Critical Minerals are like roast dinners - hear me out…

A classic roast dinner… can’t say I agree with the composition

So, on a long drive from Cornwall to Nottingham to attend the Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre Annual Conference, I was naturally thinking about how best to communicate some key aspects of why critical minerals are important… and I was hungry.

That was when it hit me, critical minerals have a lot in common with roast dinners.

OK, so they’re not the roast dinner itself, but they can represent  components of a roast dinner. Let’s step back for a minute.

Critical minerals are important in different industries. These industries build things… like different roast dinners. Some industries make roast dinners that don’t need anything particularly special and you can readily source everything you need. The potatoes are a classic roast, the veggies are a standard stock of carrots and peas, the stuffing is sage and onion and the meat is available and cheap. Even the premium products simply furnish with a nice chunky parsnip. It’s a classic roast chicken dinner.

Now, you’re probably wondering which way I’m going with this… or at least what controversial roast dinners claims I’m about to make...

Naturally, you need to step up to a more complex roast dinner to see the inclusion of critical minerals, I mean ingredients. Different industries are variably complex and make different roast dinners and therefore need a different combination of critical minerals. The turkey dinner has its cranberry sauce - perhaps the antimony in fire retardants. Whereas batteries are the pork roast with its crackling graphite anode and lithium electrolyte apple sauce.

We then come to the defence industry, with its complex requirements to make the perfect duck roast - I’ll let you decide what elements comprise the red cabbage, asparagus and poached cinnamon pear that are essential to this roast dinner. (Yes, there’s no jus d’orange on my table!)

The first facet of critical minerals in this metaphor is that not only are they important to particular dinners, you often only need a little of each to make the meal memorable. That what makes them important to a country as it creates a world-leading industry or product.

The second facet is where you source them. Sure I can import my pears from Netherlands, asparagus from Mexico and my red cabbage Spain. But wouldn’t it be better if I could grow them all in the Vale of Evesham, the UK’s famous growing region for market garden crops? (You can by the way).

The UK has similar regions for critical minerals in the rocks beneath us and can source at least some of its own needs. It’s time we started consuming local for raw materials, too.

I would like to thank Jeff Townsend for his surprisingly enthusiastic support for this metaphor - thanks for being polite Jeff ;)