Sustainable Development Strategies Group proposes to issue a series of short policy papers, each focused on a specific mineral, that will highlight current global policy issues related to potential mineral scarcity, critical and strategic minerals shortages, and the availability of sufficient mineral resources to support the transition to a less carbon intensive economy.
The Current Debate
There has been heightened recent concern, globally and in the United States, about mineral depletion and mineral shortages. There is particular concern over the potential that supplies of certain mineral commodities might be used by those who have abundant supplies for economic and military leverage over those who are in shortage.
Some of this has its origin in the fact that the predominant production of rare earth elements has been in one country, China. “Rare earths,” (which are not actually all that rare in the earth’s crust), are some 17 chemical elements. They were mostly of limited economic importance until the last two decades, when they have become vital to advanced technologies. They are used to produce small powerful magnets, catalyzers, displays, touch screens, and other new inventions. Some industries are highly dependent on rare earths.
In 2010, China used its dominant position to pressure Japan, which had detained a Chinese fishing trawler captain who was fishing in disputed waters. China cut off rare earth shipments to Japan, which focused world attention on China’s position as their leading producer.
But current concern is far broader than simply the rare earth minerals. It takes place against the backdrop of centuries of debate about mineral depletion: whether the world was going to “run out” of the finite supply of important minerals.
The great mineral economist John Tilton observed twenty years ago that
“the debate over resource availability is not new. It can be traced back
at least 200 years to the Classical economists …”
The list of commodities of concern is also far longer. In the United States, the Biden Administration has published “a draft list of 50 mineral commodities proposed for inclusion on the 2021 list of critical minerals.”
Transition to a Green Economy
The transition to renewable energy and the fight against climate change are central. The International Institute for Sustainable Development asserts that “[a]t least 23 key minerals will be critical to the development and deployment of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and energy storage technologies. Many of these minerals are projected to surge in demand in the coming decades, in part due to the global transition to the low-carbon economy.”
The World Bank has its own list. “The rise of green energy technologies required for a low-carbon future is expected to lead to significant growth in demand for a wide range of minerals and metals, such as aluminum, copper, lead, lithium, manganese, nickel, silver, steel, and zinc and rare earth minerals.”
There are also focused concerns over more limited groups of minerals. As one example, the Global Battery Alliance, an association of private companies including electric car manufacturers, exists “to ensure that battery production not only supports green energy, but also safeguards human rights and promotes health and environmental sustainability.” Cobalt is high on their list.
Limits on Production
Geology and is an important tool for assessing abundance of these resources. Metallurgy and allied sciences are absolutely necessary to understand what is needed to extract useable commodities from host ores. But these are often not enough for a definitive answer.
The world is full of examples of identified and otherwise useable mineral deposits that are not being produced for environmental, social and political reasons. As one example, copper is frequently called out, with good reason, as one of the world’s most critical and most needed minerals.
Yet many of the major copper ore bodies, from the Pebble Mine in Alaska to the Tampakan deposit in the Philippines, to Mes Aynak in Afghanistan are simply not going to be developed any time soon as a result of combinations of community opposition, environmental concerns, and political instability.
Understanding these factors is one of SDSG’s strengths, and adding them to the analysis is one of the ways SDSG can add value to this discussion.
A Variety of Overlapping Concerns
There are thus a variety of overlapping concerns, from shortages constraining the transition to a greener economy and our ability to combat climate change, to geopolitical power struggles, to the concern that we may, in our haste to obtain minerals for worthy (or unworthy) purposes, do grave damage to communities, workers, or our much-abused environment.
When concerns over shortage have arisen in the past, the track record is not always encouraging. As just one example, in the wake of World War II and the advent of nuclear weapons and nuclear power, there was relatively little known about supplies of uranium, a material for which there had previously been limited demand.
In the United States, this led to a program of subsidizing exploration for and production of uranium. This, ultimately, created a great surplus of uranium, and the suspension of subsidies in the mid 1960s. In the process, these activities created enormous environmental damage, which has proven extraordinarily expensive and difficult to remediate.
