THE USGS APPROACH TO DEFINING, TRACKING, AND MODELING CRITICAL MINERALS (Invited Presentation)

The recent geopolitical and pandemic related strains on global supply chains have brought the issue of “critical materials” to the public eye, however prior to this newfound attention governments and affected industries have been working to develop was to identify and track materials with supply risks. The United States government has worked on various multi-agency modeling and tracking approaches for many years, but Executive Order 13817 in December 2017 mandated a coordinated federal identification of critical minerals. The criteria for defining a material “critical” were: a. being essential to US economic and national security, b. having a supply chain vulnerable to destruction, and c. contributes to the manufacturing of a product that is consequential to the economy or national security. This initial screening produced a list of 35 mineral products that met this threshold for criticality at some stage pre or post processing. The screening for critical materials was mandated to reoccur in three-year intervals, and the 2021 update used a further refined methodology and identified additional materials of concern.

This presentation will go through the methodology used to identify the US government’s list of critical minerals developed by the US Geological Survey with input from other agencies. Our work has prioritized quantitative analysis, and we will explain the metrics of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability used and how they interact in our risk framework. We will discuss the geologic, economic, and geopolitical factors that ultimately feed into our risk assessment, illustrating what it takes to make a material “critical.”

This work is not meant to simply periodically produce a list, but is also meant to help prioritize research into the geology, processing, and metallurgy of high risk materials. While our screening may identify that there is a lack of supply of a given commodity in the US, it will then require the efforts of public and private researchers to further determine if there is mineral potential in the US and if it can be utilized to reduce supply risks. Many of the critical minerals such as gallium or indium have only recently experienced manufacturing demand, opening new opportunities for study in geologic systems and geochemistry for the next generation of geoscientists.