Thank you Ben for that kind introduction
and for the opportunity to talk to you
today about some of the work that we do
at the National Minerals Information
Center at the US Geological Survey. So
what I would like to do today is to
start off by giving some general
background which may be perhaps obvious
to some of you, but is I think generally
not well known to the general public.
First I think it's important to note
that modern technology makes use of
virtually the entire periodic table of
elements. Even a single artifact like the
cell phone contains several dozen
elements, in this case 38 were analyzed
in this example, including elements that
previously had little or no application -
major applications. Of course it's not
just about consumer electronics. These
exotic elements are used in everything
from energy generation, including
renewable energy technologies such as
thin film solar photovoltaics and
direct-drive wind turbines; in health
care, including biomedical devices,
anti-cancer drugs, diagnostic imaging
equipment; in national defense
applications whether it's rhenium for
single crystal turbine blades or
night-vision goggles or in transportation of course like the
electric vehicles that are coming online
and becoming much more important. This
list is of course by no means exhaustive,
but it gives you a sense of how these
elements now find use in virtually every
aspect of our daily lives whether we
realize it or not. Now to meet demand for
these new technologies, production
has of course had to increase. For base
metals that may have been used for
millennia, that growth has been steady
and constant. Here I'm showing the
production of several metals since 1975
so their values of normalized to 1975
production at one, and you can see for
example the production of zinc has more
than doubled, the production of copper
has nearly tripled and bauxite, the
production of bauxite has almost
quadrupled. As a reference, world GDP
adjusted for inflation has a little more
than tripled. Now in contrast, some of
the minor metals have increased much
more notably. For example, rhenium's
production has increased almost 12 fold, indium's production 16 and a half fold,
and gallium a whopping almost 43 fold.
Now these elements I picked not randomly.
If you look at them closely, you'll
notice that the the three that are in
the yellowish shades are actually
byproducts of the ones in the blue
shades. So we get gallium as a byproduct
of bauxite, indium as a byproduct of zinc,
and rhenium as a byproduct of molybdenum
and copper and so what this suggests is
that, you know, how could this possibly
happen if the production of these sort
of host metals is only doubled or
quadrupled and these minor metals
have increased tens of folds. Well that
suggests that maybe previously we
weren't recovering some of these minor
metals in significant quantities and
now we are recovering them, but it also
suggests that this trend is
potentially not sustainable in the fact
that at some point we're going to
recover everything that there is and the
production of the base metals will
to have to increase as well. So there's
that dynamic going on. Now of course
gallium, indium, and rhenium are not the
only by-product metals. This is a study
we did back in 2015 where we analyzed,
you know, what percentage or what share
of each element's primary production is
obtained as a by-product and you can see
there's something on the order of like
38 or so elements that we analyzed have
at least half of their production being
produced as a by-product. Another issue
to consider is the concentration of
production. I think it's maybe
obvious to a lot of people but not to
everybody that mineral resources like
any other type of natural resource is
neither uniformly nor randomly
distributed on Earth. As a result of that
and other factors, such as of course
economics and policy, production is
highly concentrated in a few countries.
Here I'm highlighting nine countries and
their share of each element's global
production for those countries. So you
can see some countries like Brazil
dominate a few elements like niobium.
Chile dominates several more - rhenium,
copper, lithium. DRC Congo Kinshasa
dominates tantalum and
and cobalt mine production. The United
States has a few more - beryllium and
helium. South Africa dominates the
platinum group metals as well as
vanadium, chromium and manganese. Canada
has a little bit of everything.
Russia as well, and then we have China,
which essentially today dominates
everything else. So you can see this
concentration of production of course
leads to another concern, which is the
fact that not every country has
everything that it needs. So this is what
we call net import reliance. We do
this analysis on an annual basis
in our Mineral Commodity Summary
publication. This is from the 2017
publication. Our 2018 publication will be
out later this month, so look for that.
But basically what it highlights is all
the commodities that the United
States is highly important reliant on
and that number has been growing. We're 
something on the order of 50 commodities
with over 50% import reliance at this point. So that
that number is large and has been
growing. So if you think about all these
concerns, it sort of begs the question of
well okay so we have a number of
different concerns regarding
concentration of production, increasing
demand. There are other things that I
didn't mention like limited or no
recycling at the end of life. They all
draw the conclusion of that there's
potential concern for a supply
disruption and so there are a number of
assessments typically referred to as
criticality assessments to try to
examine this issue. This is not something
new. It's been done at least since the
1950s.
