Metal Digest

Metals shape modern life, from electronics to energy

Metals & geopolitics

Metal commodity prices are at the mercy of geopolitics, wars, mine discoveries, and miners’ strikes, making the market volatile.
Some metals are so strategic that countries have created national reserve stocks, such as tungsten, cobalt, and lithium, avoiding dependence on imports.

Critical metals

Critical metals are defined by supply risk, not scarcity. China dominates not only mining but, the refining & processing stages, accounting for around 90% of REE processing, 60% of refined lithium, and 70% of refined cobalt. The bottleneck here is the chem processing stage.
Mines take 10–20 years to come online. Lengthy environmental and social permitting makes critical metals structurally volatile, as supply reacts slowly to demand.
W/o critical metals, digitalization would not exist: data centers, semiconductors, sensors, and smart grids depend on tantalum, tungsten, indium, and REEs. A single smartphone uses 30+ metals.

Gold, copper, nickel

Gold is an almost indestructible metal, capable of being recycled w/ virtually no loss of quality. Long a store of value; ~40% of mined gold sits in central banks.
Copper, the leading conductive metal, is an economic barometer: up in growth, down in crises.
Nickel demand & production have doubled over the past decade due to the electrification of vehicles, with certain battery-grade nickel achieving an astonishing 99.99% purity.

Iron / steel

98–99% of all extracted iron is used to produce steel, making it essential for infra, transportation & construction. Although it is more abundant than gold or copper, pure iron is extremely rare in nature.
Brazil is the largest exporter of high-quality iron ore, with only 10% of the world's supply coming from countries outside major producers like Brazil, Australia, and China.
Stainless steel, which contains nickel as a key alloying element, is widely used in PV, wind, green H₂, and biogas, thanks to its corrosion resistance, especially in offshore turbines & electrolyzers/piping.
304 steel is the most common austenitic stainless steel, containing 18-20% chromium and 8-10.5% nickel, known for excellent corrosion resistance, formability, and non-magnetic properties.

Agricultural minerals: where geology meets sustainable farming

Metals are vital for agriculture, from macro nutrients like potassium (K), phosphorus (P), calcium (Ca), and magnesium, to micro nutrients such as zinc, copper, manganese, and molybdenum.
K & P support growth, Ca & Mg strengthen plants, and S, now often from energy byproducts, links agriculture and industry.
Micro nutrients (needed in tiny amounts), are crucial for productivity, with many recycled from industrial residues.