In the dozen years since then, graphene has become one of the stars of nanotechnology, hailed for its ability to conduct electricity and exhibit exceptional durability and strength, according to the National Science Foundation.

However as Simon Moores, founder and CEO of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence predicted on the ARPN blog a decade ago, “the road to wide scale commercialization and unlocking the true potential of graphene” has been “long and hazardous.”

The challenges notwithstanding, the materials science revolution has marched on, and today, the graphene space is bustling.  One of the pioneers in graphene development as an early recipient of federal funding via National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants and U.S. Army SBIR contracts, Jessup, Maryland-based Vorbeck Materials Corp., currently holds more than 100 patents as its two primary graphene products, VOR-X and VOR-INK, find broad application in a variety of sectors and products.

And while it may well be a wonder material that can enhance innumerable applications ranging from “puncture-resistant footwear and wearable electronics to spray-on electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding for electronics and high-performance antennas,” as Shane Lasley writes for Metal Tech News, it is of course not “fairy dust.”

As ARPN has frequently outlined, you “need stuff to make stuff,” and graphene is derived from graphite – a critical mineral the market for which has long been dominated by China.

*** See some of our recent coverage of graphite’s supply challenges
and opportunities to alleviate them here and here.***

A just-announced partnership between Vorbeck Materials and Graphite One, Inc., owner of the Graphite Creek deposit near Nome, Alaska, recently recognized by the U.S. Geological Survey as the largest U.S. graphite deposit and among the largest in the world, could help change the narrative.

Vorbeck Materials is looking “to meet unique defense and commercial requirements with Graphite One’s high grade, US sourced graphite for advanced graphite and graphene applications.”  

At a time when geopolitical tensions are riding high, the partnership may represent an important piece of the puzzle as the U.S. and it Western allies continue step up their efforts to decouple from China.

The post Wonder Material Graphene — New Sourcing Partnership Could Further Goal of Decoupling From China appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

The clean energy provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act negotiated by Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) — which passed the U.S. Senate on August 7, 2022, was approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on August 12, 2022 and is now headed for U.S. President Joe Biden’s desk – include combined investments of $369 billion aimed at reducing carbon emissions by roughly 40% by the end of this decade.

A swath of significant clean energy tax credits aims at increasing domestic energy production while at the same time accelerating energy innovation abroad.

Among them are:

• $30 billion in production tax credits to accelerate domestic critical minerals processing as well as manufacturing of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines

• $10 billion in investment tax credits to build manufacturing facilities for EVs, wind turbines and solar panels

• $500 million to use the Defense Production Act to accelerate critical mineral production among other defense priorities

• $2 billion in retooling grants for existing auto manufacturing facilities to transition to the manufacture of EVs

• Up to $20 billion in loans for the construction of new clean vehicle manufacturing facilities

• $2 billion in materials science research funding for the National Labs

The package further includes funding for tax credits and rebates for consumers buying electric vehicles, installing solar panels or making other energy-efficiency upgrades to their homes, including, a credit of $4,000 for lower-and middle-income individuals purchasing used EVs, and up to $7,500 tax credits for EVs.  These represent a renewal of the existing $7,500 electric vehicle Federal tax credit starting in January of 2023, and carrying it through until the end of 2032. The former 200,000-vehicle cap is removed and all manufacturers will have access to the credits if they comply with the other requirements in the package.

However – and of considerable interest for followers of ARPN — a new requirement is that qualified cars must be assembled in North America, and adhere to mandated “escalating levels of critical minerals to be sourced from the U.S. or a country with a free-trade agreement with the U.S.”

Green Car Congress summarizes the escalating levels of sourcing requirements for applicable battery critical minerals (with the bill defining an extensive list of applicable minerals) as follows:

“40% for a vehicle placed in service before 1 January 2024;

50% for a vehicle placed in the service during calendar year 2024;

60% for a vehicle placed in service during calendar year 2025;

70% for a vehicle placed in service during calendar year 2026; and

80% for a vehicle placed in service after 31 December 2026.

The bill places similar restrictions on the percentage of value of the components, but leading up to a 100% requirement for vehicles placed in service after 31 December 2028.”

While experts like John Adams, U.S. Army brigadier general (ret.), believe that the sourcing requirements for the battery materials contained in the package are key to addressing “emerging energy security vulnerabilities before they are intractable crises,” others have cautioned that because the auto industry is so heavily reliant on battery materials and components from China – as evidenced by the latest supply deals inked by Tesla – the requirement will represent an almost insurmountable challenge. Says Simon Moores, chief executive of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence:

“Considering it takes seven years to build a mine and refining plant but only 24 months to build a battery plant, the best part of this decade is needed to establish an entirely new industry in the United States.” 

