Otmane El Rhazi from Mining Weekly | Ferrous Metals Home.
The term “strategic minerals” is one that is much used but one that, in the words of Brazilian minerals lawyer Raquel Quaresma de Lima, “does not have a steady definition”, while the Science and Technology Committee of the UK House of Commons has observed that there is “no single definition of the term ‘strategic’.” Rather, de Lima points out, it is “a subjective feature being continuously subject to changes in view of different factors throughout time. It varies from product to product, from country to country and also depends on the development of new technologies, the uses of the mineral products and the availability of adequate and cost-effective substitutes. Notwithstanding, there are two characteristics which are most commonly used to define what is a strategic mineral. They are the vulnerability [risk of supply] and the criticality [the importance of the mineral for strategic industries in a country] ... .” The Science and Technology Committee decided that it “had to take a broad definition and we took strategically important metals ... to be those that may be of importance to any user within the UK.”*
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