Knowledge / Mining & Geoscience / Critical Raw Materials
Critical Raw Materials
Critical Raw Materials: Supply risk and economic importance, how the EU, US and others measure them, and why criticality is not value; Light and heavy REE, carbonatite, ionic-clay and placer sources, and why separation, not geology, is the bottleneck; Salar brines.
All 7 articles are published. Each one states what it needs, what can be concluded with it, and what cannot — and every one stays marked DRAFT until it has had independent geological review.
- 1. What makes a raw material critical publishedSupply risk and economic importance, how the EU, US and others measure them, and why criticality is not value.
- 2. Rare earth elements publishedLight and heavy REE, carbonatite, ionic-clay and placer sources, and why separation, not geology, is the bottleneck.
- 3. Lithium: brine and hard rock publishedSalar brines, spodumene pegmatites and clays — how each is explored, measured and processed.
- 4. Battery metals: nickel, cobalt and manganese publishedSulphide and laterite nickel, cobalt as a by-product, and manganese — geology, processing route and supply concentration.
- 5. Graphite publishedFlake, vein and amorphous graphite, why flake size and purity matter more than grade, and synthetic competition.
- 6. By-products and companion metals publishedGallium, germanium, indium, tellurium, cobalt — metals whose supply is set by a host metal's economics.
- 7. Supply concentration and criticality lists publishedHerfindahl index, processing versus mining concentration, and how to read an official list without over-reading it.