As Dario Pong, founder and managing director of Ferro Resources, a Hong Kong-based automotive ferrite magnet company operating in mainland China, told attendees during a panel discussion on supply chains at a conference organized by the think tank branch of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund in Hong Kong earlier this month, he is more concerned about copper and nickel, stating that “[t]here is enough rare earth in the world. There is also enough cobalt in the world.” 

But with regards to copper and nickel he said:

“These are the big-ticket items, not the so-called minor materials, and China is also worried about not having enough copper and nickel. That is why China is working together with the world to secure that.”

As governments around the globe place more emphasis on securing critical mineral supply chains, China has a leg up on the West because, as Pong says, the country planned for the run on critical minerals before the West began focusing on it.  While China has scarce copper resources, Pong says that Beijing has close trade relationships with its main suppliers from Latin America (including Chile and Peru) along with Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Central Africa, and has made significant strategic investments in these leading copper mining countries, while “[t]he West has overlooked their manufacturing sectors in the past few decades.”

Indeed, as followers of ARPN well know, China has, through decades of strategic planning, achieved a stranglehold on most segments of the supply chains for many critical minerals.  Copper may not be as flashy as some of its peers – but, as followers of ARPN well know, it is also an indispensable component in green energy technology, and demand for the “metal of electrification,” as it has been dubbed by the Financial Times, is expected to increase drastically to keep pace with the material requirements of the global push towards net zero carbon emissions.

While U.S. import reliance for copper hovered around 30 to 35 percent in the 2010s, that number has gone up to more than 40 percent in the 2020s, according to the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries. 

Miners are pointing out that a confluence of complex permitting timelines, rising inflation and the fact that the commodity is “harder to find in high quantities in the ground” may have led to a situation “where it’s likely there won’t be enough copper to meet decarbonization goals in the next few decades.”

And with China “tightening its grip on copper” as Bloomberg News phrased it recently, there is potential for more competition and confrontation between China and the West, an already fraught relationship, on the horizon.

Perhaps now would be a good time for the U.S. Government to revisit its omission of Copper from the latest Critical Minerals List.  The Department of Energy has already opened the door by adding the metal to its 2023 Critical Material Assessment list – USGS only needs to walk through it.

The post China Zeroes in on Copper appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

Laments Lasley:

“The case for copper’s criticality is backed by commodity analysts who predict global copper production will need to double by 2035 to meet demands driven by global net-zero emission goals. Building that level of capacity in just 12 years, while at the same time not losing any output from existing mines, is a highly unlikely scenario.

(…)

Despite the growing consensus that it is going to require extraordinary measures to ensure that there is enough copper to achieve global net-zero carbon emission goals, the U.S. Geological Survey has remained steadfast in its refusal to add this metal to America’s critical minerals list.”

USGS Director Dave Applegate has publicly stated that while copper is considered an essential mineral, copper does not meet the agencies criteria for elevating the material onto the critical minerals list, an assessment that, in Lasley’s eyes, “seems to ignore the forecasts that demand will outstrip supply over the next two decades.”

Lasley points to the Copper Development Association’s (CDA’s) commissioning of an analysis mimicking USGS methodology employed for the 2022 Critical Minerals List, which the association maintains was based on out-of-date data.  The CDA-commissioned analysis concluding that copper does meet the “critical” criteria when basing the assessment on “the very latest available data.” 

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.

However, USGS has remained steadfast in its refusal to re-consider copper’s status even though the Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland has statutory authority to add copper to the Critical Minerals List without waiting for the next official update of the entire list, and has rejected a formal request by a broad coalition including federal lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle and more than 70 trade associations and unions to do so.

The U.S. Department of Energy, meanwhile, recognized the growing importance of copper and included it into its critical materials list as part of its 2023 Critical Materials Assessment. While agreeing with the USGS notion of a diverse and relatively low-risk global copper supply, the department’s inclusion of copper was prompted by a longer-time view that declining ore grades and growing competition for available resources might change the outlook so that “identifying and mitigating material criticality now will ensure that a clean energy future is possible for decades to come.”

