critical minerals list

Earlier this spring, the Department of the Interior released its finalized Critical Minerals List.  Jeffery Green, president and founder of government relations firm J.A. Green & Company and member of the ARPN panel of experts reminded us in a recent piece for Defense News why the current focus on our over-reliance on foreign mineral resources is relevant. Writes Green:

“(…) America’s critical minerals problem has gone from bad to worse. The nation’s only domestic rare earth producer was forced into bankruptcy in 2015 after China suddenly restricted exports and subsequently flooded the market with rare earth elements. Adding insult to injury, the mine was then sold last summer for $20.5 million to MP Mine Operations LLC, a Chinese-backed consortium that includes Shenghe Resources Holding Co. Now, according to MINE Magazine, this same mine is exporting critical minerals to a processing plant in China—because the United States cannot process or refine these materials at commercial scale. 

Without a dramatic change in minerals policies, the United States will not be able to minimize the economic damage that will come when China decides to leverage its minerals monopolies against us.”

Green outlines several key steps stakeholders should focus on:

• Creating a “whole-of-market approach to spur innovation in minerals production” – i.e. removing “regulatory hurdles that dissuade would-be investors,” including, most notably, reducing permitting delays.
• Focusing on “existing Department of Defense programs designed to support the U.S. defense industrial base.” Writes Green: “Each branch of service has a ManTech program intended to improve the productivity and responsiveness of the industrial base and to enable manufacturing technologies.” However, Green believes budget requests for FY 2019 are too low: “[D]edicating just 0.025 percent of the budget to the next generation of manufacturing technologies is nowhere near enough to catch up to China and shore up domestic capabilities.”
• Ensuring that ManTech and DPA projects are not only prioritized but that respective funds will fill vulnerabilities in the defense industrial base. Writes Green: “Building resiliency and operational capacity throughout the supply chain requires investing in more than just the finished product to include the many tools, technologies, and processes that get us there. With a calculated and strategic focus on filling these gaps in the supply chain, American companies can rise to the task.”
• Combating unfair trade practices “that have bankrupted American mining companies and left us dependent on China for minerals essential to the defense industrial base.”“The United States must make clear it will not tolerate these practices, and will take a strong stance against continued, aggressive trade actions.”

As Reuters columnist Andy Home has outlined, coming up with a list of Critical Minerals was the easy part. Green’s suggested list of policy recommendations gives us another glimpse into what comes next – the hard work of overhauling policies to appropriately address our nation’s critical mineral supply issues.

Click here to read the full text of Green’s piece.

“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.

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