Category:Strategic Minerals
From Eurêka
“Future generations will also measure what we did with the world's knowledge reserves. One of the rules of the next millennium must be that we have an obligation to disseminate, not hoard away new information about science, health and technology”
— Editorial, New York Times, 1 January 2000
Resources Resource is something material or abstract that can be used to satisfy some human want or deficiency, i.e. by definition the existence of a resource depends on its value to humans. What makes a thing a resource is not its intrinsically valuable properties but the fact that a given society expresses a desire for it and is willing to pay for it. Resources are therefore a cultural concept, and those things considered to be resources by one society may not be so considered by others who lack the knowledge or desire to use them.
Natural resources Refer to those parts of the environment that people find useful including minerals and energy sources, climate soils, natural vegetation, animal life, landscape, etc. They are identical to the formal economic concept of land. Resources are commonly divided into two major types:
- Stock resource (Nonrenewable resource) All minerals and land which have taken millions of years to form and so from a perspective are now fixed in supply. There must be a limit to the quantity which can be ultimately used, although we neither know where this limit lies nor whether the substance will still be regarded as a resource if this limit is approached. An important distinction arises between those which are “consumed by use” and those which can be recycled.
- Flow resource (Renewable resource) Flow resources are those which are naturally renewed within a sufficiently short lifespan to be of relevance to human beings. They include water, air, animal and plant life, solar radiation, wind power and tidal energy.
Resource process Total flow of a resource from its natural state through its period of human use to disposal (and perhaps re-use).
Critical zone resources Resources which can be exploited to exhaustion.
Human resources Refer to the number and abilities, mental and physical, of people.
Capital resources People-made aids to production, e.g. machine tools, and living, e.g. houses.
Common-property resource Natural resource for which no individual/private ownership rights exist and for which no rent/price is payable for its use, e.g. fish in the ocean, fresh air. Such resources, not owned by anyone, are considered to be “owned in common.”
Raw material Substance of an extractive nature (e.g. iron ore, stone, timber) which is intended for processing, fabrication or manufacture.
Non-utilitarian resource Resource which has social rather than practical value, e.g. a society enjoying a relatively high standard of living will generally place greater value on the need for clean air and water access and access to unspoiled recreation areas than a society faced with food shortages, widespread unemployment and lower material standards of living.
Inexhaustible Resource that will never run out.
- Immutable: solar power, wind power, precipitation, water power, tides.
- Misusable: atomic energy, atmosphere, water, scenery
Exhaustible Resource that will run out.
- Maintainable Resource that can be manage to sustain its use.
- Renewable, water in place, soil fertility, products of the land, products of lakes, streams, etc., products of the ocean, human powers.
- Nonrenewable species of wildlife, specimen wilderness.
- Nonmaintainable
- Reusable gem minerals, nonconsumptively used metals.
- Nonreusable fossil fuels, most nonmetallic minerals, consumptively used metals.
Resource base Total quantity of all the components of the environment that would become resources if they could be extracted from the environment. Some attempts have been made to calculate the resource base for particular non-fuel minerals by multiplying their elemental abundance measures in grams per tonne by the weight of the earth’s crust (or to a depth of one kilometer).
Hypothetical resources Resources we may expect to find in the future, in areas which today have been only partially surveyed and developed.
Speculative resources Deposits which could be found in hitherto unexplored or little-explored area where reasonably favorable geological conditions are thought to exist.
Ultimately recoverable resources Estimates of the ultimately available resource stocks. This has been an active area of research in the case of oil.
Maximum resource potential Anthropocentric attempts to estimate the future availability of renewable resources usually based on the notion of resource capacity or potential to produce useful products or services in a set period of time. Such estimation exercises must be regarded as essentially trivial and of no value in practical planning for future renewable resource developments.
Absorptive capacity (Assimilative capacity) Ability of water, land or air to be used as receptacles, either consciously or inadvertently, for the disposal of the waste products of human activity.
Carrying capacity Concept, borrowed from agriculture, is analogous to those of absorptive and sustainable capacity, in that it too is based on the assumption that resource use should be limited to levels where no appreciable environmental changes occur or where resource productivity is sustained over time.
Resource management Conscious process of decision-making whereby natural and cultural resources are allocated over time and space to optimize the attainment of stated objectives of a society, within the framework of its technology, political and social institutions, and legal and administrative arrangements. An important objective is the conservation of resources, implying a close and integrated relationship between the ecological basis and the socio-economic system. It is contrasted with resource development, which is the actual exploitation of a resource to meet human needs.
Depletion In the context of resource use, a reduction in the total amount of a resource ultimately available for use by society.
Depletion policy Government policy concerned with establishing guidelines as to how fast society should be using up its resources, particularly exhaustible or non-renewable ones. Attempts to formulate depletion policies imply that an optimum depletion rate - i.e. a rate of use which is better than all others, neither too fast or too slow - can be determined for the extraction and consumption of such resources. There are, however, problems in identifying such rates in practice, because the technically optimal rate may differ from the broader, economically optimal rate of use which, in turn, will differ from a narrowly commercial or profit-maximizing rate, and because of the difficulty of ensuring equity between generations.
Substitution In productive activity, the process of substituting one factor of production for another.
Economic exhaustion Deposits almost inevitably are deemed economically before they are physically worked out. As a deposit becomes more physically difficult to mine, supply costs rise and, over time, the marginal supply cost curves will shift upwards until a point is reached that no customer is prepared to pay them. That is the point of economic exhaustion.
Economic basement Rock strata below which there is little chance of discovering mineral wealth, especially oil. If mineral resources do exist below this basement, they are unlikely to be capable of exploitation at an economic cost.
Resource security Difficulties that can arise because of the uneven spatial distribution of resource consumption, production and reserves. Fears by nations that they will become import dependent and become vulnerable to cartels.
Strategic minerals Minerals considered to be essential to national security and to a healthy economy which must underlie that national security. These minerals are required for such products as jet engines, specialty steels, missiles, turbines, gun barrels, armor plate and aircraft fuselages as well as many other industrial products less directly related to military hardware. Today’s strategic minerals are often those which were barely mentioned in textbooks of mineralogy a few years ago, for they have been developed in the space age, high temperature technology. Aircraft engines have been pushed toward he extremes of high internal pressure and temperature, requiring many more compressor stages and more exotic materials to withstand the tremendous heat and stress. They must be strengthened by such minerals as titanium, stainless steel (which requires chrome, cobalt, manganese), and beryllium. Titanium illustrates the military/economic relationships perfectly for it is important in the aerospace industry. Each of the four engines of a Boeing 747 contains about 2,000 pounds of titanium. The total amount of the metal required for this plane, including the engines, is about 72,000 pounds. There were serious geopolitical implications resulting from the increasing dependence upon the Soviet Union and southern Africa for chromium, cobalt, manganese and platinum.
- Black Book US Army study entitled, “Report on Certain Features of the Organization Problems involved in Developing Resources to Meet Strategic Requirements.” Named after the color of cover, completed 15 May 1942.
Strategic reserve Stockpile of materials maintained for national security purposes.
Stockpiling Storage of a commodity for use at a later time.
