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There’s a lot going on in the realm of critical minerals these days – and that does not only apply to policy, but also personnel changes.

After five years of building and leading the Critical Materials Institute (CMI), a Department of Energy research hub under the auspices of Ames Laboratory, its Director Dr. Alex King is stepping down towards the end of this month. Ames Laboratory has announced that King will be succeeded by Dr. Chris Haase, who currently serves as Senior Director for New Business Creation at GE ventures, and previously served in several other roles focused on “early-stage technology and product development.”

King can look back at five very successful years at the helm of CMI. The hub was created in 2013 with the goal of “bring[ing] together the best and brightest research minds from universities, national laboratories and the private sector to find innovative technology solutions that will help us avoid a supply shortage [for critical minerals] that would threaten our clean energy industry as well as our security interests.”

Under King’s leadership, CMI has indeed become the nation’s “premier research, development and deployment institute for critical materials, alloys, oxides and processing solutions,” prompting us at ARPN to closely follow its activities and dedicate our blog feature series “Materials Science Profiles of Progress” to the public-private partnerships CMI and Ames Laboratory have engaged in to further the cause of alleviating our critical mineral resource supply challenges.

Since 2013, the research hub has engaged in at least 36 collaborative research projects. While most of these were initially focused on Rare Earth Elements, Ames Lab recently announced that CMI will be expanding its research on tech metals “as rapid growth in electric vehicles drives demand for lithium, cobalt,” focusing on maximizing the efficiency of processing, usage and recycling of Lithium and Cobalt starting this summer.

Among the projects ARPN has so far featured are:

• Materials Science Profiles of Progress: CMI Announces New Partnership to Recover REEs from E-Waste
• REE Extraction From Coal
• CMI Public-Private Partnership Studies New Ways to Capture Gateway Metals and Critical Co-Products
• Researchers Turn to Bioengineered Bacteria to Recover REEs

Haase, who will officially take over on June 25, plans to “use his unique blend of technical knowledge and operational planning to expand CMI’s diversity of funding sponsors to ensure the long-term sustainability of the Institute,” and is “excited to help CMI continue to increase its partnerships and collaborations on innovative projects that bridge fundamental and applied sciences for market-relevant technological breakthroughs.”

Congratulations to Alex King on a great five years at the helm of CMI, and we look forward to seeing Haase “help CMI continue to increase its partnerships and collaborations on innovative projects that bridge fundamental and applied sciences for market-relevant technological breakthroughs.”

“Identifying which minerals are ‘critical’ is the easy part. Working out what to do about them is going to be much harder.” 

– That’s the conclusion Reuters columnist Andy Home draws in his recent piece on the current Administration’s efforts to develop a strategy to reduce import reliance for metals considered “critical to the economic and national security of the United States.”

Home’s entry point to the issue is a promising mining project in Nebraska aimed at developing Scandium, Niobium and Titanium – all of which have been officially afforded “critical minerals status” in the Department of the Interior’s recently-released list of 35.

Writes Home:

“No-one’s mined niobium in the United States since 1959, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The country relies exclusively on imports, mostly from Brazil.

The same is true of scandium, a metal which, according to NioCorp, has been used for several decades in ‘cutting-edge Soviet and Russian military technologies’ but not by the U.S. armed forces due to a lack of supply.”

Thus, he says, it comes as no surprise to find these materials on the list, which features a mix of “supply challenged” tech metals and more conventional materials for which USGS has deemed the entire supply chain “problematic.”

ARPN’s Dan McGroarty has called the list a “great starting point” but also pointed out that it does not include materials like Copper, which “is the gateway to 5 ‘co-product’ metals that are listed as critical, but are not mined in their own right.  And the U.S. has a 600,000 MT copper gap each year – the gap between what we consume and what we produce.”

With the list of 35 completed, focus will shift towards the report featuring policy recommendations, which the Commerce Department will have to submit to the President by August 16.

Home says:

“[I]ncreasing domestic supply across the spectrum of the periodic table is going to be a core recommendation in the report.” 

This recommendation, as followers of ARPN know, will hinge largely on the improvement of our nation’s outdated and cumbersome permitting structure for mining projects.

Home also looks at current efforts at the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) to reduce our over-reliance on foreign mineral imports, which involve keeping our nation’s current “stockpile” of materials current and R&D efforts in the field of recycling and substitution.

The bottom line, however, as Home rightfully argues, is that all of these efforts “can only be part of a broader strategy that will have to be both multidimensional and highly flexible.”  In today’s fast-paced high tech world in which the ongoing materials science revolution constantly presents us with new uses for metals and minerals, supply and demand pictures can change dramatically on extremely short notice.

As Home notes, making a critical list is the easy part.  For stakeholders the hard part comes next.

Heavily quoting from ARPN’s statement on the issue, The Daily Caller’s Michael Bastasch earlier this month reported on the Department of the Interior’s finalized list of minerals deemed critical for U.S. national security. Writes Bastasch: “President Donald Trump’s administration’s release of a list of 35 critical minerals highlights just how reliant the U.S. is on [...]

At ARPN, we have long touted Copper’s versatility – its traditional uses, new applications and Gateway Metal status – but for those who still struggle to see more in Copper than your old school industrial metal, some visual help has arrived in the form of yet another impressive infographic from Visual Capitalist. The comprehensive infographic [...]

Last week, the Department of the Interior released its finalized Critical Mineral list. In spite of calls to include various additional metals and minerals (see ARPN principal Daniel McGroarty’s public comments on the issue here) DOI decided to stick with its pool of 35 minerals deemed critical from a national security perspective. “With the list [...]

Earlier this month, members of the Congressional Western Caucus sent a letter to Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, and Acting Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) Mary Neumayr calling for the inclusion of additional metals and minerals into the draft critical minerals list released by Secretary Zinke [...]

Advances in materials science are altering and expanding the ways in which we use metals and minerals at neck-breaking speeds, and are drastically changing the supply and demand picture.  The United States was significantly less dependent on foreign supplies of metals and minerals in the 1970s — but today, we find ourselves import-reliant for scores [...]

Against the backdrop of an increased focus on critical minerals at the federal level, North of 60 Mining News — an Alaska-based trade publication covering mineral resource issues for Alaska, northern British Columbia, Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut — has started a new series of articles ARPN followers may wish to bookmark. As Lasley pointed [...]

Since its inception, ARPN has advocated for more robust domestic resource development. The U.S. mine permitting process has long inhibited domestic development, and has exacerbated U.S. dependence on foreign metals and mineral supplies.  As the pace of technological change accelerates, driven by advances in materials science, these ever-deepening resource dependencies are weakening the U.S. economy [...]

In a new piece for The Hill, American Resources Policy Network principal Daniel McGroarty zeroes in on the intersection between trade and resource policy. Against the backdrop of the current negotiations to update the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), McGroarty argues that one of the metals ARPN followers have come to know as a [...]