USGS may have rejected a direct broad-based push to include copper into the overall government Critical Minerals List, but a congressional push is still underway, and the recent DOE elevation of copper’s status may provide a boost for U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani’s (R-Ariz.) Copper is Critical Act, which would do so with or without USGS consent.

As copper demand in an increasingly net zero world continues to grow, ARPN will watch the push to add the perhaps most critical non-critical to the official U.S. government list with great interest.

The post The Most Critical Non-Critical? A Look at Copper appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

This week, the Indian Ministry of Mines released a comprehensive Critical Minerals List, consisting of 30 metals and minerals deemed critical for India’s ambition for cleaner technologies in electronics, telecommunications, transport and defense, according to the government.

The list comprises the group of 17 rare earth elements (REEs) and six platinum group metals (PGMs) as complexes. It also encompasses four of what ARPN has dubbed the “battery criticals” lithium, cobalt, graphite and nickel (India’s list does not include manganese which rounds out the five battery criticals), as well as antimony, beryllium, bismuth, gallium, germanium, hafnium, indium, molybdenum, niobium, phosphorous, potash, rhenium, silicon, strontium, tantalum, tellurium, tin, titanium, tungsten, vanadium, zirconium, selenium, and cadmium.

Lastly, the list also includes copper, a mainstay metal and key component of the green energy transition which the United States has thus far failed to add to its own list of critical minerals in spite of numerous pushes for its addition.

According to Indian web news hub Rediff.com, the government plans to encourage public and private investment in exploration, mining and processing to secure the country’s critical mineral supply chains, and will seek to “facilitate the adoption of advanced technologies and international collaborations to enhance efficiency and environmental sustainability in the extraction and processing of critical minerals.”

One of the first such international collaborations was just made official during a state visit of India’s Prime Minister Narenda Modi to Washington, D.C. last week, where Modi and U.S. President Joe Biden announced the country’s joining of the Minerals Security Partnership alongside several bilateral and defense deals.

The MSP is a partnership between the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea and several other countries convened in June 2022 as an initiative to bolster supply chains while aiming “to ensure that critical minerals are produced, processed, and recycled in a manner that supports countries in realizing the full economic development potential of their mineral resources.”

As the rest of the world aims to decouple its critical mineral supply chains from China, which has long dominated most of the critical minerals sector across all links of the supply chain, India is looking to harness its geopolitical wealth to become a “global hub for critical mineral production and reinforce its position as a major player in the global economy.”

In keeping with that objective, India’s recent moves have global implications.

At the beginning of this year, a New York Times piece called on G20 leaders gathering in Davos, Switzerland, to “pivot to the new reality provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the growth of extreme inequalities and aggressive Russian and Chinese autocracies.” 

In the critical mineral realm, these recent events served as a catalyst for a new “Great Game,” which the geopolitics of mineral resource supply had triggered and which gained momentum with the adoption of the Paris agreement in 2015.

India’s recent critical mineral moves are highly relevant in the context of this new “Great Game,” particularly as relations between India and China are strained by an ongoing border conflict and growing regional rivalry, both of which are shaping South Asia’s security landscape and strategic environment.

With India having overtaken China as the world’s most populous country and set to become the third-largest economy in the coming years, India’s recent moves could be seen as a direct challenge by Beijing.

As Frédéric Grere and Manisha Reuter outline for the European Council on Foreign Relations, “New Delhi still exerts a dominant role in South Asia and, specifically, the Indian Ocean, but as China consolidates its position in the region, its attitude towards India has become more assertive. India remains resolute about preventing Chinese hegemony in Asia, repeatedly stressing that a multipolar world starts with a multipolar Asia, and seeking partnerships with a variety of countries, including the US and the EU. Beijing is concerned about India’s growing military ties with the US and tends to consider India’s intentions through the lens of its own rivalry with the US.”

The new Great Game may have just gotten Greater.

The post India Ups the Ante in New “Great Game,” Releases Critical Minerals List and Joins MSP appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

Arguing that changing copper’s designation would allow the federal government to more efficiently ensure reliable and secure supplies of the material in the future, Representative Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.) is introducing the “Copper is Critical Act.”  The bill is co-sponsored by Reps. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), Jim Baird (R-Indiana), and David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), Eli Crane (R-Ariz.), and Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.)