The challenge is certainly real as, in the words of General Adams: “China has worked diligently to turn mineral supply chains into an economic leg up but also an enormous source of geopolitical leverage — not unlike how Russia has leveraged its energy trade with Europe.”  He maintains however, that “the mineral sourcing requirements in the reconciliation bill – coupled with other incentives to encourage domestic mining, mineral processing and recycling– are precisely the bold measures needed to address this alarming vulnerability.” 

Also of note for followers of ARPN, the package places an emphasis on a concept which, as Reuters columnist Andy Home recently suggested, “could allow some to move beyond [carbon] neutrality to become net carbon negative:” a set of incentives to substantially expand carbon capture technologies that capture carbon dioxide and either store it underground or ship it for reuse.

As ARPN previously pointed out, “experts believe that harnessing the natural chemical reactions that convert captured CO2 into rock and store it underground, as currently done at large scale by carbon mineralization company Carbfix at its Coda Terminal in Iceland (see our piece on the issue here), could become an important asset in the push to meet global climate goals.”

The emphasis on carbon capture in the package is consistent with the U.S. Department of Energy’s recent $2.2. million award to fund to a Rio Tinto-led project with joint-venture partner Talon Metals Corp. at the Tamarack Nickel Project in central Minnesota to achieve carbon capture by a process that mineralizes the carbon in rock – a process considered far more stable than methods that inject carbon, where it remains vulnerable to seepage and fracturing due to earthquakes.

Some caution, however, that “while the new bill may appear helpful on a theoretical basis, both carbon capture and storage and direct air capture could face some serious headwinds over the course of the next decade and beyond,” possibly in the form of opposition to the construction of necessary pipelines.

Any new law this wide-ranging will require federal guidance on the way to implementation – and spark follow-on efforts by resource development opponents to roll-back some elements even as resource development proponents look to build on this new legislative initiative.

All of which is good reason to be hopeful that the bill’s requirements will help jumpstart a more comprehensive push towards domestic sourcing and processing, onshoring, friend-shoring, and harnessing the materials science revolution, which are important components of a comprehensive “all-of-the-above” resource development approach.

As the bill proceeds to the president for signature, ARPN will continue to monitor what may well be, as General Adams phrases it, “a critically important leap forward to build the secure, responsible industrial base our economy and national security needs.”

The post Congress “Net-Zeroes” in on Energy Security, Supply Chains for Critical Minerals – A Look at the Inflation Reduction Act appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

A look at the numbers reveals that despite a noticeable push towards strengthening U.S. supply chains (we’ve featured some recent developments here) “there is still a gaping hole in America’s efforts” according to JB Straubel, a co-founder of Tesla who has moved on to head up Redwood Materials, a battery component company planning to invest more than $2 billion to start building battery components as early as this year.

Muller cites Jigar Shah, head of the Department of Energy’s Loan Program’s office, who says that the U.S. currently only possesses about 5% of the manufacturing capacity required to hit President Joe Biden’s ambitious declared goal of 50% of all vehicles sold in the U.S. being electric by 2030.

Simon Moores, CEO of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and Morgan Bazilian, Director of the Payne Institute and Professor of Public Policy at Colorado School of Mines, dig deeper into the numbers in a recent piece on the Benchmark Mineral Intelligence Blog, pointing out that while in 2015, 40% of the cost of a lithium ion battery was raw materials, that percentage has shot up to 80% in 2022.  Their conclusion: “[I]f EVs mean lithium ion batteries, EVs must now mean critical minerals and mining.”  Industry leaders like Tesla’s Elon Musk are openly mulling throwing their hats into the mining ring – but, as Moores and Bazilian write: 

“OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] are right to be fearful and hesitant to want to ‘become miners’.

Echoes of an ill-fated venture by Henry Ford to build rubber plantations in Brazil in the 1920s after the industry ran out of rubber tyres loom large. One hundred years on the industry faces an eerily similar problem.

The reality is that this global EV blueprint is yet to be built out to a scale needed to reach surging consumer demand and increasing aggressive OEM and government targets… We are nowhere close.”

Moores and Bazilian see the recent invocation of the Defense Production Act Title III by the Biden Administration to strengthen battery supply chains as a “major step forward” and “a move that it hopes will drag the finance community in to 21^st century mining.” But as they conclude, the proof is in the pudding, and it goes back to a truly comprehensive “all-of-the-above” approach across the entire value chain that ARPN and others have been calling for.  The Administration has been embracing partnership with allies, and expanding recycling and closed-loop solutions, but has been guarded at best when it comes to domestic mining. According to Moores and Bazilian, that must change:

“Big talk on EVs must now mean equally as big statements on mining. After all, a Gigafactory without secure raw materials is as useful to an OEM as a grain silo.” 