More recently in 2008, the National
Research Council put out a report that
provided a basic framework for analyzing
criticality which my former group at
Yale and I have helped to flesh out and
apply and of course the European
Commission has also adopted the
methodology for their own needs. Since
coming to the US Geological Survey, we as
part of the National Science Technology
Council have taken a somewhat 
different approach than than to do a
straight-up criticality assessment. What
we've tried to do instead is try to look
at a number of indicators and try to
look at trends over time to highlight
things that are potentially changing
that might be problematic. So things that
we look at are some of the things that
I've already mentioned - the concentration
of supply in countries of low governance,
the increase of production as a proxy
for increasing demand and increasing
importance, and price volatility to
examine the stability of the market. So
we look at all these factors and
come up with a single indicator that's
normalized on a common zero to one scale.
We look at it over time to see if we can
highlight trends and concerns and so
these are the results in periodic table
format. So you can see a couple of things
right away. Elements like copper, silver,
and gold - their values are relatively low
and consistently low. Others are
consistently high, such as the minor
platinum group metals like ruthenium and
rhodium and then others still are
rapidly increasing in
what we call criticality potential
values, such as gallium one of the main
byproducts that I previously mentioned.
Another thing that I think this is
helpful for is to identify things
before they happen. So one thing that we
for example looked at was the rare
earths and to see you know could we have
captured that issue before it happened
and in fact we possibly could have. Using
these simple indicators we could have
seen a problem starting to happen in the
early 2000s and well before any of the
disruption that happened later
on. So this is work that we did and
published in 2016. We've updated it in 2017
and we plan to continue to update it on
a somewhat regular basis, but so once a
criticality assessment is completed, the
question is okay so you've identified
the commodities that are perhaps of most
concern. Then the question is okay well
what can be done about it or what should
be done about it? And I think for us, the
way we try to approach this is we
first want to try to understand well how
is this resource essentially being
managed once it's been mined. So what
happens to it? How much is being mined?
Where is it being used and what
applications is it used in? How much is
recycled? How much is lost during use? How much is
lost after use? And so this is an example
from a study that we recently did
tantalum. So these are global tantalum
flows. Everything is in tantalum content
metric tons for the year 2015. Starting
from the left, the production you can see
is dominated by the Great Lakes region
in Africa in DRC and Rwanda
goes through primary production
processing, which is the equivalent of a
smelter, manufacturing, so these are
original equipment manufacturers, through
the use phase, so these are actual
consumers using this tantalum-containing
finished goods, and then you know what
happens to them after use, after they've
been potentially discarded and then the
flows that you see at the bottom are
recycling flows at the different
lifecycle stages. So we tried to take a
holistic approach. We look at the entire
lifecycle from primary production all
the way to end-of-life and try to
understand what's going on with the
commodity throughout its lifecycle. So
this is just for a snapshot in time, but
if you look at it over several years, you
can see some trends and so here I'm
showing that same figure for several
different decades 1995, 2005, 2015 and
you can see how things have changed over
time for for tantalum. In '95 for example
a significant amount of tantalum was
recovered out of tin slag. In 2005
Australia was the dominant producer
and now it's shifted to Rwanda and
DRC. On the use side, tantalum was
significantly used of course in
capacitors, it still is, but as well as
mill products and and carbides - that's
shifted now to a significant amount of
tantalum being used in chemicals and
alloy additives and sputtering targets - a
lot of those end up being used in
electronics. So what does that mean and
what kind of trends can we look at? Well
in general, we can look at different
recycling rates and two different
indicators for recycling. One is recycled
content, so this is the amount of
tantalum that's flowing to the
manufacturer that has been recycled at
some point whether it's new scrap from
the manufacturers or old scrap, and you
can see that's sort of hovered between
20 and 35 percent recycled content for
tantalum. The end-of-life recycling rate,
which
is essentially a metric of how much of
the tantalum that's coming out of use
actually was recycled, has actually
declined since the 1990s, at
least based on these modeled estimates,
from a high of perhaps twenty five
percent recycling rate down to around
eighteen percent today and the major
reason for that is again the shift 
from things that are heavily recycled
such as carbines and mill products to
things that are not namely electronics
at the end of life. And so you can look
at different metrics that try to
understand well what is going on? What
are sort of the hotspots? What are the
areas that we can sort of tackle in
terms of reducing our risk for a
supply disruption? Now everything that
I've mentioned here for tantalum is
looking at flows, but you can aggregate
the flows to look at stocks to get a
better sense of what is the status of a
commodity above ground and so that's
what this waterfall diagram is looking
at. So I have for example, we've mined
something on the order of 50,000 plus
metric tons of tantalum since 1970. Most
of that is from tantalum mineral
concentrates. A significant amount
however is also from tantalum tin slag.
