Report notes:

“Eagle Mine is the only active nickel mine in the U.S. today, and its lifetime is set to end in 2025.”

Home acknowledges this fact and continues:

“There is no domestic nickel processing capacity outside a limited amount of by-product salt production.

Yet this particular battery metal is the one likely to experience the most significant demand increase over the coming years, the report says, with ‘market indications that there could be a large shortage of Class 1 nickel in the next 3-7 years.’

Indeed, with nickel content rising in battery cathode design, not having enough of the right kind of nickel ‘poses a supply chain risk for battery manufacturing globally, not just in the United States.’”

For Copper, one need to look no further than the latest IEA report which estimates that, driven by the Electric Vehicle revolution, copper demand will be 25 times greater in 2040 than it was in 2020.

Thankfully, the U.S. does not have to look far for opportunities to strengthen our position for both Nickel and Copper. The Tamarack Nickel project in Minnesota hosts a high-grade Nickel deposit, along with Copper and Cobalt as co-products.  As for Copper, several of our recent posts provide an insight into domestic opportunities.

As the Department of Energy concludes:

“The United States must adopt a set of tools to increase domestic battery manufacturing while improving the resilience of the lithium battery supply chain, including the sourcing and processing of the critical minerals used in battery production.”

It’s a behemoth task, but, the good news is that  in light of the United States’ mineral riches and technical knowhow the “All of the Above” approach embraced in the Biden Administration’s strategy can start at home.

 

[Note from Sandra Wirtz: As ARPN digs through the White House Supply Chain Report, we are completing the week with posts that “preview” metals and minerals prominently mentioned in the Report – beginning with copper.]

“The road to decarbonisation will be paved with copper (…) and a host of other minerals, all critical for electric vehicles (EVs), solar panels and wind farms,” writes Andy Home, whose work we’ve highlighted here before, in a new piece for Reuters.

Reporting from a European perspective, Home writes that stakeholders have begun to realize that levels of import reliance for these critical minerals on nations like China is not “sustainable,” and access to raw materials (from production to refining) is viewed as “strategic” by the European Commission. He says the big problem, however, is “Us” — meaning that “[t]he paradox of the green revolution is that public opinion is firmly in favour of decarbonisation but not the mines and smelters needed to get there.”

Home points to the United States, where, by way of example, global miner Rio Tinto has been “trying for over a quarter century to win approval for its Resolution copper mine in Arizona” against “stiff opposition” from Native Americans and environmentalists in what is a traditional mining state and generally considered a mining-friendly jurisdiction. As friends of ARPN will know, the U.S. is presently import-dependent for 35% of its annual copper demand or 650,000 metric tons a year — and growing: According to the recent IEA Report, driven by the Electric Vehicle revolution, copper demand will be 25 times greater in 2040 than it was in 2020.

Environmental concerns are a legacy issue the mining industry has been grappling with. Technological advances and commitments to more sustainable practices are changing the landscape, but, as Home writes, “[i]t’s not hard to understand why the political desire to reshore critical minerals production is running into popular resistance,” which is why European Commission plans to accelerate mine permitting are being drawn up in the context of a “responsible resourcing code in a bid to win hearts and minds.”

Home points to a recent CSIS study which contends that while fully decoupling from China “is impossible today (and) in the future, it is improbable and likely expensive,” and that Western nations should instead focus on areas where they can “compete in parts of the green technology supply chain and accept a level of inter-dependence with China.”

He concludes that dealing with a certain level of quid-pro-quo with China might be “unlikely to please those who contend that the United States and Europe must completely reshore their minerals production. But it may be no more than a statement of fact until we collectively accept the need for more mines and metals plants somewhere close to our back yards.” In other words, we are the “human bottleneck in critical mineral supply chains.”

Our idea of having our cake, and eating it, too, will have no place in the post-petro Tech Metals Age. The hard truth is that achieving decarbonization goals while at the same time reducing the U.S.’s over-reliance on critical minerals from China will require an “all of the above” approach we’ve come to know from the energy debate, a notion that is supported by the IEA study on achieving carbon neutrality goals by 2050.

This is why we’re encouraged by the Biden Administration’s just-released 100 day review report of critical supply chains — which, in the Department of Defense’s outline of policy recommendations to alleviate critical mineral supply chain vulnerabilities, explicitly calls for embracing such an approach: “Reliable, secure, and resilient supplies of key strategic and critical materials are essential to the U.S. economy and national defense. The United States needs an ‘all of the above’ comprehensive strategy to increase the resilience of strategic and critical material supply chains that both expands sustainable production and processing capacity and works with allies and partners to ensure secure global supply.”

Recent media reports had indicated that the Biden Administration might not incorporate new domestic critical minerals production into its strategy and rather focus on the processing side of the supply chain relying on imports from allied nations. However, the just-released review report does see a role for new — sustainable — domestic mining, which, as we’ve previously pointed out, is feasible with industry having made strides towards reconciling environmental concerns with meeting supply needs.

There is a lot to unpack in the 250-page report, and we will take some time to analyze it more thoroughly, but, as we stated earlier, it appears that the message that in our Tech Metals Age, minerals and metals are the indispensable ingredients to securing supply chains vital to advanced manufacturing, renewable energy, public health and national security has registered, and it is good to see that the Biden Administration appears willing to unkink the bottlenecks.

To learn more about the “all of the above” approach, which ARPN’s Daniel McGroarty recently discussed at a congressional virtual forum, click here.

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