Water is a Critical Material for a Thirsty Man
July 22, 2011
In recent years the terms Critical Minerals, Strategic Minerals and even Vital Minerals have been coined and presumably coin has been turned on their basis.
These divisions have resulted in endless lists and explanations of which minerals are which, who thinks so and why. Indeed I was been party to this in the early days, however you know things have got silly when an article arrives that lists every element as critical and only excepts two. If it were written ironically I would let it pass.
What must be recognised is that ‘criticality’ is completely relative. It depends on the technology, who you are in the technology cycle and where (geographically and economically) you are speaking from. In fact as I argued in a short note to the UK’s Energy Research Council Network just before Parliament took representations from our learned societies on this topic, what you define as critical defines you.
Maybe these terms have use in policy-making circles, but having spoken to academics and NGOs on the topic I don’t think that’s true. They are generally more confused by the use of these terms than they were before. They can cope with specifics. They are not dumb.
We, in the mining industry, should not be complicit in confusing investors or legislators by wanton rebranding with meaningless jargon. It is difficult enough to persuade the non-mining world that mines are a necessary evil without obsfucation.
This trend appears to have started with the USA pre-occupation with energy independence and its false hope of controlling all elements of its energy cycle. It is a false hope because energy is global cycle not a national one. The separation of supply chains using national security as justification is the basest form of resource nationalism and not one becoming of the world’s biggest economy. It is not surprising that China reacts to this kind of posturing with a robust economic response. It knows that any comment from the WTO on this topic is bluster, at best.
Mining is an exercise in coping with living on a planet whose resources are not distributed evenly. Always has been. Always will be. The sudden realisation, from outside the industry, that the technological world would grind to a halt for the want of a iron nail should not deflect us from providing that nail and millions like it every day.
There is virtually no industrial metals mining left in the USA and those of us who operate outside that dysfunctional legislature should not be drawn into its often bizarre internal politics. Let us concentrate on supplying those nails at the best possible price and let the US increase its own transaction costs to the point where it has no industry left. Then maybe we can call a metal a metal.
PS. the two elements omitted from the ridiculous ‘critical’ list – iron & aluminium, the two most used metals in society today.
Rare media interest (except from The Guardian)
September 4, 2009
Rare Earth Elements. REEs. There I said it. Used the energy buzz words of last week (apart from ‘Giant’ and ‘Shell’).
I could turn this post into a list of all the media voices that have suddenly discovered that there is some stuff that China does that we can’t do at the moment and its a threat to the world because we can’t do it but China can. But that’s been done very effectively already with varying degrees of shrillness.
What was apparent from the coverage that I saw outside the specialist channels was the lack of appreciation that geology influences trade, economics and politics at a fundamental level. As a UK-ite and involved in the commodities sector, it appears impossible to me to separate the history of nation and then empire from that of energy availability, resource exploitation and commodities trade. They just run together in a continuum. But apart from the normal oil & gas stories, commodities mostly get overlooked and things like REEs might as well be fairy dust as far as mainstream media is concerned.
The rare earth story didn’t make it to the red tops, after all its not like China invaded Tokyo or some stick-thin media casualty just got slightly less stick-thin. But it made all of the other major UK newspapers, except The Guardian. The Guardian who started their 10:10 campaign to get my fellow UK-ites to reduce their carbon footprints by 10% by 2010. The Guardian who have one of the most vociferous environmental media campaigners around as a regular columnist in George Monbiot. I suppose there is a simplistic reason for that. Mining to provide material vital to almost all the significant new energy infrastructure does not fit the world view that mining is bad in each and every case. I hope that’s not the case this time. Most of their content is pretty intelligent and as a new media outlet they are well ahead of the curve. Not even a blip in the business section, nothing. The world’s proposed new low carbon energy system is facing an existential threat (as some would seem to have it) and it doesn’t apparently rate an inch or two, even in calm defense against hysterical hyperbolae. I’m not accusing The Guardian of being a bad news organisation, or of missing a story (I’m sure that they saw the same news wires as every one else), what I’m saying is that they are lacking nuance on this story in particular and that in not publishing their take on the story have made more of a comment than had they made comment.
The world is a complex and contradictory place and sometimes a story comes along that contradicts you and everything that you are saying. But that’s what journalism is for isn’t it ? Exposing the contradictions for what they are. Democratising information to allow proliferation of thought.
The uni-vocal will struggle to cope with that proliferation and loose credibility as a result. What the rare earth story demonstrates, to me at least, is that labelling an entire industry as bad, or dirty or unethical (or good, green and ethical) is as reductive as calling an animal evil. Now that’s the sort of story that the red tops can get their teeth into !