We've lost quite a bit in simple
processing. There's quite a bit in
industry stocks that are unaccounted for. That
leads us to how much is entered the
manufacturing stage net of any recycling,
so we call that demand net of recycling.
We can subtract out the amount that's
been lost during manufacturing. There's
bit a little bit of loss during use,
so these are carbides that get wear and
tear, so you lose a little bit during
use. Some of the super alloys are
downgraded, so you can think about that
as super alloys being downgraded to other
types of steels and so you lose the
functionality of the tantalum, but the
majority of the losses have been at the
end of life. So these are discarded
products that are no longer in use. They
actually may still be - they may not
have been discarded, but they're no
longer in use. So you can think about
these as somebody's cellphone sitting in
a drawer somewhere. It's not been tossed,
but it's no longer in use. So these would
typically cause hibernating stocks, but
what we we're left with is about
21% of all tantalum that's been
mined since 1970 is still in use today -
about half of that is in capacitors and
so this gives you a sense of you know
where is tantalum, what's the status
above-ground, what is it still used in
today. Now this is done globally, but you
can imagine doing a similar study for
individual countries, and various
colleagues of ours have done that and
you can see, you can compare for example
what is the stock of tantalum above
ground versus below ground. A recent study
that's come out of Europe, I believe by a
group in Leiden University, looked at
tantalum, sorry aluminum reserves for
various countries and what ends up,
what one of their results showed is that
there's more aluminum reserves in the
United States above-ground than there is
contained in bauxite in geological
reserve, so that's an interesting finding
that's probably not very common yet, but
as demand for these commodities grow
sort of the the reserves of these
commodities that might be called in
urban mines might be shifting depending
on where the uses are from below ground
and being dispersed to uses above-ground
in different countries. For tantalum
what what we also found is that if you
were to recycle the amount that's coming
out of use every year on an annual basis,
the amount that's coming out of use from
carbides, if it was entirely recycled,
sorry from capacitors if it was recycled
completely would be more than the amount
that's currently mined in DRC or Rwanda.
So that sort of gives you a perspective
on the numbers that's coming out of use
on in annual basis. Of course
economic plays a huge role in and what
is or isn't recycled. So everything that
I've talked about so far is sort of
looking at you know what's going on
today or maybe what's going on in the
recent past, but we also try to look at
things going to the future and we do
that using scenarios. So what we found is
that there's a significant amount of
uncertainty regarding the new and emerging
technologies, so it's hard to to put
numbers with any sort of significance
unless you do some sort of scenario
analysis. So here's an example of paper
that we recently did looking at
renewable energy technologies and
by-product metals
required for those. Specifically here I'm
showing annual requirements for
tellurium in U.S. CdTe photovoltaics
up to the year 2040 under various
scenarios and you can see there the
results vary considerably depending on
the scenario. Here we're looking at
whether or not the clean power plan was
adopted or not. We're looking at
uncertainties regarding the market share
of that technology. We're also looking at
uncertainties regarding the material
intensity - so how much tellurium is
required per megawatt of capacity, and
what what you can see
from these two figures is that the
results vary considerably, but under the
more aggressive scenarios, the demand for
tellurium could be a significant part of
current global production and so that's
something to watch out for. A follow-up
study is looking at the supply side to
try to understand well how much more
tellurium could be recovered from copper
anode slimes, and based on preliminary
results it looks like it could be
significant. So we believe that you know
we need to look at the past to
understand what's going on. We need to
understand what's going on above ground.
We also need to develop scenarios to
look at what's going on in the future. So
with that I will summarize. So a
combination of trends and issues we
believe raise concerns regarding the
reliability of supply for certain non-fuel
mineral commodities. We've developed an early
warning screening as part of the
National Science and Technology Council
to try to help to identify minerals that
are perhaps of most concern. Doing
assessments of minerals throughout their
lifecycle all the way from mining to
end-of-life we believe provides
foundational knowledge regarding that
commodity and helping reduce that supply
risk, and we believe using scenario
analysis can help us determine or tackle
the uncertainties of what demand might
be and supply might be in the future and
to help inform policy or inform 
corporate strategies to try to address
those uncertainties.
