All right. Thank You Cassy and thanks
AGI and the other sponsors for making
this opportunity available to us. I'm
going to talk about critical minerals
from our perspective in the National
Minerals Information Center. I will start
with a bit about who we are and what we
do. Many of you may be familiar with the
National Minerals Information Center, others not. Our mission is very clear and very
simple: we collect, analyze, and
disseminate information on domestic and
international supply and demand for
non-fuel minerals and materials
essential to the US economy and national
security. We do this to provide
decision-makers with information
required to ensure that the US has an
adequate supply of minerals and materials to
meet US needs at an acceptable cost with
regard to environmental, energy, and
economic factors. Our data are all
publicly available - everything we publish
is on our website - but our focus,
principally, is for providing information
to other government agencies, so some of
those are shown on the bottom of the
screen - the House and Senate, the Office
of Science, Technology and Policy, the
Department of Defense, particularly the
Defense Logistics Agency, the CIA,
Department of Energy, Departments of
State and Commerce, and the Federal
Reserve Board are among the other
government agencies that use our data
routinely. We have a very broad
scope of coverage in our mission. Mineral
criticality studies are impossible
without data, and our data are as, I think,
broad and as comprehensive as any
available in the world. In the upper left
there's a picture or a graphic of the
periodic table and the elements
highlighted in green are ones that we
cover in some way shape or form, these
are either as minerals, elements, metals
or compounds, and as you can see we cover
most of the periodic table. Likewise, we
have a very broad global coverage - we
cover more than 180 countries globally
for the simple reason that not all
minerals are produced in the U.S., in
fact increasingly
many are not. We produce more than 700
publications
annually on monthly, quarterly,
annual product cycles. Some of those are
shown on the right of this slide - Mineral
Commodity Summaries are probably our
most famous publication, the Mineral
Yearbooks are also widely used, as are
our other standard work products that
make up the 700 publications that we
produce annually. Any of these can be
accessed at the web address at the
bottom of this slide in case you're
interested in getting more detail or
accessing individual publications.
So critical minerals. Just a few
observations. I know there's a lot of
words here but I think it's worth going
through this. There have been a
number of evaluations of mineral
criticality have been done in the past
few years. This has resulted in a whole
variety of lists and indexes and
methodological refinements,
but from our perspective
criticality really is something that
depends on who's asking the question, so if
you're somebody in industry
you're likely to come to a different
conclusion and a different list
depending on what applications you are
using materials for and what market
sectors you're selling into,
you're likely to come to a different
conclusion than a government agency that
has a different mission and a different
set of objectives. So just some examples:
the USGS did a ShakeOut scenario a few
years ago where they simulated a 7.8
earthquake in Southern California and
one of the things that came out of that
was that the critical minerals in that
scenario were aggregates -
construction sand and gravel, concrete,
asphalt - things that people don't normally
think of as being critical but in that
situation that was what was most needed.
Another example that is not necessarily
a classical critical mineral in many
people's view are things like
barite and frac sand, so if you're into
in oil and gas exploration and
production you might view those as
critical where others may not. The
Department of Energy has a focus on
green energy, so this is part of their mission, and so they
tend to focus on materials that support
green energy. The Defense Logistics
Agency focuses on the strategic
stockpile so again they have a different
mission, a different set of objectives.
They're likely to come to very different
conclusions about what is critical and
what's not, so that's an important aspect
of this. Also criticality is not static
but it changes over time as the
availability of minerals change and as
new technologies develop that increase
consumption and result in new
applications.So you really have to look
at this as something that changes
over time, and criticality studies
require reliable, regularly updated
mineral production and consumption data
for a broad spectrum of applications and
stakeholder needs, and this is exactly
what we do. This is our mission
at the National Minerals Information
Center so it fits very well with
supporting critical minerals as a
topic. As a working definition we use the
seminal work from the National Academy
of Sciences published in 2008. Professor
Eggert who will speak later was
essential in the conception
and publication of this work. They
defined mineral criticality as
"performing an essential function for
which few if any substitutes exist and
an assessment indicates high probability
of supply being disrupted, resulting in
physical unavailability or significantly
higher price," right, so it's basically
supply risk and impact of disruption of
supplies defined on two axes. So our
questions from the NMIC
perspective is, okay, how do we measure
these? What kind of data are required to
quantify these measures of
criticality? What kind of attributes are
important for the data that you use
to quantify these aspects of criticality?
So if I can go to a specific example of
data that is useful, this is the Defense
Logistics Agency definition for
criticality, and I won't read the whole
thing but I would draw your attention to
the part that's highlighted in red.
This comes out of the statute and the second
component of their definition is that
they're materials that are not found or
produced in the United States in
sufficient quantities to meet such need.