The bill would amend section 7002 of the Energy Policy Act of 2020, and represents the first time this process is used in an attempt to broaden the scope of the U.S. Critical Minerals List.

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.

Policy experts agree.

In a recent piece, 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 elaborated 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.” 

With copper’s long list of applications growing in the context of the materials science revolution and with long-term demand scenario surging, ARPN will monitor the Copper is Critical Act as it moves through the legislative process.

The post Lawmakers Seek Critical Mineral Designation for Copper via Federal Legislation appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

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 post Copper – A Mainstay Metal, Gateway Metal and Energy Metal, But Not a Critical Mineral? Some Think it’s Time to Change This appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

The New South Wales Department of Planning and environment has taken a closer look at solar panels, which, just like EV batteries, are at the core of the green energy transition, and outlines the top four metals and minerals that make solar panels work: 

Copper — a mainstay metal with perhaps unrivaled versatility, lending itself to a wide range of traditional and new applications,  and yields access to other critical minerals as a “gateway metal,” an indispensable component for advanced energy technology, ranging from EVs and wind turbines to the electric grid and solar panels.

For some of our most recent coverage of Copper, click here.

Silicon — the most abundant compound in the Earth’s crust, silicon takes the form of ordinary sand, quartz, rock crystal, amethyst, agate, flint, jasper, and opal. To produce pure silicon, the compound is hearted with carbon at extra high temperatures.  The material is used extensively in electronics because of its semiconducting properties. It is used in the manufacture of next-gen 5-nanometer (5nm) semiconductor chips, and is a key component of solar panels and photovoltaic cells.

For ARPN’s recent coverage of Silicon, click here.

Silver — By definition a “precious” metal like gold, it may come as a surprise to those who see silver primarily as shiny adornment or a means to store value that the biggest end users of silver may actually be specialized industries. More recently, the metal has evolved from “money metal to techno metal,” as North of 60 Mining News’s Shane Lasley termed it, with its true value lying in “more industrious properties that make it invaluable to high-tech applications such as solar panels, electric vehicles, and 5G networks.”

For Shane Lasley’s Treatment of Silver in the 2021 issue of “Critical Mineral Alliances” click here.

Zinc — primarily used in metallurgical applications, zinc is also a Gateway metal, yielding access to “criticals” Indium and Germanium. Today, zinc is also seeing greater application in green energy technology.

For examples of ARPN coverage of Zinc, click here and here.

These four may not make the top of the hour news at the moment, but silicon, for example, appears on the Australian and European Union’s critical minerals lists, while zinc, previously not on the U.S. Critical Minerals List, was afforded critical mineral status by the U.S. Government earlier this year, and is also deemed critical by the Canadian government.

As for copper – which Canada considers a critical mineral – followers of ARPN well know that there are good reasons to include Copper into the U.S. Government’s Critical Minerals List, and ARPN’s Daniel McGroarty has consistently argued in favor of doing so via public comments during the draft process of both the initial 2018List and its 2022 iteration.

See McGroarty’s public comments on the U.S. Critical Minerals Lists here and here.

The bottom line is, while people appear to be laser focused on achieving the green energy transition via securing supply chains for the battery criticals and rare earths, the issue is bigger than this limited group of metals and minerals.  With the materials science revolution continuing to yield research breakthroughs at neck-breaking speeds, demand scenarios for metals and minerals will be subject to change.

It is clear that in the words of Forbes contributor Wal van Lierop, “[w]ithout massive investments in base metals and key minerals, Europe and North America will fail to meet their carbon emission targets and face a new form of energy insecurity,” — but these investments have to be made in the context of a broad-based “all of the above” strategy.  

The post Not Just the “Battery Criticals” — Green Energy Transition’s Mineral Intensity Requires Broader Focus: A Look at the “Solar Metals” appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

The researchers find that the “exotic polaritons [i.e. quasi-particles] in the ScN can be utilized for solar and thermal energy harvesting.  Also, belonging to the same family of materials as gallium nitride (GaN), scandium nitride is compatible with modern complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) or Si-chip technology and, therefore, could be easily integrated for on-chip optical communication devices.”