As ARPN has said many times, the first word in supply chain…. is supply.

The post Time to Address the “Gaping Hole” in America’s Efforts to Secure Critical Mineral Supply Chains appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

While, as Reuter columnist Andy Home points out, “the initial impact is likely to be incremental rather than revolutionary,” observers and stakeholders hope that it will “will likely oil the wheels of domestic mining and refining” by “funding easy wins” and “low hanging fruit,” as Simon Moores, Managing Director of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence phrased it, and will set the stage for subsequent additional steps to support domestic mining and processing projects.

Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, and rising resource nationalism in various parts of the world, have raised the stakes for U.S. mineral resource security, as we have highlighted in several posts – but of course, as Home points out “’unreliable foreign sources’ is usually diplomatic code for China, when it comes to strategic metals.”

And while price surges for raw materials for EV and other automobile parts such as palladium, nickel, and aluminum in the wake of Russia’s war on Ukraine have certainly “open[ed] up new potential mineral hostilities and underlines the need for greater self-sufficiency,” Chinese “EV manufacturers grapple with rising raw material costs, shrinking margins,” as Tyler Durden reports for ZeroHedge – which will only add fuel to the fire as the global race for battery materials kicks into high gear.  Already, some observers are warning that China may attempt to exploit the current global focus on Ukraine to further bolster its critical mineral assets.

Meanwhile, automakers have begun securing their own supply chains, with Tesla leading the pack having signed several deals for nickel over the past few months in anticipation of a looming supply challenge. Followers of ARPN may recall his public direct plea to mining executives to “please mine more nickel” stating that his company would give them a “giant contract for a long period of time” if they mined nickel efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way.”  Other EV manufacturers “are left scrambling,” as ZeroHedge’s Durden writes.

As such, the Defense Production invocation can and should be seen as, in the words of Reuters’s Home, “a federal government accelerator for a domestic battery metals supply chain that is still in its infancy” – but Homes believes that “[t]he real significance of invoking the DPA […] is that it elevates battery metals to the top of the U.S. critical materials supply list.”

Concludes Home invoking a “Back to the Future” theme:

“Industrial metals moved out of the geopolitical limelight after the 1970s, when successive oil shocks rocked the global economy. 

President Biden’s lithium echo of Truman’s [1952] steel warning [-- "Our national security and our chances for peace depend on our defense production, (and) our defense production depends on steel"--] tells you they’re rapidly returning to centre stage.”

The post The DPA in the Context of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and Chinese Strategy – “Back to the Future”? appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

a Last Look Back at the United States’ Critical Mineral Resource Challenge in 2021

Well, two words, for the sticklers.  Merriam Webster may have gone with “vaccine,” but for ARPN, there was really no doubt. As one article put it, “2021 is the year ‘supply chain’ went from jargon to meme.”  

As we noted more than once in 2021, the first word in supply chain is supply – a broad hint that we should wonder, and in many cases worry, about where we get the constituent parts and essential materials that make our EVs, our laptops, computers and CT scanners, smart phones, and smart bombs.

Even cookies – not the website kind, more the chocolate-chip variety.  As Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster put it in a 2021 New Yorker Cartoon: “What me wants to know:  What are the implications of the supply-chain crisis for cookie?”

For ARPN, it all added up to a teachable moment:  A reason to step back from the magic of modern life and ask, where does the stuff that makes our stuff come from?

And what better time to take that step back than mid-December, which is customarily the time for ARPN to take stock and assess what has happened on the critical mineral resources front in the past twelve months — where we are, and, filled with hope for a new year, where we are headed.

COVID-19 and Push Towards Net Carbon Zero as Catalysts

With the U.S. presidential elections behind us, one of the two key issues dominating the news cycle in 2020 has faded into the background, but of course the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has not. Vaccines have brought hope and have helped save lives, but the arrival of new virus variants have made clear that the issue is here to stay.

In 2021, two major themes — the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the accelerating global push towards net carbon zero dominated headlines.

Both themes served as catalysts for the rise of one key issue in the mineral resource realm and beyond:  Securing the Supply Chain.

After all, the supply chain is what everything hinges on these days — our success in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, the global push towards net carbon zero, buying a new car, putting presents under the Christmas tree, or (if you’re trying to find cream cheese for that traditional holiday dessert) just minding our day-to-day business in our personal lives.

