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Rhenium – a Copper co-product – is a case in point; which is why the BBC has made it the subject of a short yet informative clip as part of its “Secrets of the Super Elements” series. Likening Rhenium’s stand-out properties to “alien technology,” the clip provides a great visual explanation of Rhenium’s heat resistance, which has made it an indispensable component for superalloys used in turbine blades for jet aircraft engines.

Watch the clip here:

In other words – which the BBC notes elsewhere:

“[t]he ability of superalloys to operate at such extreme temperatures is what makes your holiday to the Algarve or Florida affordable.”

Meanwhile, primarily derived as a co-Product of Copper mining, Rhenium is extremely rare, with an average abundance of less than one part per billion in the continental crust.

USGS pegs global Rhenium production at a total of merely 47 metric tons, with more than 80 percent of that amount going into superalloys.

To address supply concerns, users are turning to recycling and substitution, however neither represents a panacea, as a piece in the Economist outlined several years ago:

“General Electric, one of the world’s biggest makers of jet engines, has spent years developing nickel-based superalloys to replace rhenium. But the best GE’s boffins could manage was to reduce the amount of metal required, not eliminate it altogether. Moreover, few manufacturers possess the resources to achieve even such limited progress.”

What does that mean for domestic use and production? According to revised USGS numbers, U.S. import reliance for Rhenium is at 81 percent. As we previously pointed out:

“Because the recovery process is complicated and requires special facilities, we are unlikely to fully meet our demand with domestic resources. However, a strong demand for Rhenium is likely here to stay. That, coupled with the fact that we have proven Rhenium reserves in the U.S. (the development of one of which has been projected to generate more than 20 tons of Rhenium per year as a Copper Co-Product, thus significantly reducing our reliance on foreign imports), should suffice to get policy makers’ attention (…).”

The bottom line: We need to rethink the way we look at some of our old-school mainstay metals, and give the ones that serve as gateway metals – in Rhenium’s case Copper – more thorough consideration. After all, they hold the key to unlocking those “alien technology” “super elements” that keep us safe, afford us everyday convenience, and keep us competitive from an economic perspective.

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In what may spell good news for the United States, analysts anticipate the biggest expenditure increases to occur in the United States, Canada and Australia, all of which are considered “safe bets” due to lower operating risks and high technology standards.  Providing a private sector viewpoint, Stephen McIntosh, group executive for growth and innovation at Rio Tinto, says:

“At quiet periods in the cycle, we will typically press out into non-OECD countries (…) But at the moment, we’re focusing on the OECD, predominately the Americas, and predominately for copper.

The development comes at a critical time when U.S. mineral resource dependencies are deepening, as the USGS’s just-released Mineral Commodity Summaries report shows.   And while for Copper (which is one of the main metals discussed in the Reuters piece) our overall dependence may have slightly dropped, demand is likely to grow significantly — due to increased infrastructure and clean tech investments (both areas in which Copper is becoming increasingly indispensible), and because of its status as a Gateway Metal (to scarce specialty metals like Rhenium, Selenium, Tellurium, Cobalt and in some instances the Rare Earths).

While Reuters reports on these developments largely from a market perspective, there may be policy considerations at work, here, too:

The mining industry’s pivoting back towards the United States may reflect a growing optimism that with a new Administration at the helm in Washington, DC, policies devised at creating a regulatory environment that is more conducive to responsible domestic resource development may stand a better chance.  Here’s hoping that their optimism is well founded – America’s economic well-being, as well as our competitiveness and national security would be well-served.

The post As Resource Dependence Deepens, Miners Pivot Back to U.S. For Exploration appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

The New Year is now a little over a week old and the inauguration of the 45^th President of the United States is just around the corner.  And while some are still dwelling on 2016 (we offered our post mortem at the end of the year), the time has come to look at what’s in store.

One of the key buzzwords, particularly if you’re looking for an issue that transcends party lines these days is “infrastructure” – an area where broad consensus on the need for significant overhaul exists.  What is often overlooked, however, is that our infrastructure today comprises of far more than just bridges, roads, and tunnels.  As our very own Daniel McGroarty outlines in a brand new piece for Investor’s Business Daily,

“[t]oday, our infrastructure extends to the national power grid — currently a patchwork of lines, nodes and often antique switching towers we rely on to move energy to where we need it — to the internet itself, which has a physicality we easily overlook in this Age of the Cloud and Wireless. These systems, marvels that they are, come closer to tin-can-and-string contraptions than the modern version we would build if we began the work today. 