While discoveries like these in their initial stages are far from commercially viable, these findings once more underscore the importance of materials science, which has been yielding key breakthroughs at neck-breaking speeds, yielding new applications for many critical materials — in this case, and not for the first time in recent years, scandium.

Followers of ARPN may recall the “Light Rider,” a high-tech motorcycle, which, because it is held together by an intricate web of “Scalmalloy,” is perhaps the lightest motorcycle in the world. Scalmalloy is an “aluminum alloy powder ‘with almost the specific strength of titanium’ [used] to build incredible structures by fusing thin layers of the material together.” One of its key components is scandium – which explains the first syllable of its somewhat curious name, Aluminum being the middle-portion, with the “M” standing for Magnesium.

It is new applications like these that are making scandium an increasingly indispensable tech metal, particularly in the context of the lightweighting revolution – a development marked by the “growing imperative to lightweight transportation, buildings, and infrastructure systems.” 

Add to that the newly-found application for scandium in renewable energy, and we have another catalyst for the adoption rate of scandium, use of which was long limited to “niche Western products such as baseball bats and lacrosse sticks,” because of its classification as an “if” metal.  Writes the British Minor Metals Trade Association:

“Scandium has long been considered an ‘if’ metal. If only it were available in quantity, it could transform aircraft production and fuel consumption. If only it were available in quantity, it could speed the emerging hydrogen economy. If only it were available in quantity, it could accelerate the rollout of 5G technologies. And so on.

The view has been that scandium could be used in numerous large-volume applications, if only supplies were sufficient to meet the potential demand. Manufacturers regularly cited a lack of sufficient scandium supply as the reason why they did not roll out new uses and products containing scandium.”

Russia has long used scandium-aluminum alloys in its MIG fighter jets, but then Russia has long had commercial domestic scandium production.

While the same cannot be said for the United States, including the material on the U.S. Government Critical Minerals List, may be a sign that change is underway for North America’s scandium supplies. Writes Reuters’s Andy Home in regard to a long-standing mining operation in Quebec:

“It turns out, though, that Rio Tinto has been producing scandium all along at its titanium operations over the Canadian border. But the metal now deemed critical was going with other waste into a tailings pond.  The company has now worked out how to extract scandium oxide from the titanium processing stream, making it North America’s sole producer.”

In fact, harvesting mine tailings — again courtesy of materials science yielding research breakthroughs — is quickly becoming an important piece of the critical mineral resource supply puzzle, as mine waste tailings often “contain metals (such as rare earth elements) that were not considered worth extracting when the ores were initially processed, but which have since increased in value and use,” according to a 2017 research paper.

Reuters’s Home points to another Rio Tinto operation, its Kennecott copper smelter in Utah, where the company is converting the site’s anode slime waste stream into copper-tellurium, which is then sent on for refining and usage in photovoltaic solar panels.

Writes Home:

“[These] are examples of a new industry trend towards so called whole-concept mining, also known as total mining, broadening a historical focus on one or two primary products to potentially everything of metallic value in the ore being mined and processed.”

Pointing to other examples, including Russia’s Rusal harvesting aluminum tailings to recover scandium, he concludes:

“The USGS has been tasked with mapping and collecting data for areas containing mine waste ‘to increase understanding of above-ground critical mineral resources in previously disturbed areas’.

It’s not only a highly cost-effective way of closing the country’s critical minerals gaps, but also a way of closing the green-on-green divisions that cause every new energy transition metals mine to run into fierce environmental opposition.

The green future, it turns out, can be achieved at least in part by cleaning up the mining legacy of the past.”  

The post Scandium and Beyond: Materials Science Allows for Harvesting of Mine Tailings appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

Pointing out that “[t]hese tiny chips are the ‘brains’ enabling all the computational capabilities and data storage that we take for granted today,” and are powering “virtually every sector of the economy,” Collier argues that the geopolitics of the chip manufacturing supply chain “leaves the U.S. in a precarious position, dependent upon foreign sources of supply such as South Korea and Taiwan,” and provides “compelling reasons to consider strengthening the supply of semiconductor production at home.”