In 2020, we were given a first glimpse into the challenges associated with an over-reliance on foreign, and especially Chinese, raw materials, the effects of which were being felt across broad segments of manufacturing.

In 2021, the extent of our supply chain vulnerabilities has reached crisis levels.

Where We Began – Amidst Big Policy Shifts, Signs for Continuity in Mineral Resource Realm

Observers of the critical mineral resource realm saw early indications that, unlike some other policy areas, critical mineral resource policy would display a certain level of continuity. In December of 2020, then-Assistant Secretary of State (Energy Resources) Frank Fannon declared that he expected the Energy Resource Governance Initiative (ERGI) — an initiative aimed at securing supply chains for metals critical for the clean energy transition — would continue in 2021, and policy statements made by the transition team suggested that, while emphases were certainly going to shift, efforts to secure critical mineral supply chains was going to continue taking a central role under an incoming Biden Administration.

Remarks made by the incoming Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in January signaled that the Biden Administration acknowledged the urgency of our nation’s critical minerals challenge, and the importance of securing supply chains:

“If we are to build the supply chain for batteries, as one example, if we allow for China to corner the market on lithium or for the Democratic Republic of Congo to be the place where everyone gets cobalt when there may be child labor or human rights violations associated with that supply, then we are missing a massive opportunity for our own security but also for a market for own our trading partners that also may want to have access to minerals that are produced in a responsible way.”

She added, “the responsible way is an important thing to mention — we know we can mine in a responsible way.”

The Push towards “Building Back Better” 

One of the key priorities of the Biden Administration would dominate the domestic policy agenda for much of 2021.  President Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda: an economic recovery package seeking to “make historic investments in infrastructure, along with manufacturing, research and development and clean energy.”

The increased focus on clean energy brought the critical minerals challenge to the forefront of the political discourse.  As followers of ARPN well know, the road to a lower-carbon future is paved with critical metals and minerals – not least evidenced by the instructive World Bank report entitled “The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition,” which estimated that production of metals and minerals underpinning the shift, such as the battery tech metals graphite, lithium and cobalt, would have to increase by nearly 500 percent by 2050 to meet global demand for renewable energy technology. To achieve the transition to a below 2°C pathway as outlined by the Paris Agreement, the deployment of wind, solar and geothermal power, as well as energy storage will require more than three billion tons of minerals and metals.

The growing emphasis on clean energy on the part of the Biden Administration, embedded into a global push towards net zero carbon emissions that began to accelerate in 2020 and has continued into 2021, culminated in the 2021 Climate Change Conference (COP26) commitments by various countries, territories, and automakers to sell only zero-emission vehicles by 2040.  Against the backdrop of these commitments, and the growing awareness of the mineral intensity of sustainably greening the future, supply chains took center stage.

Supply Chains Take Center Stage – the White House’s 100 Day Supply Chain Report

On June 8, 2021, the White House released its 100 Day Supply Chain Report — key findings from reviews directed under Executive Order 14017 “America’s Supply Chains” (E.O.14017). Signed on February 24, 2021, the Executive Order instructed President Biden’s economic and national security teams to conduct a 100-day review of four key U.S. supply chains across federal agencies to assess the nation’s “resiliency and capacity of the American manufacturing supply chains and defense industrial base to support national security [and] emergency preparedness.” 

The report assessed the risks and vulnerabilities for several key industry sectors — semiconductors, high- capacity batteries, medical supplies and critical and strategic metals and minerals, and offered recommendations on how to address the challenges.  Not only did the report endorse an all-of-the-above approach to critical mineral resource policy, by looking to  invest in “sustainable production, refining, and recycling capacity domestically,” while at the same time looking to “diversify supply chains away from adversarial nations and sources with unacceptable environmental and labor standards” by working closely with allies and partners. The Department of Defense-led chapter also specifically acknowledged the importance of the inter-relationship between what we at ARPN have been calling “gateway metals” and their “co-products.”

See ARPN’s report on the 100 Day Supply Chain Review here.
To learn more about the Gateway Metal/Co-product relationship, click here. 

 On July 22, 2021 the House Armed Services Committee’s bipartisan Defense Critical Supply Chain Task Force, chartered in March of 2021 to “review the industrial base supply chain to identify and analyze threats and vulnerabilities,” released its final report, which includes key findings and policy recommendations, many of which mirror the Administration’s 100-Day Supply Chain report in the context of an all-of-the-above approach.

Against mounting pressures, hope was building that both reports would create sufficient momentum to translate recommendations into actual policy, programs, and projects to address the nation’s deep shortfalls in Critical Mineral supply.

