supply chain

Hours after President Donald Trump issued a new executive order declaring a national emergency on critical minerals, the U.S. Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support received testimony from Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen M. Lord on the integrity of America’s critical minerals supply chains.

Kicking off the hearing, Subcommittee Chairman Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) argued that COVID-19 and the rise of China have given new urgency to “the vulnerabilities and gaps in our supply chains, particularly as it relates to national security.”

Said Sullivan:

“Highly technical weapons systems, as well as consumer electronics (…) increasingly have a role in warfighting and are increasingly reliant on Chinese supply chains. One area of supply chain integrity that is particularly important to me, and I think the rest of the country, is our supply of strategic critical minerals and metals that go into many of our modern-day electronics and our modern-day weapons. The key issue on this is that we know we’re reliant on China. In many cases, we, the United States of America, actually have these critical minerals—for example, in the great state of Alaska—and we actually mine them and process them [using] much higher environmental standards than the Chinese (…) and I think people are starting to recognize that.”

In her testimony, Under Secretary Lord addressed the Department of Defense’s efforts to strengthen and secure the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), “both before and since the President issued ‘Proclamation on Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak’ on: March 13, 2020.”

Lord pointed to reduced U.S. capability in microelectronics as a particularly troublesome area for the DIB, where reliance on non-U.S. suppliers for leaves DoD vulnerable.

Outlining current and future efforts, she said:

“What we can do today is begin the mining and processing (…) [and] we can think about stockpiling some more of these. We need the authorities to move forward with these, in some cases, and we certainly need appropriations (…) We actually have worked through OMB (Office of Management and Budget) and have submitted to Congress and hoped to see another appropriation to DOD under the CARES Act, and we actually had submitted $5 billion for another DPA (Defense Production Act) Title III appropriation, because our industrial business council has a very long list of critical frugalities that we are trying to address. Rare earth is our key one.”

When asked by Sen. Sullivan how the Strategic Petroleum Reserve differed from the National Defense Stockpile and whether said stockpile should be expanded to take on a role similar to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Lord replied: “There is already a lot of work going on to look at expanding the National Defense Stockpile to include more rare earths and to look at that as a national resource.” She committed to providing the subcommittee with a plan, within 30 days, for establishing a domestic stockpile of critical minerals.

In a week where the lack of critical mineral supply was declared a “national emergency,” the Senate SASC hearing underscores that resource dependency, in the 21st Century Tech Metals Era, is a clear and present danger.

“This obscure metal is going to go ballistic in a few years,” John Kaiser of Kaiser Research told the Investing News Network a few years ago. The metal he was referring to is Scandium — a material that is “as strong as titanium, as light as aluminum, and as hard as ceramic.” It’s a material that has become one of the poster children of our nation’s critical mineral resource dependencies — though you are most likely to have heard of the element group it is assigned to: the Rare Earths. Like its 16 peers in the REE group, scandium itself is not necessarily rare, but it is “rarely concentrated in nature, making commercially viable deposits extremely scarce.”

Most frequently harnessed as a co-product in the refining process of other metals such as tin and nickel, processing has proven difficult.

Thus, in spite of breakthrough new applications for the material, especially in the context of the lightweighting revolution (readers may recall the Light Rider), Kaiser’s prediction has yet to materialize.

There are indications, however, that its time is about to come as the materials science revolution marches on.

A new piece for Investing News Network takes a closer look at the current scandium market and discusses current production, new market entrants, and scandium’s potential to shine in the future.

The piece, which draws from a recent Kaiser Research study citing “an enormous latent demand for scandium if it ever became available on a primary scalable basis,” highlights two recent market events in the scandium space that, according to Kaiser “have the potential to launch scandium demand growth over the next decade towards a 1,000 (tonne per annum) market worth $2 billion:”

“For one, Rio Tinto announced in early 2020 that it has developed a route to recovery for scandium at its Sorel-Tracy facility in Quebec, where it produces titanium slag from the Lac Tio iron-titanium deposit. [More information on this development here.]

Secondly, Scandium International Mining filed an application in late 2019 for a patent protecting a method for recovering scandium and other metals from the waste streams of copper oxide leaching operations. In mid-2020, the company announced that copper raffinate tests showed there is enough recoverable scandium using its patent-pending process to match the supply growth coming from Rio Tinto’s recovery of scandium from its titanium upgrading slag.”

Airbus has long recognized the importance of scandium, and developed the aluminum alloy “Scalmalloy” in partnership with APWORKS several years ago. Earlier this week, the company announced three new concepts for “the world’s first zero-emission commercial aircraft which could enter service by 2035” — and there’s a good chance that – in light of its properties and Airbus’s work in the field – scandium may have found its way into the concepts.

With lightweighting becoming increasingly important in aeronautics and the automobile industry, and breakthroughs as the ones referenced above, the odds for scandium to finally “go ballistic” may have just increased significantly.

As the U.S. explores its options when it comes to diversifying our critical minerals supply chains away from China in the wake of COVID-19, Europe is coming to grips with its own mineral supply challenges. According to European metals association Eurometaux, the region “has reached a critical fork in the road,” as it grapples with [...]

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After years of missed opportunities to prioritize mineral resource policy, the U.S. government is stepping up its efforts to secure critical mineral resource supply chains.   The latest case in point is the drafting of a “joint action plan” with our neighbors to the North to reduce reliance on Chinese supplies of Rare Earth Elements (REEs) — which, [...]

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On Tuesday, June 4, the U.S. Department of Commerce released the “interagency report that was submitted to the President pursuant to Executive Order 13817, A Federal Strategy to Ensure Secure and Reliable Supplies of Critical Minerals.”  The report, which, according to the agency’s official announcement, “contains a government-wide action plan, including recommendations to advance research and development [...]