Gardner reported from the UK that despite having limited rare earth reserves, the UK is still eager to make moves in the sector. Elliot Gardner speaks to Professor Frances Wall of the Camborne School of Mines on the topic. In July 2022, the UK government launched ‘Resilience for the Future: The UK’s Critical Mineral Strategy’, a landmark strategy aimed at recognizing the importance of critical minerals to British modern daily life, and securing a supply chain to protect UK interests and investments in this vital sector.
In March 2023, the government updated this commitment, putting a spotlight on funding and initiatives in place to deliver on its strategy, including an $18.6m (£15m) fund through UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to boost rare earth element supply chains reliant on the UK and, and ensure the resilience of these supplies of critical minerals.
In announcing the fund, the UKRI and the UK Department for Business and Trade highlighted the importance of critical minerals in developing clean energy technologies, the need for recycling technologies to secure UK critical mineral requirements and the importance of developing interests at home and abroad, important aspects of the supply chain that will be buoyed by the new funding.
But questions remain as to how best to implement these strategies, and how much of a role the UK can have when its domestic production of rare earths is limited. Professor Frances Wall, who is a professor of applied mineralogy at the Camborne School of Mines at the University of Exeter, and who helped advise the UK government’s critical mineral strategy, is uniquely positioned to answer some of these questions.
Elliot Gardner: The term “critical minerals” seems quite broad; can you help define what is meant when we refer to minerals this way?
Professor Frances Wall: Critical minerals are defined differently to different people in different places. But basically, we mean really specialist metals and rare earth elements with important properties that make our high-tech goods work.
Read on .... https://mine.nridigital.com/mine_may23/uk_rare_earths_sector
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