Shoring Up Supply Chains in the Wake of the 100 Day Supply Chain Report

Industry Deals
Only weeks after the release of the 100 Day Supply Chain Report, several deals struck in the critical mineral resource realm suggested that the “all of the above” approach was off to a good start.

International Cooperation
Efforts to promote closer collaboration with allied nations to secure stable supply of critical minerals had already been underway in 2020, and continued in 2021, in line with the all-of-the above approach endorsed by the 100 Day Supply Chain Report.  In this context, relations with long-standing trading partners Canada and Australia remained the focal point, but stakeholders also called for increased leveraging of the National Technology and Industrial Base (NTIB), which, originally established to strengthen technology links between the U.S. and Canada in 1993, was expanded in 2016 to include the United Kingdom and Australia. 

Industry Efforts to Sustainably Green Our Future
Acknowledging their role and responsibility in supporting and building out “sustainable production, refining, and recycling capacity domestically,” the mining sector and associated industries have made significant capital investments and – long before 2021 – began harnessing the materials science revolution to meet increased expectations of consumers, society, and governments to support the green energy transition.  ARPN has, over the course of 2021, featured many of the industry initiatives to that effect, and will continue to do so going forward.

 Examples of recent industry initiatives to sustainably green the future can be
found here and here.

Legislation and the New Draft Critical Minerals List
While several pieces of critical minerals legislation never made it out of Congress, the bipartisan infrastructure package passed by Congress and signed by President Biden contains key provisions ranging from mine permitting reforms, to investments in carbon capture and critical mineral mapping initiatives aimed at strengthening critical mineral supply chains.

Meanwhile, the fact that a new draft Whole-of-Government Critical Minerals List released by USGS in November with a request for public comment has grown from 35 to 50 metals and minerals deemed critical for U.S. economic and national security (– essentially half of the naturally-occurring elements on the Periodic Table –), is proof of the critical role these materials play in our Tech Metal Era.

See our commentary on the new draft list here, here, and here.

Once finalized, the updated list, additions and omissions to which we featured in a series of blog posts, may provide fresh impetus for policy reform in 2022.

The NIMBY Challenge
While much is being done to shore up U.S. supply chain security, efforts continue to face a significant hurdle:

For all of the verbal affirmations of an “all-of-the-above” approach to mineral resource policy on the part of the Biden Administration, the overall plan thus far appears more geared towards “rely[ing] on ally countries to supply the bulk of the metals needed to build electric vehicles and focus[ing] on processing them domestically into battery parts, [as] part of a strategy designed to placate environmentalists.”

The latest manifestation of this challenge became apparent at a November 2021 congressional hearing, during which U.S. Representative Scott Peters (D-Calif.) suggested that rather than onshoring minerals production, the U.S. should try “friend-shoring,” adding that “it seems like we should be working with our allies to develop new mines and factories for clean energy technologies in more favorable locations.”

While the “friend-shoring” concept is an important pillar of the “all-of-the-above” concept and highly appealing especially to those policy makers with “not in my backyard (NIMBY)” constituencies, it is insufficient to alleviate our overall problem.

As Thom Carter, energy adviser to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and executive director of the Governor’s Office of Energy Development, argued in a piece for the Deseret News, the “keep it all in the ground” push by “Washington, D.C. and the East and West Coasts” provides little more than a “talking point. (…) Anyone who says that you can get power through a ‘keep it in the ground’ policy isn’t telling you the truth. (…) All power, whether traditional or renewable, is impacted by what comes out of the ground. Advocating for renewable energy sources also means maintaining, if not expanding, our mining infrastructure.”

The good news is that courtesy of the materials science revolution, industry can harness new technologies to do expand our mining infrastructure responsibly and sustainably – as we outlined above, and as even Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm acknowledged this summer during a U.S. Senate hearing:

 “This is the United States. We can mine in a responsible way. And many places are doing it. And there are some places where there are more challenges, but we can do this.” 

A Sense of Urgency:  On China, Winning the Battery Arms Race, and the Overall Critical Minerals Challenge

While not making as many headlines this year, the tech war between China and the United States, the extent of which was exposed in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic placed a magnifying glass on our mineral resource dependencies, continued in 2021. In essence, this tech war is a competition ““to see which country will dominate the 21st Century Technology Age, in which our ‘Achilles heel’ is our over-reliance on foreign metals and minerals underpinning 21st Century technology.”  The tech war has a number of battlefronts, ranging from aviation to space technology, from biotech and quantum sciences to robotics, and from military technology to artificial intelligence.

