Publications

The accelerating adoption of clean energy technologies is driving demand for certain mineral commodities like lithium, essential for electric vehicle batteries. Understanding the influence of the energy transition on each market requires examining their supply and demand price elasticities. However, there have only been a limited number of studies that have estimated mineral demand price...

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Each mineral commodity chapter of the 2024 edition of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Mineral Commodity Summaries (MCS) includes information on events, trends, and issues for each mineral commodity as well as discussions and tabular presentations on domestic industry structure, Government programs, tariffs, 5-year salient statistics, and world production, reserves, and resources. The...

Global resource extraction raises concerns about environmental pressures and the security of mineral supply. Strategies to address these concerns depend on robust information on natural resource endowments, and on suitable methods to monitor and model their changes over time. However, current mineral resources and reserves reporting and accounting workflows are poorly suited for...

Rare earth elements are increasing in demand due to the movement towards electrification. In particular, there is a growing need for high performance rare earth permanent magnets for motors and generators used to convert electrical energy to mechanical energy, and vice versa. Current trends in rare earth demand are reviewed and discussed as the specific rare earth metal demand can...

From 2000 through 2020, demand for cobalt to manufacture batteries grew 26-fold. Eighty-two percent of this growth occurred in China and China’s cobalt refinery production increased 78-fold. Diminished industrial cobalt mine production in the early-to-mid 2000s led many Chinese companies to purchase ores from artisanal cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), many of...

The relative quantities of ore mined and waste rock (i.e., overburden) removed to produce the rare earth elements—their rock-to-metal ratios—were calculated for 21 individual operations or regions covering nearly all mine production in 2018. The results indicate that the rock-to-metal ratios for the total rare earth elements ranged from a low of 1.6 × 101 to a high of 3.6 × 103, with...

Each mineral commodity chapter of the 2023 edition of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Mineral Commodity Summaries (MCS) includes information on events, trends, and issues for each mineral commodity as well as discussions and tabular presentations on domestic industry structure, Government programs, tariffs, 5-year salient statistics, and world production, reserves, and resources. The...

Estimating the material flows of rare earth elements (REEs) is essential to understanding which industries are most vulnerable to potential REE supply disruptions which, in turn, may inform policy recommendations aimed at reducing the supply risk. However, the REEs are a group of mineral commodities characterized by highly uncertain estimates of supply and demand due to the REE market's...

Tantalum has received considerable attention due to risks associated with its supply chain. In 2020 ∼70% of global tantalum supply originated in Africa, with 40% produced in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone. The United States has relied entirely on imports since the 1950s. However, quantifying total domestic consumption is problematic because refined tantalum compounds do not have...

IntroductionDuring the last 12 decades (1900–2020), the amounts of raw materials used in the United States have increased significantly due to economic development, technological innovations, and population growth. Data on materials are presented here to provide an overview of the annual quantities (measured in physical terms) required for the standard of living in the United States and...