Indeed, as followers of ARPN well-know, and as the U.S. Commerce Department pointed out last year, there are many access points for supply chain vulnerabilities along the way because the typical semiconductor production process spans a multitude of countries and products, crossing international borders up to 70 times, which is why the Biden Administration dedicated an entire chapter to the supply chains of semiconductors in its 100 Day Supply Chain Report.

Recent news of tech firms ripping apart new washing machines to harvest their computer parts in a bid to beat the global microchip shortage underscore the urgency of the situation, and Collier rightly argues that “onshoring semiconductor fabrication capabilities and providing market incentives” in this field could go far in “strengthening national security and promoting economic prosperity.”

However, the issue is much bigger than semiconductor fabrication, because, as ARPN has long pointed out, the term “supply chain” begins with “supply.”  The supply of the “secret sauce” for semiconductors is where the issue starts.

As ARPN’s Daniel McGroarty outlined for The Economic Standard in 2020 for the next-gen 5-nanometer (5 nm) semiconductor chips:

“What gives 5nm its secret sauce?  Like gastronomes blending obscure spices, 5nm’s designers looking to push the limits of Moore’s Law have turned to a broader swath of the Periodic Table of Elements to expand their computing palate.  Starting with the familiar silicon substrate ‘wafer,’ 5nm layers in exotic elements like silicon germanium for its super-lattice, adding dielectric hafnium-dioxide and gallium arsenide laced with indium – with a side-look at gallium antimonide as a potential substitute.

 And that’s where things get difficult, at least if we’re rooting for the U.S. to become the world’s epicenter of 5-nanometer chip production:  The U.S. produces precisely zero of three of these elements — indium and gallium and arsenic – leaving us 100% import-dependent, while we’re 84% import-dependent for antimony, and more than 50% for germanium.  Data for hafnium, among the rarest of the elements, is notoriously harder to come by, with production guesstimated at a scant 70 tons per year.”

As McGroarty points out, China is the lead global supplier for all six materials, but “it doesn’t have to be that way:  The U.S. has ‘known resources’ of all six, and already includes them on the U.S. Government Critical Minerals List.”

That is not to say that focusing on expanding manufacturing capabilities for semiconductors is not important — it absolutely is — but any effort to truly secure their supply chain must begin at the beginning: with the responsible sourcing of the metals and minerals underpinning this crucial 21^st Century technology.

The post Let’s Onshore Semiconductor Fabrication – But Not Without Strengthening Supply Chains at the Source… After All, “Supply Chain” begins with “Supply” appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

Arguing that the additions of Nickel and Zinc “reflect… an evolution of the methodology used to determine whether a mineral is critical to the well-being of the U.S. economy,” Home provides a window into the drafters’ reasoning for including them.

For Nickel, he writes that while a “relatively benign supply profile kept nickel off” in the past, there are two reasons for including it on the updated List.

Pointing to the only domestic operating Nickel mine in the U.S. and a single producer of Nickel sulphate (which only produces Nickel as a co-product), Home says “the USGS has expanded its criticality criteria to look beyond trade dependency to domestic supply, particularly what it calls ‘single points of failure.’”

The second reason, according to Home, is “nickel’s changing usage profile from alloy in stainless steel production to chemical component in electric vehicle batteries.”  The rapid uptake of EVs as a key to the net-zero carbon transition has propelled Nickel onto the Critical List.

While for Zinc, the U.S. domestic supply chain is “less fragile,” according to Home, “the country’s refined zinc import dependency is relatively high,” and “[g]lobal supply trends make this problematic.”

Homes closes by noting that neither of “…these industrial metals feature on the European Union’s critical minerals list. In part that’s a reflection of Europe’s domestic production base both at the mining and smelting level.  But in part it may be because the USGS is ahead of its European peers in analysing global supply patterns and the resulting potential threats to critical minerals availability.

Nickel and zinc may not spring to mind when most people think of critical minerals, but as far as the United States is concerned, they both are.”

