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If you’re in Washington, DC this week, mark your calendar:  On Wednesday of this week, RealClearPolitics, in partnership with our friends at the National Mining Association, will be convening issue experts and stakeholders to discuss “Minerals: The Overlooked Foundation of Our Future.”

U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and is a leader in the realm of critical mineral issues, will be keynoting the event. 

Her address, and subsequent panel discussions will “explore how – despite the importance of minerals to our technology, defense, energy and manufacturing supply chains – the industry’s importance is often overlooked by consumers who take for granted that certain materials will always be available. (…)”

The event seeks to further explore “policy questions surrounding the importance of minerals, and how the nation’s manufacturing sector, national defense and even green energy technologies depend on a healthy domestic minerals mining industry and improved access to domestic minerals.”

Here’s the lineup for the event, which includes ARPN principal Daniel McGroarty:

Featured Discussion
- Q&A with U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)

Panel One: The Importance of Minerals to Our National Security & Economy
- Steven Fortier, PhD, Senior Policy Advisor, Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and Technology Policy
- Casey Hammond, Acting Assistant Secretary, Land & Minerals Management, U.S. Department of the Interior
- Drew Horn, Associate Director of Policy, Office of the Vice President of the United States
- Melissa Simpson, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Energy Resources, U.S. Department of State

Panel Two: The Manufacturing and Trade Challenge
- Robbie Diamond, Founder, President and CEO, Securing America’s Future Energy
- Emily Hersh, Managing Partner, DCDB Group
- David Livingston, Deputy Director, Climate and Advanced Energy, Atlantic. Council
- Dan McGroarty, Principal, Carmot Strategic Group

The event will be held at Charlie Palmer Steak DC. Doors open at 7:30 AM and the event will begin at 8:00 AM. To RSVP click here or email rsvp@realclearpolitics.com. 

If you can‘t make it, you can follow the action via live stream here.  
If you‘d like to follow along via Twitter, the hashtag for the event is #MineralsRCP.

As the “tech wars” gear up and the “battery arms race” shifts in to higher gears, efforts to promote the securing of domestic critical mineral supply chains are not only underway in policy circles in Washington, DC, but in the private sector as well.  Companies including the world’s top diversified miners are intensifying their R&D efforts to meet the world’s increasing demand for tech metals. 

The latest case in point:  Rio Tinto’s successful production of lithium carbonate – a key component of electric vehicle battery technology – as part of the reprocessing of waste piles from its long-standing boron mine in southern California.

Part of a unit that produced borates [link to old Boron post], the Boron site is home to at least 80 minerals. The lithium find was part of waste reprocessing in an initial search for gold and other elements at the site.  Efforts now shift to improving quality and lifting volumes, according to Bloomberg.

As Simon Moores, managing director of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and member of the ARPN panel of issue experts told the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources earlier this year, “The growth trajectory expected for lithium ion battery raw material demand is unprecedented. Lithium ion batteries are becoming a major global industry and the impact on the four key raw materials of lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite will be profound.” Outlining theoretical demand scenario from megafactories in the pipeline at 2023 and 2028, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence estimates that lithium demand will increase by over eight times.

The Boron discovery, while in Moores’ view not necessarily a “volume play,” but rather an “IP [intellectual property] play” is significant because in recent years, there has been only one lithium production facility in the U.S. — prompting analysts like Moores to lament that the United States is a “bystander” in the battery arms race.  

Confirming Moores’ analysis, U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) called our nation’s over-reliance on foreign critical minerals our nation’s “Achilles’ heel that serves to empower and enrich other nations, while costing us jobs and international competitiveness.”

 

Late last week, we witnessed the formal announcement of a forthcoming roll out of an “action plan” to counter Chinese dominance in the critical minerals sector during Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s week-long state visit to the U.S.. According to news reports the plan will “open a new front against China in a widening technology and trade war by exploiting [...]

Bearing testimony to the increasing awareness regarding our nation’s critical mineral resource issues, the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources chaired by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) earlier today held a full committee hearing on “Minerals and Clean Energy Technologies.” Witnesses included The Honorable Daniel Simmons, Assistant Secretary for the Office of Energy Efficiency [...]

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