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Released June 19, 2025 | SUGAR LAND
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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--In a recent forum at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy, "Minerals, Metals and Mining -- What the Public Needs to Know," various experts in the field talked about how these topics impact, well, lots of things. The discussions covered how rare earths and other critical minerals have become a major focus in the trade talks between the U.S., China and other countries; the "death" of the mining industry in the U.S. and ways to revive it, and the promise of deep sea mining, among other issues.
Dr. Michelle Michot Foss of the Baker Center for Energy Studies kicked off the June 5 discussion by setting the scene. She noted that the current list of critical minerals includes about 50 items.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the Energy Act of 2020 defined critical minerals as those that are essential to the economic or national security of the United States; have a supply chain that is vulnerable to disruption; and serve an essential function in the manufacturing of a product, the absence of which would have significant consequences for the economic or national security of the U.S.
Critical minerals can include ones with exotic-sounding names such as the rare earth element dysprosium (used in permanent magnets), germanium (used in fiber optics) and platinum (catalytic converters), but also more prosaic-sounding ones like graphite (used in refractories) and tin (alloys). Michot Foss noted that copper is not on the USGS' list of critical minerals, even though the availability of the metal is often a topic in the news.
China dominates the production of many of these minerals, which has led to trade tensions with the United States and other nations.
"The really important theme for today...is these are choices," Michot Foss said. "It's not that we (the U.S.) don't have these resources--we have the resources for most of them. We have commercial resources; we chose not to use them."
"The problem that we face, the thing that's getting talked about, are our vulnerabilities in the United States, and how that affects our relationships to the rest of the world," she continued. "How that affects our trade, our relationships with our trade partners and our trade flows, a lot of that is because of what we chose to do over the last decades for our own domestic extraction businesses."
Public policy, environmental oversight, fragmented regulatory barriers, high labor costs and a "misunderstanding in the market about what the mining industry is all about" have been some of the factors leading to the choices of what not to produce in the United States, Michot Foss said.
Michot Foss added that the "death" of the U.S. mining industry occurred while, ironically, she was in graduate school at the Colorado School of Mines during the 1980s.
"By the time I popped out (of school) in 1985, the Business Week cover story was out there, claiming the death knell, which actually it really was, and a kid graduating from (the School of Mines) had to go to Botswana to work in the mining industry. We had a mining industry that shrank by close to a half. We had rules that went into place that shut down refining and processing, which is our biggest problem, and the most difficult to address."
China's dominance of minerals supply chains "happened because of the choices we made. When our market shares shrunk because of our consolidations and dismantling of facilities here, the Chinese were industrializing. What do you think happens? You wake up one day and you were 40% of the finished aluminum market and now you are 2% and China is 50%."
The U.S. faces lots of challenges if it wants to alleviate the situation. In the old days, "we extracted really good ores," Michot Foss said, but miners now have to go to more remote locations to get better ore grades. "The concern here is the amount of metal, the end product, the target that you are after ... per ton of rock. And it's getting lower and lower, which makes all the problems in the mining industry worse and worse."
Also, "commercialization is really tough, supply chains are complex, (there are) lots of difficulties and challenges in quality because all the stuff that we use sometimes needs to be very pure. Sometimes it doesn't matter so much," she said.
Finally, the global asset base is old. Mining assets are built to last decades or even longer, and "we need to keep this stuff going because it's so hard to originate. But sooner or later it catches up with you. Operating costs rise, sustainability gets more difficult, it gets tougher and tougher to extract in a way that makes sense."
Despite the challenges, there are opportunities as well. "Clearly, we have to think about alternatives," Michot Foss said. "One of my main concerns ... is that a lot of what we are focused on is keeping us in the bucket of legacy materials."
There is "good news here and there," she added, such as efforts to get additional copper from waste material and obtaining tellurium (used in advanced thin film photovoltaic solar panels) from copper refining operations.
On the aluminum side, she said, "one of the ironies in the trade debate that is going on is that one of the best providers of aluminum for us is in Quebec right on the St. Lawrence River, fed by hydroelectricity."
Aluminum tariffs in the United States are now at 50%.
An effort to create a similar aluminum facility in the United States would come with "great pain and great effort," she said, which "is not the right thinking in my opinion. We need to figure out who are our friends, whether its Chile for copper, Quebec for aluminum. We've got to think seriously about those and how we are going to work with them."
On the rare earths front, there's MP Materials Corporation's (Las Vegas, Nevada) Mountain Pass rare earth oxide mine and refinery in California. It is rated as the second-largest rare earth mine in the world, with the only rare earth refinery in the Western Hemisphere. Subscribers to Industrial Info's Global Market Intelligence (GMI) Metals & Minerals Industry Plant Database can click here for the plant profile.
Industrial Info Resources (IIR) is the leading provider of industrial market intelligence. Since 1983, IIR has provided comprehensive research, news and analysis on the industrial process, manufacturing and energy related industries. IIR's Global Market Intelligence (GMI) helps companies identify and pursue trends across multiple markets with access to real, qualified and validated plant and project opportunities. Across the world, IIR is tracking more than 200,000 current and future projects worth $17.8 Trillion (USD).