It is also true that things are not always what they appear to be. “Strategic minerals” concerns have in the past been advanced for reasons quite different from those publicly advertised.
Perhaps the most famous of these was the desire of the United States Central Intelligence Agency surreptitiously to build a vessel capable of raising a sunken Soviet submarine from the ocean floor for intelligence purposes. As part of this “Project Azorian,” the CIA contracted Howard Hughes’ Summa Corporation to build a special vessel, the Glomar Explorer, with the cover story that it was going to retrieve mineral nodules from the deep sea. Government concern that there was a “strategic mineral crisis” was enormously useful to this cover story, and was hardly discouraged by the Agency.
And there were clearly important commercial interests involved in the various legislative proposals to subsidize the development of a rare earth processing facility at the Mountain Pass Mine in California.
Which Minerals?
Exactly which minerals are part of any pending crisis or concern depends on political and economic perspectives. One thing that is clear is that minerals differ dramatically in important ways:
Where are the known reserves of the mineral and known and inferred resources? Who controls them?
What are current and projected future rates of consumption?
How is this mineral produced? What are the techniques and methods of production?
What is the mineral used for, and to what processes is it vital? What if any substitutes are there?
Who is benefited by its production, and who suffers any adverse impacts? Where are the communities most impacted by an increase in production?
What are the key environmental impacts of an increase in production?
What systems are in place to manage the environmental and social impacts of current and increased levels of production?
Are there valid national security concerns about availability, and what are they? To what extent (if any) would governments be advised to accumulate stockpiles, or stimulate alternative sources through subsidies or other means?
Policy Paper Series
SDSG proposes to develop and publish a series of short (estimated 8-10 pages), interesting and readable policy papers on individual minerals of importance to the global economy, to security concerns, and to the transition to a green economy, and the fight against climate change.
These papers will focus on current and possible future impacts of increasing supplies of these minerals, in particular on the communities that are likely to bear the brunt of the process of production, and the environmental impacts involved.
For further inquiry, contact below
Sustainable Development Strategies Group
Julia Metzger (metzger@sdsg.org)
Luke Danielson (danielson@sdsg.org)
footnotes:
Congressional Research Service, Rare Earth Elements: The Global Supply Chain
(December 16, 2013) https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R41347. Magnuson, China Maintains Dominance in Rare Earth Production, National Defense, September 8, 2021. https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2021/9/8/china-maintains-dominance-in-rare-earth-productionJ. Tilton, Depletion and Long-Run Availability of Mineral Commodities (2002), https://www.iied.org/mmsd-working-papers
See National Research Council, Minerals, Critical Minerals, and the U.S. Economy (2008).
Aluminum, antimony, arsenic, barite, beryllium, bismuth, cerium, cesium, chromium, cobalt, dysprosium, erbium, europium, fluorspar, gadolinium, gallium, germanium, graphite, hafnium, holmium, indium, iridium, lanthanum, lithium, lutetium, magnesium, manganese, neodymium, nickel, niobium, palladium, platinum, praseodymium, rhodium, rubidium, ruthenium, samarium, scandium, tantalum, tellurium, terbium, thulium, tin, titanium, tungsten, vanadium, ytterbium, yttrium, zinc, and zirconium... Interior Department, 2021 Draft List of Critical Minerals, Federal Register (Nov. 29, 2021)
Church and Crawford, Green Conflict Minerals: The fuels of conflict in the transition to a low-carbon economy (August 2018) available at https://www.iisd.org/system/files/publications/green-conflict-minerals.pdf
World Bank, “The Growing Role of Minerals and Metals for a Low Carbon Future, (June 2017), available at https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/207371500386458722/pdf/117581-WP-P159838-PUBLIC-ClimateSmartMiningJuly.pdf
Global Battery Alliance website, https://www.globalbattery.org/
E.g., Hay, Forget COP26. The world needs COPPER 26, Reuters, (Nov. 5, 2021) https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/forget-cop26-world-needs-copper-26-2021-11-05/
