Who dominates the world’s materials-based industries of the future? Well, says The Elements of Power author, David S. Abraham, it’s probably going to be the economic power educating and training today’s best metallurgists, engineers and earth scientists.
Speaking on a panel on geopolitics and critical minerals convened by the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Abraham said a generation of US policy drift towards outsourcing of minerals and metals supply had not only left the country strategically challenged (let’s say) in relation to China and its industrial base, it had also opened up a critical skills gap.
The Boise State University faculty member and resident expert on critical materials and industrial policy featured on the panel with Gracelin Baskaran from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, former US foreign service officers, Helaina Matza and Laura Taylor-Kale and moderator, CFR senior fellow Heidi Crebo-Rediker.
Matza is now minerals investor TechMet’s chief strategic development officer and Taylor-Kale is CEO of Washington DC-based Strategic Capital Advisory and a CFR geoeconomics and defence senior fellow.
The panel discussion, in the US capital, examined global resource control and risks associated with concentrated supply chains – what were called “shared vulnerabilities” among the US and its allies. The forum was described as the influential, century-old US think tank’s first public meeting on critical minerals.
It heard China’s broad and deep-seated strategy to dominate global materials-based industries demanded a similarly comprehensive free-market response. “What we’re facing is very much a generational challenge, not just a mining challenge,” Crebo-Rediker said. “There are many dimensions to it. The Chinese have made a generational investment in the full supply chain and the US has not.”
Between changes of Western governments and a seemingly scattergun policy landscape, discussion about strategic material sourcing and resilient supply-chain building had at least been significantly elevated, the meeting heard. Now what was needed, though, was more coherent policy that deeper reserves of patient private capital and the other main driver of progress, people, could get behind.
“We need to focus on education because we don’t have the necessary skills in our wheelhouse here,” Abraham said.
“Ten years ago I was talking to a materials scientist who was coming out of MIT and most of her classmates weren’t going into material science.
“They were going into finance.
“There was a lack of sexiness in material science. And the same with mineralogy and processing. You can go through a number of different studies and say, oh, there are 40 programs in China that are studying metallurgy and there are just a few here, and a few in Europe, or we only have 600 students studying mining and related degrees annually compared to 12,000 in China.
“Those numbers [highlight] a difference in scope, but the question is really, what’s needed here?
“That context I can’t give because I don’t know. But what I do know is that I go to a mining conference and I feel I’m the youngest guy in the room. And I should not be at the age of my career where I’m the youngest guy – and I do say guy – in the room. So there’s going to be even a further loss of expertise.
“It is important to have these conversations because it gets people enthusiastic about coming to courses; coming to classes.
“Hopefully a few smart people will switch industries because if we can start to harbour ambitions at the dawn of AI there’s a strong future for us to come through with breakthroughs that we really haven’t thought about.
“There’s AI that can do a better job of analysing where the resources are in the ground so we could be more efficient with our mining methods to reduce costs.
“In the midstream, especially for rare earths, there’s this brew of acids and heat and magnetics that help coax elements out of the minerals. In the case of rare earths there are [multi-stage] mixer-settlers. It’s a flow of liquid and minerals from one container to the next. And if you can start to use AI to process the amount of time it’s in one settler or mix the acids in a certain way more efficiently, you can start to increase production and yield at percentages that make new ore deposits much more profitable.
“It’s these kind of breakthroughs that are 10%, 15% or 20% more efficient that can bring new resources to life.”
The forum heard the importance of a more technologically advanced, future-facing materials supply sector projecting its vital role in advanced manufacturing and technology supply chains into new ‘markets’ could not be understated.
Baskaran said hosting the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ first Future of Critical Minerals and National Security event at West Point military academy in New York was an eye-opener.
“The composition of the workforce is changing in mining,” she said. “Fifteen years ago if you looked at a mine it was rock blasters physically going to place the blast and then blasting it. [Now] they sit five miles away in a room that kind of looks like a mission control room and they blast using AI.
“As a kid who spent time in a NASA control room and in adulthood, [after I] did my PhD on the platinum sector, having spent a lot of time in these [mine control] rooms, it is like, wow, this is the coolest thing in the world.
“I thought the coolest part of [the West Point forum] was a bunch of cadets going to the superintendent and saying, wow, this is really cool: how do I change my major?
“Mining is just an interesting thing we don’t talk about.
“I can’t turn a 45-year-old into a mine engineer [but] starting younger, engaging actively, playing that mentoring role, helping them understand, is how we get a younger group in. We need to build our STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] education if we want to create that pipeline of talent.”