From an ARPN perspective, critical mineral resources are – in the military sense of the term — the materiel from which modern weapons of war are fashioned, and within that context, aside from the rare earths challenge, perhaps the biggest theater of U.S.-Chinese confrontation is the battery arms race, which in 2021 not only continued, but punched into overdrive.

As National Mining Association president and CEO Rich Nolan argued in a November 2021 op-ed, while the United States still has a shot at winning the EV revolution, it is currently not only not in the lead, but is “being lapped” by China, which jockeyed for pole position in the EV race a long time ago and has since attained a startling level of “control of the EV supply chain, particularly the production and processing of minerals that make lithium-ion batteries possible.”

As Benchmark Mineral Intelligence data shows, the battery arms race trend was set in motion in 2015 – but today the megafactories are mainstream, with 225 plants in the pipeline as of August 2021.  While the U.S. is no longer a bystander in this race, only very few megafactories are currently located in the United States.

To succeed in this environment, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s Simon Moores says stakeholders will need to understand the lithium-ion-to-EV supply chain, its individual sections, and the linkage between them:

“Automakers who quickly understand the importance of these linked steps in the battery supply chain to the quality and cost of their EVs will be the most successful at navigating the next decade. 

For governments, the shifts in the economics of the supply chain […] provide opportunities to create jobs, garner influence over a strategic industry, and establish new trading relationships, particularly relevant as Europe and the United States, under a Biden presidency, will seek to reduce reliance on China as a single point in the supply chain.”

And in stern message for us as we look to the new beginnings of a new year:

“Those who do not see the importance of the lithium-ion battery will have no meaningful future.”

All-of-the-Above and Supply Chains in 2022 – Beyond Verbal Commitments 

2020 was a watershed year to expose the extent of our nation’s over-reliance on foreign mineral resources. Meanwhile, considering the aftershocks of pandemic-related policy measures such as lockdowns, and a new global resolve to pursue a low carbon energy future we feel confident to say that 2021 could go down in history as the Year of the Supply Chain.

While several steps were taken to address associated challenges, pressures will only continue to mount – particularly when it comes to the sought-after global green energy transition. Stakeholders increasingly realize the urgency of the situation, as the mineral resource-focused passages the freshly codified infrastructure bill underscore.

However, many have yet to fully embrace a comprehensive “all-of-the-above” strategy to secure our supply chains.

Consequently, current efforts “might pale in comparison to the scale and pace of mineral demand growth,” as Reed Blakemore of the Atlantic Council lamented in a recently released study on the role of minerals in realizing US transportation electrification goals.

The challenge is too large to address piecemeal.

While recycling, substitution, and partnering with allies should be part of any overall comprehensive strategy, strengthening domestic mineral resource development across the entire value chain must be a key focal point of our efforts if we want to ensure reliable access to the critical minerals we need to meet our current and future needs.

New Years are an invitation to take stock – a phrase with multiple meanings now that our just-in-time economy has rudely reminded us that stocks can be rapidly depleted, and dependencies exposed.  Here’s hoping that as we survey our prospects for 2022, it will be the year we take critical minerals and metals as seriously as Cookie Monster takes the things that make his cookies….  cookies.

If “supply chain” could move from jargon to meme in 2021, maybe 2022 can be the year that strengthening supply chains can move from rhetoric to reality.

The post ARPN’s 2021 Word of the Year: Supply Chain appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

The renewable energy sector has been transforming at neck-breaking speed, and with that, demand for the metals and minerals underpinning the green energy shift has been surging. EV battery technology is one of the key drivers of these developments, and battery mega factories are shooting up like mushrooms.

In a recent podcast interview with HC Insider, Simon Moores — managing director of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and a member of the ARPN panel of experts — zeroes in on lithium, one of the key building blocks of battery technology.

As HC Insider points out, “[lithium] mining is constrained by available ores and multiyear start up times. Chemical processing and cathode production is technically challenging, environmentally impactful, and concentrated in China. EV manufacturers are buying all the Lithium supply they can on decade-long contracts.”

With demand forecast to vastly outstrip supply two decades from now, the question of how the rest of the world can tackle the lithium supply chain challenges going forward looms large.

Take a listen as Simon Moores, who has testified before the U.S. Congress on several occasions to alert U.S. policy makers to the magnitude of the global battery arms race, discusses the issue here.

The post Podcast: Battery Tech Supply Chain Expert Simon Moores Discusses Lithium Challenge appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

Targeting supply chains for semiconductors, high-capacity batteries, medical supplies and rare earth metals, the White House aims to “identify ways to secure U.S. supply chains against a wide range of risks and vulnerabilities.”

