Critical Mineralogy
The Mineralogy of Critical Minerals
Co-Conveners
Robert John Bodnar,Virginia Tech
Pei Ni, School of Earth Sciences and Engineering, Nanjing University
Nancy Ross, Virginia Tech
Critical minerals represent materials that are essential to the economic and national security of a country, and have a supply chain that is vulnerable to disruption. Most developed countries have established lists of critical minerals and, while the lists vary to some extent based on each country's mineral endowment and political and trade agreements, many materials are common to the large majority of critical minerals lists.
Most critical minerals are not minerals sensu stricto, following the accepted definition of a mineral. Rather, most critical minerals are elements (such as cadmium, lithium, rare earth elements, etc.), with others being mixtures of minerals (such as bauxite). In nature, some critical minerals, including copper, occur as a major stoichiometric component of ore minerals such as chalcopyrite, bornite, chalcocite and covellite. In other cases, the critical mineral occurs as a minor or trace component in another mineral - an example is the occurrence of the critical mineral cadmium in the mineral sphalerite (ZnS). In rare cases, a critical mineral is indeed a mineral, with examples being the minerals graphite and barite.
In this session we invite contributions that describe the physical, crystallographic and thermodynamic processes that lead to the formation of minerals that host critical minerals (elements), as well as processes required to extract and refine critical minerals. Topics of interest include partitioning of various elements between melts, fluids and minerals; crystallographic constraints on elemental substitution in minerals; the various chemical and physical conditions and processes that control mineral chemistry, and modern analytical techniques applied to critical minerals characterization.
