USGS

Earlier this week, USGS released its latest iteration of the annual Mineral Commodity Summaries, a much-cited report that every year gives us a data-driven glimpse into our nation’s mineral resource dependencies.

It’s fitting that ARPN reviews the report on Groundhog Day, February 2^nd, because just like in the Bill Murray classic movie, in which the clock jumps back to the same day all over again every morning, the Critical Mineral movie appears to bring us back to a situation of ongoing deep dependency on foreign sourced metals and minerals every year – at least in recent memory.

While there are some changes from last year’s report, the number of metals and minerals for which we are 100% import dependent dropped by two from 17 to 15, the only significant change here is a drop for Vanadium, with recalculations made for overall import reliance suggesting that its inclusion in the 100% segment has been overstated for several years. (The drop for nepheline syenite from 100% to greater than 95% is less significant, with the numerical drop small and material not featuring on the critical minerals list.)

And for all the talk about reducing the United States’ resource dependence in recent years,  a deeper look at the chart depicting U.S. Net Import Reliance — or the “Blue Wall of Dependency,” as we have dubbed it based on the many blue bars showing our significant degree of import dependence, reveals that the number of metals and minerals for which we are 50% or more import-dependent has even gone up over last year — with the new report pegging it at 51 versus 47 in 2022.

When cross-referencing the U.S. Net Import Reliance chart with the 2022 Final list of Critical Minerals, the United States was 100% net import reliant for 12, and an additional 31 critical mineral commodities (including 14 lanthanides, which are listed under rare earths) had a net import reliance greater than 50% of apparent consumption.

Once more, we can’t help but observe that this represents a stark contrast to our import reliance for metals and minerals in 1984, when we were 100% import reliant for just 11 mineral commodities.

A few changes for individual metals and minerals included in the report are notable and significant, particularly in the context of the accelerating global green energy transition:

For the Rare Earths, a key group of tech metals underpinning 21st Century technology and the accelerating green energy transition, our import reliance had dropped from 100% in the 2021 report to “greater than 90%” in the 2022 report. It is now back up to “greater than 95%”, and the rare earth concentrate being extracted in the U.S. currently sent to China for separation.  Once again, a single link lacking in a supply chain continues U.S. dependency.

For Lithium, perhaps the most frequently cited battery tech mineral, and Cobalt, another one of Lithium’s “battery critical” peers, U.S. import reliance stayed the same at “greater than 25%” for lithium, and Cobalt at 76% respectively.

For Graphite and Manganese, both battery criticals – the USGS report shows both still pegged at an unchanged 100% import reliance.

For Nickel, the final battery critical and a new element on the 2022 Critical Mineral List, import-reliance jumped from 48% last year to 56% in this year’s report.

In upcoming posts, ARPN will focus on each of these battery criticals, and the U.S.-based projects working to urgently needed new supply into production.

As in previous iterations of the report, China continues to be the elephant in the data room. And against all pledges in recent years for the United States to reduce import reliance on supplies from China, the 2022 Mineral Commodity Summaries lists still China an unchanged 25 times as one of the major import sources of metals and minerals for which our net import reliance is 50% or greater – and recent developments in China show that the country has no intention of loosening its grip on the critical minerals supply chain [see our recent posts on Chinese resource policy here].

Owing to the growing focus on critical minerals on the part of U.S. policy stakeholders, this year’s Mineral Commodity Summaries report features an expanded chapter on developments in the critical minerals realm, identifying trend lines, and supply chain security and U.S. government critical minerals initiatives as well as critical mineral investments.

While the urgency of the need to secure critical mineral supply chains has registered with stakeholders over the past few years, USGS’s findings underscore once more that supply chains in the 21st Century are extremely complex and meaningful change takes time – and the developments of 2022 ranging from increased resource nationalism in the Southern hemisphere over war in Ukraine to rising geopolitical tensions have not made untangling supply chains any easier.

In Bill Murray’s movie, it took the protagonist several years to realize how to change behavior to break the cycle.  We know by now that to break our cycle of resource dependence, it will take a comprehensive “all of the above” approach to critical mineral resource policy – and stakeholders have come to realize this and have increasingly embraced the concept.  We continue to stand by what ARPN’s Dan McGroarty stated during a congressional hearing in 2019 – “we can’t admire the problem anymore. We don’t have the luxury of time.”

If we act swiftly and comprehensively, there may just be a chance that we will wake up twelve months from now not to another Groundhog Day, but to a 2024 Mineral Commodity Summaries that paints a picture of reduced resource dependence.