The executive order comes against the backdrop of two recent announcements which mark a pivotal moment for EV battery technology in the United States: President Biden’s declaration to shift the entire federal vehicle fleet to EVs made in America, and General Motors’ announcement to cease production of cars powered by combustion engines by 2035. Undoubtedly, this will further heat up the already “turbocharged” lithium-ion-battery-to-electric-vehicle (EV) supply chain.

As the National Mining Association’s Rich Nolan wrote in a recent RealClear Energy piece, this moment “offers both the potential for significant progress in reducing emissions and the opportunity for the U.S. to win the accelerating race for the future of the auto industry and the millions of jobs it supports.” But he cautioned that “if we don’t get serious about building the domestic mineral supply chain to support it, it’s a race we could lose.”

Followers of ARPN know that we are already “in the midst of a global battery arms race in which the US is presently a bystander” — and that China, having taken the “initiative to build battery capacity at speed and scale” has long taken the pole position.

Citing Benchmark Mineral Intelligence data, Nolan pointed to the fact that while 142 battery megafactories are currently in the pipeline worldwide, of these 107 will be in China, with 53 already actively producing. Meanwhile, there are currently only nine megafactories lined up in the United States.

To succeed in this environment, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s Simon Moores says stakeholders will need to understand the lithium-ion-to-EV supply chain, its individual sections, and the linkage between them:

“Automakers who quickly understand the importance of these linked steps in the battery supply chain to the quality and cost of their EVs will be the most successful at navigating the next decade. For governments, the shifts in the economics of the supply chain outlined in this article provide opportunities to create jobs, garner influence over a strategic industry, and establish new trading relationships, particularly relevant as Europe and the United States, under a Biden presidency, will seek to reduce reliance on China as a single point in the supply chain. Those who do not see the importance of the lithium-ion battery will have no meaningful future.”

It’s not too late yet, but time and a firm commitment are of the essence. Concludes Nolan:

“Catching up to China will mean building an EV supply-chain strategy from the mine up. The U.S. has the resources to do it. What we need now is a commitment to prioritize the production and a mines-to-markets strategy that enables us to build infrastructure for the electrification of transportation that will support American industry and millions of American workers.”

President Biden’s executive order and the confirmation of Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm are early indications that the current administration understands the stakes. Here’s hoping that decisive action to strengthen our domestic critical mineral supply chains from EVs to Rare Earths and beyond will follow.

The post A Pivotal Moment to “Get Serious About Building the Domestic Mineral Supply Chain” appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

This year’s virtual summit will bring together U.S. Government representatives and industry stakeholders to discuss materials challenges in the realm of lithium ion battery technology, as well as electric vehicle and energy storage supply chains.

With critical mineral demand expected to skyrocket — a World Bank study earlier this year estimated that production of metals and minerals like graphite, lithium and cobalt will have to increase by nearly 500 percent by 2050 to meet global demand for renewable energy technology — and materials supply chain issues brought to the forefront by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the event couldn’t be more timely.

Keynote speakers include:

U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Chairman, Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and one of the few long-standing champions of comprehensive mineral resource policy reform in the U.S. Senate,
U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), Ranking Member, Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, and
Simon Moores, Managing Director, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, who is also a member of the American Resources Policy Network panel of experts, and has testified on critical minerals issues before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on several occasions.

A second panel comprised of industry representatives will round out the event.

You can register for the event here. It will be free to view live; however only Benchmark Members will have access to a replay of the webinar.

The post Event Alert: Benchmark Webinar on Lithium Ion Battery, EV and Energy Storage Supply Chain Issues appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

According to London-based Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, whose analysts forecast that at least European 16 plants will be operational by 2030, there have been “some issues with cell producers in Europe struggling to ramp cell production in new facilities to meet demand, but in terms of construction timelines the plants to date have remained on schedule.” 

With the World Bank forecasting that production of metals and minerals like graphite, lithium and cobalt will have to increase by nearly 500 percent by 2050 to meet global demand for renewable energy technology, this development comes as no surprise.  Growing mineral resource pressures in the context of the low-carbon transition are also prompting global miners to shift their traditional focus, as evidenced most recently by Rio Tinto’s decision to invest almost $200 to move to the next development stage of the lithium-borate Jadar project in Serbia.

While China continues to hold the pole position as the world’s largest producer of lithium ion batteries, a continuation of the European gigafactory buildout at the above-referenced pace would put Europe at a total annual production capacity of 446 GWh and place the region in second place.  It would also perpetuate the “bystander status” into which the United States has maneuvered itself in the context of the global battery arms race.

