America’s mineral blind spot – the trillion-dollar opportunity hiding in plain sight

Payne Institute Student Researcher Gabriel Collins, Faculty Fellow Ian Lange, and Director Morgan Bazilian write about how In the sprawling mines of Utah and Arizona, where global giants extract copper and nickel by the ton; germanium, gallium, tellurium—names that don’t make headlines, but underpin the technologies of tomorrow—are discarded as waste or left ignored in tailings ponds. While China tightens its grip on these critical minerals, the US sits idle, stymied not by geology but by corporate calculus.  September 11, 2024.