This leads directly to our net import
reliance data that we publish every year
in the Mineral Commodity Summaries, so on
the right is our iconic graphic - a bar
chart of materials for which the U.S. is
net import reliant in various
percentages with various countries, and
then to the left is a new graphic that
we've included in the MCS for the first
time this year that shows the geographic
distribution of these
materials in a global graph - a graphic - so
the numbers of commodities that we
are greater than 50 percent dependent on
are shown in a geographic distribution
here, and you can immediately see that we
are heavily dependent on Canada in North
America and China in particular in Asia,
but generally that the distribution of
the sources of these materials is very
much global. If you'd like to access this
publication the web address is at the
bottom. Another measure that people often
use to quantify particularly supply risk
is the country concentration of
production, and a recently
released report from the OSTP NSTC
Subcommittee on critical and
strategic mineral supply chains
contains this kind of analysis, and
there's a graphic from that publication
shown on the right basically using the
Herfindahl-Hirschman index - I won't
take the time to define that
here but it is a commonly used metric
that people use to evaluate supply
concentration. The critical aspect of
this, if you'll pardon the expression, for
us is that the data that go into making
this calculation are data that we report
every year in our publications, so from
our world production tables we produce
quantitative estimates of all of the
mineral commodities we cover, country-specific, updated annually, the Mineral
Commodity Summaries are very timely, they
come out in January the
first month after the reporting year,
they are authoritative, our Mineral
Yearbook Series is our permanent
repository for this information, and it
is a time series - we have data
for commodities going back to the
beginning of the 20th century and we
have comprehensive coverage over an
extended period of time for almost
everything we track. Again, if you're
interested in the publication itself you
can go to the website at the bottom
of the slide and access the the OSTP
report that was produced largely by
folks in our center in cooperation with
Department of Energy and others and
relied very heavily on our data. Just
another example to illustrate the point
about the time series nature of these
kinds of data. This is for tantalum, we
call it the conflict - critical mineral
nexus. This is a graph that shows the
primary production of tantalum going
back to the year 2000, and so what you
see as you move forward in time is that
we've shifted from production being
dominated by Australia and Brazil in the
blue and the red to present-day
where production is dominated by
Rwanda and the DRC, which of course are
our Dodd-Frank countries by definition,
and now Rwanda, the DRC, and
surrounding countries make up up to
two-thirds of global supply of tantalum.
This geographic
shift has been accompanied by a shift
from industrial mining techniques to
artisanal mining, so from highly
mechanized to highly labor-intensive
mining techniques. We've also shifted
from countries that have very low
governance risk and transparent trade
flows to countries that decidedly do not.
The governance risk and transparency of
trade flows from the DRC and Rwanda are much less clear than they are
for Australia and Brazil.
So again, criticality is dynamic, we need to
use time series to analyze for emerging
risks. If you combine this kind of
information with world governance
indicators
to capture the governance risk you
get a pretty robust metric for measuring
supply risk and that is in fact what
we used to quantify that in the OSTP
report that I just referenced. Just one
more mention of the conflict
minerals issue: conflict minerals are not
necessarily critical minerals but they
can be, so we produced a series of
conflict mineral fact sheets last year
in work that we did in support of the
State Department and the Department of
Commerce, and of the three T's - tungsten,
tantalum, and tin, the only one that
people would really consider critical in
the most widely accepted
definition of the term would
be tantalum, simply because so much of
the supply comes from the DRC and other
Dodd-Frank countries. Tungsten and tin
might be critical in some people's
estimation depending on what their
own objectives were but they're not
critical because of supply concentration
in the DRC. The amounts that those
countries contribute to the global
supply chain are a percent or two at
most.
So the fact that there's governance risk there
doesn't make them critical, but they are
still conflict minerals. And so I think
just to sum up, the components and
characteristics of our approach to
mineral criticality - we believe that it's
essential that we have broad coverage of
mineral commodities; that that coverage
be global, it needs to be country
specific; we need to be flexible enough
in our evaluation of criticality
to meet the needs of a variety of
different stakeholders, because as I said
everybody has their own idea about what
criticality means to them; they should be
authoritative - and as a US government
agency we believe our data are the most
reliable and best out there. I think a
lot of people share that view, and they
are authoritative. They should be dynamic;
they shouldn't be static one-year
snapshots, they should be ongoing,
annually updated data collections. We
focus on trends, not on lists.
Lists have their use, but they're pretty
specific for whoever's asking the
question. We look at trends and we use
metrics that try to balance the need to
be rigorous - that is, get a signal that is
telling us something significant - balanced
with availability of data. There are lots
of things you can use to measure
criticality but if you can't get data
you can't do it in a timely way that
would allow you to anticipate potential
risk coming into the supply chain or
potential emerging criticality issues. So some
examples that I've mentioned here that I
would just recap: net import reliance,
production country concentration, growth
in world production, and price
volatility, all of these we report in our
publications annually. In some cases we
are collecting the information directly,
others we are collecting it and
publishing it, and then world governance
indicators, which are produced by World
Bank and others. We use the WGI
indicators from World Bank. The ultimate
goal of our approach to mineral
criticality is to develop a practical,
simple, early warning screening tool that
alerts us to changes in the supply chain
that should prompt us to ask more
questions about what's happening with
that particular commodity and identify
candidates for deep dive analysis in the
subsequent analysis cycle, and so this
tool, the first iteration of which is
reported in the OSTP publication, is
something that we will update annually
and in each annual cycle we will be
examining commodities that we have
identified through this process for
further study and clarification.
So with that I will stop - I think I have used up my time.