Earlier this year, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s managing director and member of the ARPN panel of experts Simon Moores argued that  

“[i]n February 2019, there were 70 battery megafactories in the pipeline of which 46 are in China and 5 in the USA. Today there are 136 of these super-sized electric vehicle battery plants in operation or being planned: 101 in China and 8 in the USA. China is building a battery gigafactory (megafactory) at the rate of one every week; the USA at one every four months. In 2019, China produced 72% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries whereas the USA only 9%.”

Testifying before the U.S. Senate in June of this year, Moores renewed his call for decisive U.S. action by invoking the U.S.’s successful creation of a widespread semiconductor industry in the 1980s:

“The lead that the USA built in semiconductors and computing power due to companies like Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel Corporation has sustained the USA’s dominance in global computing for over 5 decades.

Likewise, those who invest in battery capacity and supply chains today are likely to dominate this industry for generations to come.

It is not too late for the US but action is needed now.”

While U.S. policymakers are increasingly aware of the urgency of our nation’s critical mineral needs — a case in point being the formation of a bipartisan “Critical Materials Caucus” in the U.S. House of Representatives late last month) — political calculations in a watershed election year won’t make it easy for reform-minded lawmakers to chance the status quo. 

However, a look at Europe’s forging ahead with its gigafactory buildout should serve as a reminder that the rest of the world won’t wait for us.

The post Europe Forges Ahead With Battery Gigafactory Buildout As U.S. Still Struggles to Get Off Starting Block appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.

While parades and fireworks to honor the men and women who have fought for, and continue to safeguard our freedom today, have been canceled in many places, July 4th still provides us with an opportunity to pause and take stock of where we are as a nation — and this year, there is much to reflect on.

From a critical mineral resource perspective, we at ARPN have always used the occasion of Independence Day to remind ourselves that “while we cherish the freedom we are blessed with in so many ways, we must not become complacent, as there are areas where we’re increasingly becoming less independent” — with our reliance on foreign mineral resources being a case in point. 

Today, this statement rings more true than ever, with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic having exposed the vast extent of our mineral resource supply chain vulnerabilities. As ARPN’s Daniel McGroarty argued in a piece for Real Clear Politics in March, “[t]he rapid spread of the coronavirus is doing more than claim an alarming number of human hosts — it is burning through decades of bureaucratic inertia and plain inattention as the American economic ecosystem has become dangerously dependent on China.”

As followers of ARPN know — and as our nation as a whole is increasingly realizing —the United States’ reliance on foreign non-fuel minerals has significantly increased over the course of the past 65 years, both in terms of number and type, as well as as a percentage of import reliance.  Along with the rise in import dependency came a drastic shift in provider countries.

Whereas the number of non-fuel mineral commodities for which the United States was greater than 50% net import-dependent was 28 in 1954, this number increased to 47 in 2014.  And while the U.S. was 100% net import reliant for 8 of the non-fuel commodities analyzed in 1954, this total import reliance increased to 11 non-fuel minerals in 1984, and currently stands at 17.  In the latest USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries report, China continues to be the elephant in the data room, and is listed 25 times as one of the major import sources of metals and minerals for which our net import reliance is 50% or greater.

This spells trouble, and this realization is going mainstream, as indicated by this week’s Wall Street Journal discussion of a report by consulting firm Horizon Advocacy, which (looking specifically at rare earths) warns that “China’s rare earths positioning both implicates and threatens the entire global system,” and that “China will not rule out using rare earth exports as leverage (…).”

Thankfully, there are indications that policymakers on Capitol Hill, in Cabinet Departments and in the White House are taking the issue seriously, and, after years of inaction, a flurry of current policy initiatives aimed at alleviating our supply chain vulnerabilities points to the U.S. Government viewing strategic materials and critical minerals issues with a new seriousness.

Underscoring the urgency of the situation largely from a battery tech minerals perspective, Simon Moores, managing director of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and a member of the ARPN panel of experts, told the committee that “(…) the consequences of a long-term cutoff of some of the critical materials that we’ve discussed today would just be disastrous for the U.S. economy. (…) The threat of China…is becoming more and more evident every day even during this pandemic.” 

How we proceed forward over the next few months of 2020 could become a watershed moment for United States. Will we continue to tinker around the edges of policy reform, or will we finally take significant steps towards U.S. mineral resource independence? 

As Moores concluded in his Senate testimony with regards to securing critical mineral resource supply chains:

“It is not too late for the US but action is needed now.”

The post Independence Day 2020 – Critical Mineral Resource Policy in a Watershed Year appeared first on American Resources Policy Network.