Threats against our infrastructure are as diverse as they are real, and dealing with them will require a comprehensive approach.  Securing access to Copper, Graphite, Cobalt, Manganese, and Rhenium may not be the first things that come to mind when we think critical infrastructure protection – but they, and many other tech metals and minerals, have to be on our shopping list if we’re serious about a 21^st Century infrastructure that is competitive and can withstand threats from the outside and within.

As followers of ARPN are aware, we are subject to a significant degree of import-dependence for the above referenced materials, as well as for many others.  With there being more to infrastructure than “cement trucks and Jersey Barriers”, it’s time for an approach conducive to unleashing our arguably vast domestic mineral potential.

Explains McGroarty:

“It means getting over the pernicious mindset that 2017 America lives in a postindustrial age, a time when Americans are all ‘symbolic analysts,’ tapping away at keyboards, creating wealth from ones-and-zeros, live-blogging streaming video and the like, no longer dependent of transforming real raw materials into things. That messy business has been off-shored to other places, happy to sell us what we need.” 

This leaves us at the mercy of the rest of the world — and needlessly so. Concludes McGroarty:

“Word is that the new infrastructure bill will exceed $1 trillion. Shoring up our infrastructure — broadly understood — is essential, and not just for jobs and GDP, but for the stuff modern dreams are made of — everything from the gadgets we use to occupy our time to the high-performance materials that power the weapons platforms that keep us safe.

If we approach the Great Infrastructure Debate in this spirit, we could do even more than rebuild our roads, bridges and tunnels. We could build the foundation for a new American Century.”

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The following is an overview of our “Through the Gateway” informational campaign, in which we outline the importance of Gateway Metals and their Co-Products.

Here, we expand on the findings of our “Gateway Metals and the Foundations of American Technology” report, in which we focused on a group of five “Gateway Metals,” which are not only critical to manufacturing and national security in their own right, but also “unlock” tech metals increasingly important to innovation and technological development.

In the context of our informational campaign, we featured the five Gateway Metals we covered in the report – Aluminum, Copper, Nickel, Tin and Zinc – as well as the tech metals they unlock, and discussed some of the cutting edge uses for these tech metals, as well as supply and other issues surrounding them.

We are continuing our discussion of Nickel and its co-products, and will update this list as we go.

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It has become abundantly clear that Copper is a critical mineral, not just as a stand-alone traditional mainstay metal, but also as a gateway to the (mostly) rare tech metals it unlocks.

In spite of the fact that, as we’ve pointed out, the United States is home to vast mineral riches, including Copper, we are still relying on foreign imports to meet our domestic industries’ Copper demand.  With our own reserves and at mining projects ready to come online, the U.S. would not only be able to become self-sufficient with regards to meeting Copper needs, but could even position itself to be a Copper net exporter.  A similar scenario is feasible for a number of other critical metals and minerals, where we could, at a minimum, significantly reduce foreign import dependencies by harnessing our domestic mineral potential.

Standing in the way of such a development, however, is a combination of decreased exploration spending and an increase in the time it takes for domestic mineral resource extraction projects to come online courtesy of a rigid and outdated permitting process.

At present, it takes roughly seven to ten years to get a mining project permitted in the United States.   Without compromising environmental standards, that very process is wrapped up in one to two years in Australia, and three to five years in Canada.

With that said, there may be some light at the end of the tunnel.

In a rare show of bipartisanship, the United States Senate has passed legislation that may represent a first step at addressing the United States’ over-reliance on foreign mineral resources. For the first time in years, a set of provisions aimed at improving our near worst-in-the-world permitting process included in Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) energy bill, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), may actually stand a chance of making it to the President’s desk.  However, only weeks before the summer recess, the path towards reconciling Senate and House versions of the legislation has yet to be cleared.

At the executive branch level, efforts are also underway.

Several initiatives, such as the Defense Logistic Agency’s work to overhaul the defense stockpile to appropriately address today’s critical mineral needs, the White House’s Materials Genome Initiative, and the Critical Materials Institute operating under the auspices of the Department of Energy come to mind.

However, much more must be done.

As ARPN’s Dan McGroarty told Congress earlier this year:

“I don’t think there’s another nation in the world that can match American ingenuity. We can pioneer the ideas behind wind and solar and so much else – but where will the materials that make these new energy sources real – where will they come from?

How we answer that question will determine to a large extent whether the U.S. can regain its manufacturing might… Whether America will lead the alternative energy revolution… And whether the U.S. will have the metals and minerals we need to provide the modern military technology we depend on.”