While critical mineral resource policy is finally receiving the attention it deserves against the backdrop of increasing supply chain challenges, a look at the materials stealing the spotlight would have you believe the list of metals and minerals deemed critical from a U.S. national and economic security perspective is much shorter than it is.

The battery criticals (lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel, and manganese) underpinning the EV revolution are certainly making a splash, and, while a few years ago the term “rare earth elements” seemed to raise eyebrows, their appearance in today’s headlines is not exactly a rare occurrence anymore.

As followers of ARPN well know, the official U.S. Government Critical Minerals List is much longer, and has grown from 35 in its first iteration in 2018 to 50 in 2022, though much of that change is a result of individually listing materials previously listed in groupings (for a detailed breakdown see ARPN’s posts from earlier this year here).

However, despite some additions to the list, there are still some materials that, despite their status as key component for many emerging and established products, have slipped through the cracks and are “consistently overlooked largely due to the mundane, or overly complex, industries it plays a role in” – as Seeking Alpha phrases it in his recent profile piece on “Boron: The Overlooked Critical Material.”

The piece takes a closer look at the “growing market for boron and its strength moving forward,” arguing that “[w]ith uses across multiple industries, some of which are in the process of explosive growth, boron looks set to experience a supercycle of its own,” with most of the Western world quietly recognizing it as a strategic material even as “the major EV battery metals have stolen much of the spotlight shone on critical materials.”

Glass and ceramics manufacturing, where boron has for centuries reduced glass viscosity and increased durability and improved thermal management, account for roughly 50% of the material’s commercial usage, while fertilizer applications are estimated to consume roughly 20%.

Courtesy of the ongoing and ever-accelerating materials science revolution, boron’s use in glass today also extends to solar panels – a market that is set to explode, growing at over 20% per year until 2026, according to Seeking Alpha. With “up to 70% of the world’s electricity (…) expected to be generated by wind and solar by 2050” and with “electricity generation also rising 2.5x by the same period, boron’s utilization in both technologies” will likely drive demand scenarios for boron up significantly, as will its application in neodymium magnets, formally known as NdFeB magnets, with the elemental symbol “B” denoting boron. While by weight, boron only accounts for just 1% in the material composition of a neodymium magnet, demand for these magnets is set to skyrocket “as they become the default choice for use in EV motors,” and are widely used in wind turbines, thus further fueling demand.

According to a recent Bloomberg Government piece, movement on the critical mineral status designation for boron may be on the horizon. Writes Roxana Tiron:

“The U.S. Defense Logistics Agency lists boron as a strategic material because it is used as a component of composite materials (boron fibers) in advanced aerospace structures and as an industrial catalyst to make things like polymers. It also plays a major role in electroplating nickel, lead, and tin; in inner plates of ballistic vests; and for tank armor (carbon boride) and permanent neodymium (NdFeB) magnets, according to DLA. 

The strategic designation allows the Defense Department to stockpile the materials.

But strategic materials and critical minerals aren’t necessarily the same thing. It depends which agency reviews the materials and makes the designation.”

The USGS’s National Minerals Information Center director Steven Fortier told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in testimony earlier this spring that, while “important” to U.S. national and economic security, boron so far hasn’t met the critical mineral definition because, in light of domestic production levels, “the U.S. is not highly reliant on imports for these minerals and typically has a combination of domestic reserves and reliable foreign sources adequate to meet foreseeable domestic consumption requirements.”

Meanwhile, as Seeking Alpha points out, “the supply chain for boron is pretty weak at the moment,” with Turkey currently accounting for 62% of global boron sales.  With Rio Tinto Group’s long-lived California-based U.S. Borax mine, the U.S. continues to remain a net exporter, but with demand rising “many of the boron deposits around the world only produce the element in small quantities, and wouldn’t exactly be considered major boron deposits.” Boron’s geological profile leads Seeking Alpha to conclude that “[e]ven if all 1,057,000 tonnes of new boric acid production come online, supply is incapable of matching demand.” 

And of course, in familiar fashion, most of the processing of the material into boron carbide today occurs in China.  As one sign that the U.S. Government is beginning to take note, 5E Advanced Materials’s Fort Cady project in California, while not yet operational, has already received a “critical infrastructure” designation from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Boron may not have met the threshold for the official U.S. government-wide “critical minerals” designation yet – but from boron fiber and ballistic vests to tank armor and permanent magnets, there is certainly a compelling case for watching the material closely going forward.

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