Minerals: What Are They and What Makes Them Critical?

Minerals and materials are the backbone of industrial productivity and might. With annual sales in the billions, they are key inputs into fulfilling the goal of lifting billions out of poverty and putting us all on a cleaner more sustainable trajectory. This paper provides background information on these crucial markets. I provide some background on the size of markets by tonnage and sales value, market evolution and recurring cycles of scarcity scares for critical minerals. Recent concerns have spawned dozens of government studies to determine which materials are critical in meeting our goals. From reviewing these studies, I consider factors that make materials critical --- high economic and/or strategic value coupled with supply insecurity, which might be geological, technical, political, social, and economic. By comparing studies, I come up with a global list of critical materials that make it on the list of many of the existing studies. I summarize what we know about demand and supply elasticities for minerals and use an example of space mining to illustrate their use.