Dr. Michelle Michot Foss of the Baker Center for Energy Studies kicked off the June 5 discussion by setting the scene. She noted that the current list of critical minerals includes about 50 items.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the Energy Act of 2020 defined critical minerals as those that are essential to the economic or national security of the United States; have a supply chain that is vulnerable to disruption; and serve an essential function in the manufacturing of a product, the absence of which would have significant consequences for the economic or national security of the U.S.
Critical minerals can include ones with exotic-sounding names such as the rare earth element dysprosium (used in permanent magnets), germanium (used in fiber optics) and platinum (catalytic converters), but also more prosaic-sounding ones like graphite (used in refractories) and tin (alloys). Michot Foss noted that copper is not on the USGS' list of critical minerals, even though the availability of the metal is often a topic in the news.
China dominates the production of many of these minerals, which has led to trade tensions with the United States and other nations.
"The really important theme for today...is these are choices," Michot Foss said. "It's not that we (the U.S.) don't have these resources--we have the resources for most of them. We have commercial resources; we chose not to use them."
"The problem that we face, the thing that's getting talked about, are our vulnerabilities in the United States, and how that affects our relationships to the rest of the world," she continued. "How that affects our trade, our relationships with our trade partners and our trade flows, a lot of that is because of what we chose to do over the last decades for our own domestic extraction businesses."
Public policy, environmental oversight, fragmented regulatory barriers, high labor costs and a "misunderstanding in the market about what the mining industry is all about" have been some of the factors leading to the choices of what not to produce in the United States, Michot Foss said.
Michot Foss added that the "death" of the U.S. mining industry occurred while, ironically, she was in graduate school at the Colorado School of Mines during the 1980s.
"By the time I popped out (of school) in 1985, the Business Week cover story was out there, claiming the death knell, which actually it really was, and a kid graduating from (the School of Mines) had to go to Botswana to work in the mining industry. We had a mining industry that shrank by close to a half. We had rules that went into place that shut down refining and processing, which is our biggest problem, and the most difficult to address."
China's dominance of minerals supply chains "happened because of the choices we made. When our market shares shrunk because of our consolidations and dismantling of facilities here, the Chinese were industrializing. What do you think happens? You wake up one day and you were 40% of the finished aluminum market and now you are 2% and China is 50%."
The U.S. faces lots of challenges if it wants to alleviate the situation. In the old days, "we extracted really good ores," Michot Foss said, but miners now have to go to more remote locations to get better ore grades. "The concern here is the amount of metal, the end product, the target that you are after ... per ton of rock. And it's getting lower and lower, which makes all the problems in the mining industry worse and worse."
Also, "commercialization is really tough, supply chains are complex, (there are) lots of difficulties and challenges in quality because all the stuff that we use sometimes needs to be very pure. Sometimes it doesn't matter so much," she said.
Finally, the global asset base is old. Mining assets are built to last decades or even longer, and "we need to keep this stuff going because it's so hard to originate. But sooner or later it catches up with you. Operating costs rise, sustainability gets more difficult, it gets tougher and tougher to extract in a way that makes sense."
Despite the challenges, there are opportunities as well. "Clearly, we have to think about alternatives," Michot Foss said. "One of my main concerns ... is that a lot of what we are focused on is keeping us in the bucket of legacy materials."
There is "good news here and there," she added, such as efforts to get additional copper from waste material and obtaining tellurium (used in advanced thin film photovoltaic solar panels) from copper refining operations.
On the aluminum side, she said, "one of the ironies in the trade debate that is going on is that one of the best providers of aluminum for us is in Quebec right on the St. Lawrence River, fed by hydroelectricity."
Aluminum tariffs in the United States are now at 50%.
An effort to create a similar aluminum facility in the United States would come with "great pain and great effort," she said, which "is not the right thinking in my opinion. We need to figure out who are our friends, whether its Chile for copper, Quebec for aluminum. We've got to think seriously about those and how we are going to work with them."
On the rare earths front, there's MP Materials Corporation's (Las Vegas, Nevada) Mountain Pass rare earth oxide mine and refinery in California. It is rated as the second-largest rare earth mine in the world, with the only rare earth refinery in the Western Hemisphere. Subscribers to Industrial Info's Global Market Intelligence (GMI) Metals & Minerals Industry Plant Database can click here for the plant profile.
Industrial Info Resources (IIR) is the leading provider of industrial market intelligence. Since 1983, IIR has provided comprehensive research, news and analysis on the industrial process, manufacturing and energy related industries. IIR's Global Market Intelligence (GMI) helps companies identify and pursue trends across multiple markets with access to real, qualified and validated plant and project opportunities. Across the world, IIR is tracking more than 200,000 current and future projects worth $17.8 Trillion (USD).