Having concluded our feature month for Copper and its co-products, we will now move on to discussing our next gateway metal after the 4th of July break. Stay tuned.

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We’re talking about Rhenium, yet another metal brought to us largely courtesy of Copper refinement.  A silvery white, metallic element, Rhenium, according to USGS, has “an extremely high melting point (3,180 degrees Celsius), and a heat-stable crystalline structure, making it exceptionally resistant to heat and wear.”  Thanks to these properties, it has been an indispensible component for superalloys used in turbine blades for jet aircraft engines.  As the BBC put it, “[t]he ability of superalloys to operate at such extreme temperatures is what makes your holiday to the Algarve or Florida affordable.”

At an average abundance of less than one part per billion in the continental crust, Rhenium, like its fellow Copper Co-Product is also an extremely rare metal.  Global production is pegged at a total  of a mere 46 metric tons, with more than 80 percent of that amount going into superalloys.

Its rare metal status is one of the key reasons why recycling rates for Rhenium are increasing.  While in the past, scrapped blades used to be sold and recycled in the stainless steel industry, today most of the rare metals contained in the superalloys used in turbine blades are recovered for reuse in manufacturing.

End users have also worked hard on substitution. As the Economist reported a few years ago,

“General Electric, one of the world’s biggest makers of jet engines, has spent years developing nickel-based superalloys to replace rhenium. But the best GE’s boffins could manage was to reduce the amount of metal required, not eliminate it altogether. Moreover, few manufacturers possess the resources to achieve even such limited progress.”

The United States currently imports 79 percent of the Rhenium we use. Because the recovery process is complicated and requires special facilities, we are unlikely to fully meet our demand with domestic resources.

However, a strong demand for Rhenium is likely here to stay. That, coupled with the fact that we have proven Rhenium reserves in the U.S. (the development of one of which has been projected to generate more than 20 tons of Rhenium per year as a Copper Co-Product, thus significantly reducing our reliance on foreign imports), should suffice to get policy makers’ attention — regardless of their stance on Salma Hayek.

The post Through the Gateway: Rhenium – Rare and Sexy? appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

As McGroarty argues, “in the case of Tungsten, the U.S. currently produces more than half of the metal it uses each year. Which makes Rhenium the weak link in the WRe chain.”

The reason?  In spite of the fact that Rhenium is critical for high-temperature superalloys used in the turbines of the Joint Strike Fighter-35 and other fighter aircraft, there is no Rhenium in the U.S. National Defense Stockpile and the U.S. currently imports 78% of the Rhenium it uses.

With Rhenium being a byproduct of Copper production, the non-specified military applications could be met if the proposed Resolution Copper mine project in Arizona – expected to increase U.S. Rhenium production by more than 200% – was realized.

However, that project remains in limbo with a necessary land swap bill having met ferocious (and largely baseless) opposition by mining opponents.

Concludes McGroarty:

“U.S. policymakers have a choice to make. They can put in place a strategic resource development policy that would help produce more U.S. supply of critical metals like Rhenium – and, while they’re at it, the 18 other metals for which the U.S. is currently 100% import-dependent – or they can stick with our current faith-based resource policy on the theory that other countries will happily sell us the metals and minerals we fail to mine in the U.S.

Until then, Rhenium will remain an example of the leverage the U.S. places in other country’s hands to provide – or withhold – metals critical to U.S. national security.”

Click here to read the full piece. 

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It’s interesting that, for Pravda, one of the factors contributing to the recent escalation is that the Kuril Islands are home to the world’s largest deposit of rhenium. While rhenium, our metal of the month for February, is a little-known specialty metal, it should not come as a surprise that it is becoming a matter of national security for Japan – a country not overly rich in mineral resources that is pursuing an aggressive global strategy to gain access to critical metals and minerals.

After all, rhenium, an extremely scarce specialty metal that is indispensible for the aviation, as well as chemical industry, has all the makings of a critical mineral. This fact hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Institute for Defense Analyses, which dedicated an entire appendix to the metal in its “Reconfiguration of the National Defense Stockpile” Report to Congress in April of 2009.

Rhenium can only be recovered of a byproduct of molybdenum or copper refinement. The fact that presently, only one of three molybdenum roasting facilities in the U.S. is equipped to capture the metal, and consequently our import dependency for rhenium currently stands at 86%, makes us highly vulnerable to supply disruptions, particularly given that nations like China and Kazakhstan top the list of our foreign supplier nations.

Japan appears to have read the writing on the wall when it comes to the national security implications associated with critical non-fuel metals and minerals – a mindset we have yet to see develop in the United States.

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