The post Nickel and Zinc “Only Two New Additions” to Draft Revised Critical Minerals List — A Look at the Government’s Reasoning appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

This, as USGS notes, is largely the result of “splitting the rare earth elements and platinum group elements into individual entries rather than including them as mineral groups” – as we argued in our last post, a welcome development likely to “encourage policymakers to understand that Rare Earth and PGM deposits can and will differ in the degree to which they afford access to the full range of these key materials.”

Perhaps even more interesting, however, is the addition of Nickel and Zinc, which, as followers of ARPN may recall, puts us at two for four:

In a statement submitted during the official comment period leading up to the release of the final 2018 Critical Minerals List, ARPN’s Daniel McGroarty had called for adding Copper, Zinc, Nickel and Lead to the List.

Reviewing several scenarios outlined in the Reconfiguration of the National Defense Stockpile Report to Congress from 2009, McGroarty concluded these four metals/minerals should be added based on relevant defense criteria — and, in the case of Copper, Zinc and Nickel, based on their Gateway Metal status.

Arguing that the 2018 draft list did not convey the “relationships of various metals and minerals,” and most importantly the fact that many of them “are not mined in their own right, but obtained as ‘co-products’ of primary mining,”McGroarty pointed to the fact that Copper, Nickel, Zinc and Lead offered access to seven unique minerals deemed critical on the list, with Copper being the most versatile, since it “unlocks” five potential co-products included in the 2018 List, and submitted a graphic underscoring his point.

The U.S. Government was unmoved, making no changes to the List.

Nickel’s star has since risen.

Against the backdrop of the accelerating battery arms race, the Biden Administration, in its 100-Day Supply Chain review report released in June, acknowledged Nickel’s Critical Mineral status, noting that

“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.”

The Department of Energy-led chapter of the 100 Day Report further concluded that “If there are opportunities for the US 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,” noting the urgent need to develop a strategic framework for securing Class 1 nickel. As we commented at the time, no other “non-Critical” received more mentions in the White House report than Nickel.

Add in the fact that Nickel provides Gateway access to Cobalt and the PGMs, and the case for including Nickel into the 2021 Critical Minerals list just got even more compelling.

Zinc, primarily used in metallurgical applications, is also a Gateway metal, yielding access to “Criticals” Indium and Germanium, is also seeing greater application in green energy technology, and, according to Mining Weekly the “increasing concentration of global mine and smelter production and the continued refinement, as well as the development, of the quantitative evaluation criteria” put zinc above the threshold for inclusion.

If Nickel and Zinc are ARPN’s two “hits,” we still stand by our two remaining “misses:”  Copper and Lead.

Less flashy than some of its tech metal peers, Copper’s traditional uses, new applications and Gateway Metal status make it highly versatile.

Copper is an irreplaceable component for advanced energy technology, ranging from EVs over wind turbines and solar panels to the electric grid.   The manufacturing process for EVs requires four times more Copper than gas powered vehicles, and the expansion of electricity networks will lead to more than doubled Copper demand for grid lines, according to the IEA.

Add in Copper’s Gateway Metal status and a 2019 mining executive’s projection that “[t]he world will need the same amount of copper over the next 25 years that it has produced in the past 500 years if it is to meet global demand.”  The just-passed federal infrastructure package and recent announcements of new EV goals and fuel efficiency standards — will only add to the outlined Copper demand scenarios.

Meanwhile, Lead continues to be a key ingredient in battery technology, with the lead-acid battery industry accounting for about 92% of reported U.S. lead consumption during 2020. On the Co-Product front, Lead is Gateway to two “Criticals,” Arsenic and Bismuth.

While the rationale for including Copper (and to a lesser extent Lead) into the latest iteration of the U.S. Government’s Critical Minerals List remains strong, and is perhaps, in the case of Copper, stronger than ever, we choose to see the glass as half-full, and are encouraged by the inclusion of Nickel and Zinc — testament to the fact that policy makers and other stakeholders are increasingly acknowledging the challenges associated with providing reliable supplies of the Critical Minerals underpinning our “Tech Metal Era.”

The post Two For Four — New Critical Minerals Draft List Includes Two of Four Metals Recommended For Inclusion by ARPN in 2018 appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.