Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-1-2021

Publication Title

iScience

Volume

24

Issue

7

First page number:

1

Last page number:

19

Abstract

The critical minerals and elements are natural substances that are essential to modern life but have insecure supply. This lack of a secure supply clashes with the increasing importance of these elements, especially given their use in technologies needed to reduce global CO2 emissions and mitigate against anthropogenic climate change. In this contribution we review the by-product nature of the critical minerals and elements and the inherant uncertainties in reported critical mineral and element annual production as well as the relationships between these commodities and main-product metals and associated concentrates. We explore the geological and geographical barriers to critical mineral and element supplies, as well as how the lack of available data and the uncertainties in the data that are available hinder our ability to estimate global resources with confidence.

Keywords

Energy sustainability; Environmental geochemistry; Environmental policy; Environmental science; Geochemistry

Disciplines

Earth Sciences | Geochemistry | Physical Sciences and Mathematics

File Format

pdf

File Size

3684 KB

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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