Just like essential nutrients are necessary for a healthy body, critical minerals are necessary for a healthy economy. And a healthy national security. And a healthy educational system. Basically all aspects of an overall healthy society in these modern times.
Pure tungsten metal (with a tiny bit of tarnish as color). Tungsten is used to to make ... [+]
The United States Geological Survey Report on a Critical Mineral List discusses 35 mineral commodities that we are dependent on. So whether it’s indium for LCD screens and aircraft wind shielding, cobalt for iPhones, uranium for nuclear reactors, rare earth elements for wind turbine magnets, or lithium for rechargeable batteries, if we do not have an ample supply of each, we risk specific losses in economic vigor or national security vulnerability. Bad things happen.
Thus, the need for Executive Order 13817. Ordered in 2017, the list contains those elements that are “essential to the economic and national security of the United States, that has a supply chain vulnerable to disruption, and that serves an essential function in the manufacturing of a product, the absence of which would have significant consequences for the economy or national security.”
Compiled and written by Steven Fortier, Nedal Nassar, Graham Lederer, Jamie Brainard, Joseph Gambogi and Erin McCullough, the report also discusses strategies to reduce the nation’s reliance on these elements, the status of recycling technologies, alternatives to these minerals, options for accessing critical minerals through trade with allies and partners, a plan for improvements to mapping the United States and its mineral resources, and other issues.
This list of critical minerals is not permanent but is dynamic, and will be updated periodically as society advances. The full list includes the following minerals (click a mineral’s name to find relevant stats including global and U.S. abundance, uses, production, tariffs and import information):
- Aluminum (bauxite), used in almost all sectors of the economy
- Antimony, used in batteries and flame retardants
- Arsenic, used in lumber preservatives, pesticides, and semi-conductors
- Barite, used in cement and petroleum industries
- Beryllium, used as an alloying agent in aerospace and defense industries
- Bismuth, used in medical and atomic research
- Cesium, used in research and development
- Chromium, used primarily in stainless steel and other alloys
- Cobalt, used in rechargeable batteries and superalloys
- Fluorspar, used in the manufacture of aluminum, gasoline, and uranium fuel
- Gallium, used for integrated circuits and optical devices like LEDs
- Germanium, used for fiber optics and night vision applications
- Graphite (natural), used for lubricants, batteries, and fuel cells
- Hafnium, used for nuclear control rods, alloys, and high-temperature ceramics
- Helium, used for MRIs, lifting agent, and research
- Indium, mostly used in LCD screens
- Lithium, used primarily for batteries
- Magnesium, used in furnace linings for manufacturing steel and ceramics
- Manganese, used in steelmaking
- Niobium, used mostly in steel alloys
- Platinum group metals, used for catalytic agents
- Potash, primarily used as a fertilizer
- Rare earth elements group, primarily used in batteries and electronics
- Rhenium, used for lead-free gasoline and superalloys
- Rubidium, used for research and development in electronics
- Scandium, used for alloys and fuel cells
- Strontium, used for pyrotechnics and ceramic magnets
- Tantalum, used in electronic components, mostly capacitors
- Tellurium, used in steelmaking and solar cells
- Tin, used as protective coatings and alloys for steel
- Titanium, overwhelmingly used as a white pigment or metal alloys
- Tungsten, primarily used to make wear-resistant metals
- Uranium, mostly used for nuclear fuel; depleted U used in military munitions
- Vanadium, primarily used for titanium alloys
- Zirconium, used in the high-temperature ceramics industries
Many of these elements are not directly mined but are recovered during the smelting or refining of the host rock or material for other commodities. These byproducts are typically similar chemically to their host material so are present in the same ores, but at smaller amounts. So refining copper ores allows us to recover significant amounts of tellurium.
The principal host metals form the inner circle. Byproduct elements are in the outer circle at ... [+]
The recovery of byproducts is usually low relative to the total amount of material that was made available from mining, but the process to get the bigger prize makes recovery economic.
Twelve of the elements listed above are byproducts, including helium, which is recovered from oil and gas extraction. This complicates the strategy for increasing the strategic supply of all of these elements as they are sometimes tied together.
The figure above shows the relation between byproducts and host materials. The principal host elements form the inner circle. Byproduct elements are in the outer circle at distances proportional to the percentage of their primary production (from 100 to 0%) that originates with the host element indicated.
This type of effort is one of the strengths of geology, and the USGS is one the strengths of our society. “The expertise of the USGS is absolutely vital to reducing America’s vulnerability to disruptions in our supply of critical minerals,” said Dr. Tim Petty, Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Water and Science.
As Morgan Bazilian pointed out in a recent OurEnergyPolicy discussion, The U.S. is 75 to 100% reliant of 24 of these critical minerals.
A short geology lesson may be needed here. The list of Critical Minerals contains mostly elements not minerals, although they are naturally found in rocks and purified by some form of smelting or separation method. A few listed, like fluorspar (CaF2) and potash (KCl), are actually minerals.
The word mineral in this case is the old colloquial term for anything not animal or vegetable, and includes many things that are not actually minerals, like oil and gas. Geologically, a mineral is any naturally-occurring crystalline substance that has a fixed physical structure (arrangement of atoms in space) and a chemical composition that varies within strict limits.
So those cool quartz crystals are made of a mineral having a chemical composition of SiO2 and a structure with the oxygen atoms arranged in a tetrahedra around each silica atom. But glass, also made of SiO2, is not a mineral as it has no fixed structure, being just a quenched liquid – remember those wavy 100-plus-year-old glass windows that have flowed under gravity so the glass is thicker at the bottom, very pretty.
A rock is an aggregate of minerals that may also consist of only one mineral. Calcite or silica-cemented pebbles in nature is a rock called a conglomerate, similar to man-made concrete. But concrete is not a rock since it is made-man.
Regardless of how you discuss them, these elements are critical to our lives, especially if your reading this on an iPhone.
