Critical Minerals

Critical Minerals

Subject : International Relations

Section: Groupings

Concept :

• A recent working paper from Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) extends the earlier minerals assessment for 23 minerals by assessing the criticality levels of 43 select minerals for India based on their economic importance (demand-side factors) and supply risks (supply-side factors) which are determined through the evaluation of specific indicators.

Critical minerals

• Critical minerals refer to mineral resources, both primary and processed, which are essential inputs in the production process of an economy, and whose supplies are likely to be disrupted due to the risks of non-availability or unaffordable price spikes.
• To tackle such supply risks, major global economies periodically evaluate which minerals are critical for their jurisdiction through a quantitative assessment.

Examples:

• Minerals such as antimony, cobalt, gallium, graphite, lithium, nickel, niobium, and strontium are among the 22 assessed to be critical for India.

Significance for India:

• Many of these are required to meet the manufacturing needs of green technologies, high-tech equipment, aviation, and national defence.
• However, while India has a significant mineral geological potential, many minerals are not readily available domestically.
• Hence, India needs to develop a national strategy to ensure resilient critical minerals supply chains, which focuses on minerals found to be critical.

Applications:

• Electric vehicles: cobalt, lanthanum, lithium
• Fuel cells: platinum, palladium, rhodium
• Wind energy technologies: neodymium, dysprosium, terbium
• Aviation sector: titanium
• Photovoltaic solar technologies: cadmium, indium, gallium

Categorization:

• Traditional — titanium, vanadium
• Sunrise — lithium
• Mixed use — cobalt, nickel, graphite, light rare earth elements (LREEs), heavy rare earth elements (HREEs).

Minerals Security Partnership (MSP)

• In 2022, the US and 10 other nations — Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the European Commission — came together in a bid to break China’s dominance in the global marketof rare earth minerals and formed the Minerals Security Partnership (MSP).
• Objective:
  • The goal of the MSP is to ensure that critical minerals are produced, processed, and recycled in a manner that supports the ability of countries to realize the full economic development benefit of their geological endowments.
  • Focus would be on the supply chains of minerals such as Cobalt, Nickel, Lithium and also the 17 “rare earth” minerals.

G7’s Sustainable Critical Minerals Alliance

Canada, along with Australia, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, launched the Sustainable Critical Minerals Alliance to drive the global uptake of environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive and responsible mining, processing and recycling practices and responsible critical minerals supply chains.