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As a highly versatile key mainstay metal, copper has been a building block of humanity’s progress. As a gateway metal, it yields access to critical minerals.  It also is an energy metal — an indispensable component for advanced energy technologies, ranging from EVs and wind turbines to the electric grid and solar panels.

But for all its traditional and new applications and surging demand in the context of the green energy transition, copper is currently not considered a “critical mineral” by the U.S. government.

A group of members of Congress have set out to change this, and have sent a letter to U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland urging the designation of copper as an official U.S. Geological Survey Critical Mineral.

The letter sent by Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (Ind.-Ariz.), joined by Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) cites new findings by the Copper Development Association (CDA) indicating that copper’s increased supply risk surpasses the USGS threshold necessary to be added to the U.S. Government’s Critical Minerals List.

“By recognizing copper as a ‘critical mineral,’ the United States’ federal government can more effectively ensure a secure and reliable supply of domestic copper resources in the years to come at all points of the supply chain including recycling, mining, and processing. Given the enormous investment required, the time lag for new sources of supply, and projected demand, time is of the essence,” wrote the Senators.

In a recent piece that also calls for a reassessment of copper’s current non-critical mineral designation, Cullen S. Hendrix with the Peterson Institute for International Economics argues that while copper is widely mined and processed relative to listed critical minerals on the U.S. government’s list, “the security of diffuse global supply chains and production in US-friendly economies is still vulnerable to disruptions in producer countries. The ability and willingness of copper producing countries to keep supplying copper can change rapidly.”

He points to current trends in Peru, a key copper mining country, where resource nationalism has reared its head, as well as developments in neighboring Chile, that may indeed affect both countries’ “ability and willingness” to supply copper to the global market and elaborates that “designating copper as critical to national and economic security would lead to enhanced scrutiny from the USGS, which tracks minerals markets, production, and reserves. Industry advocates also believe that the designation might lead to streamlined permitting processes that would facilitate more domestic production.” 

In an interview, Sen. Sinema said that “[t]his should be a no-brainer,” adding that “[w]e have major gaps in both our ability to mine and process these minerals to ensure our energy security for the future, and the administration knows how important copper is to our domestic and national security.”

As followers of ARPN well know, ARPN’s Daniel McGroarty has called for the designation of copper as a critical mineral on several occasions, and has submitted public comments to USGS to this effect.

The U.S. Government Critical Mineral List is updated at least every three years and saw its last update in late 2022, but the underlying statute stipulates that the Secretary of the Interior can designate additional materials to be added — and with  geopolitical tensions and resource nationalism on the rise against the backdrop of surging copper demand, now would be a good time to change copper’s designation to “critical.”

The global race for critical mineral resources is heating up. Against the backdrop of soaring demand and rising geopolitical tensions, nations are scrambling to diversify their critical mineral supply chains away from adversary nations, i.e. primarily China, and, in the case of Europe, also Russia.

While the European Union works to flesh out what is expected to be landmark legislation said to rival the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act to combat climate change and strengthen supply chains, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz traveled South America to lobby key mineral producing countries to prioritize resource cooperation with Germany.

After years of complacency, fueled in part by what German officials described to Reuters as a “distaste for the dirty business of mining and faith in the open market,” German stakeholders are now pushing for securing and diversifying supply chains “for example through offtake agreements, stakes in mines, or possibly the establishment of Germany’s own processing capacity.”

During his trip, Scholz signed a commodity partnership agreement with Chile aimed at strengthening cooperation via an annual bilateral forum and “state instruments” like investment guarantees. According to Reuters, Chile and Germany recently launched a hydrogen pilot project in Patagonia drawing on wind energy which is backed by the German government while leveraging technology from Siemens Energy.

While South America is a target-rich environment for Scholz’s lobbying efforts, with the region home to key mineral producers, the southern hemisphere has also seen a rise of resource nationalism which may complicate his mission.  Although he also visited Argentina on his trip, no agreement with the country has been announced, and a 2018 Bolivian-German lithium joint venture fell apart in 2020 amid domestic political turmoil in Bolivia. [See our post on nascent resource nationalism in Central and South America here.]

Scholz’s lobbying tour to South America comes as the EU-co-funded EIT Raw Materials, an innovation community within the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, calls on the European Union to use its to-be-released Critical Raw Materials Act to speed up permitting and and strengthen investment into the metals and minerals underpinning the green energy transition.

While the EU and the United States are close allies, Europe will not only have to compete with China and Russia for resources, but also with the U.S., with the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act serving as a key vehicle to spur investment in the critical minerals sector.

As EIT Raw Materials CEO Bernd Schaefer argued in an interview earlier this week, “[w]e all know Europe isn’t as agile and quick when it comes to decision-making. The Americans take the fast track and the super fast track has been taken by the Chinese.”  

With the comment that what passes for fast from the European perspective isn’t nearly fast enough, it’s encouraging that we can expect more activity across the Atlantic in the coming months.

It’s a brave new world, in which stakeholders will have to strike a sustainable balance between competition and cooperation in the critical mineral resource sector.  It’s not an easy task, but one that the United States can achieve with a comprehensive and decisively implemented all-of-the-above approach to mineral resource security.

Earlier this week, USGS released its latest iteration of the annual Mineral Commodity Summaries, a much-cited report that every year gives us a data-driven glimpse into our nation’s mineral resource dependencies. It’s fitting that ARPN reviews the report on Groundhog Day, February 2nd, because just like in the Bill Murray classic movie, in which the clock jumps [...]

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It may not make headlines as much as some of its U.S. Government Critical Minerals List peers, especially the battery criticals lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel and manganese, and as such you may not have heard much about it — but antimony has entered the spotlight and has garnered the attention of Pentagon planners. After receiving [...]

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