Know Your Minerals

Strategic Metals & Minerals

Everything produced by man is mined. This is the definitions reference for the metals that run modern life: what each one is, why it matters, the companies mining it, and a fact worth knowing. For the quick visual version, tap through the strategic metals hub.

In brief

Mining Our Future connects every strategic metal to the product it makes possible and the Season 1 mine it comes from. This glossary is the plain-English reference: what each metal is, why it matters, and a fun fact, from gold and silver to antimony, lithium, uranium, and rare earths. It is for anyone who wants to understand the minerals behind modern life.

Precious metal

Gold

Gold is a dense, soft, corrosion-resistant precious metal (chemical symbol Au) prized for being highly conductive, chemically stable, and easy to work into thin wire or film. Beyond jewelry and bullion, gold is an industrial workhorse used in electronics, aerospace, and medical devices because it never tarnishes and carries an electrical signal reliably for decades.

Why it matters
Almost every smartphone, laptop, server, and electric vehicle contains gold, plated onto connectors, switches, and circuit board contacts where a tarnish-free, reliable electrical connection is non-negotiable. Gold bonding wires link the silicon chip to its package in countless processors and memory modules, and gold-coated components ride on satellites and spacecraft where corrosion or signal loss is not an option. The path runs straight from the mine to the device in your pocket: ore is dug and processed into refined gold, which is then plated micrometers thick onto the parts that make modern electronics work.
Did you know
Most Carlin Trend gold is invisible to the naked eye: the deposits hold microscopic gold locked inside other minerals, a type no one could see or recover until geologists cracked it open in 1961.

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Silver

Silver (symbol Ag) is a precious metal prized for having the highest electrical and thermal conductivity of any element, which makes it both a store of value and a critical industrial material. Roughly half of all silver mined each year goes into industrial uses such as solar panels, electronics, and electrical contacts rather than into coins or jewelry.

On board for Season 1

Bunker Hill Mining Corp.

Restarting the historic Bunker Hill silver-lead-zinc mine in Kellogg, Idaho, the operation that anchored the Silver Valley for a century. The first company aboard for Season 1.

Why it matters
Because silver conducts electricity better than any other metal, a fine silver paste is screen-printed onto solar cells to carry the current they generate, making silver one of the top drivers of solar demand worldwide. The same conductivity puts silver inside the electrical contacts, circuit boards, and switches of phones, EVs, and appliances, so a single rooftop solar array or electric car traces directly back to ounces pulled from a mine.
Did you know
Idaho’s Silver Valley has produced more than 1.2 billion ounces of silver since the 1880s, making it one of the richest silver districts ever discovered on the planet.

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Base metal

Copper

Copper (Cu) is a reddish-orange base metal prized for being the best non-precious conductor of electricity and heat, along with high ductility and natural corrosion resistance. Because copper carries current with minimal loss, copper is the default wiring metal for nearly every electrical and electronic system on earth.

Why it matters
Copper is the metal that moves electricity, so it sits inside almost everything that plugs in or powers up: the wiring in homes and buildings, power-grid cables and transformers, motors, and the windings, busbars, and battery connections in electric vehicles. A typical EV uses roughly four times the copper of a gas car, and every solar farm, wind turbine, and data center adds more demand, which makes copper one of the clearest mine-to-product links between what comes out of the ground and the electrified economy being built on top of it.
Did you know
Copper is endlessly recyclable without losing performance, and roughly two-thirds of all the copper ever mined since 1900 is still in use today, cycling through new wiring, pipes, and electronics.

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Zinc

Zinc is a bluish-white base metal (element symbol Zn) most often recovered alongside lead and silver from sulfide ore bodies. About half the world’s mined zinc is used to galvanize steel, coating it in a thin protective layer that sacrifices itself to corrosion so the steel underneath does not rust.

Why it matters
Galvanized zinc is the invisible reason steel survives outdoors: it armors highway guardrails, bridge beams, transmission towers, rebar, car body panels, and the support structures under solar farms and wind turbines, all of which would rust through in years without it. Beyond galvanizing, zinc alloys into brass and die-cast parts, becomes the anode in zinc and emerging zinc-ion batteries, and is a micronutrient added to fertilizers and supplements, so the same metal protects a bridge and feeds a crop.
Did you know
Zinc protects steel even where the coating gets scratched: because zinc is more reactive than iron, it corrodes first and shields the exposed steel, a self-sacrificing chemistry called galvanic (cathodic) protection.

Lead

Lead (Pb) is a soft, dense, corrosion-resistant base metal mined mainly from the ore galena (lead sulfide), the same ore that carries silver in many deposits. Lead is prized for its weight, low melting point, and ability to block radiation, and it is the most recycled metal in the world by tonnage.

Why it matters
Most lead becomes lead-acid batteries: the rechargeable units that start nearly every gas and diesel vehicle, back up cell towers and hospital systems, and store power for forklifts and off-grid solar setups. Lead’s density also makes it the standard shield against X-rays and gamma rays, which is why it lines the aprons at the dentist, the walls of radiology and CT rooms, and the casks that contain nuclear material. A lead-acid battery is also a closed loop: a spent one is smelted down and roughly 99 percent of its lead returns to a new battery, making it one of mining’s clearest mine-to-product-to-mine stories.
Did you know
Lead’s chemical symbol Pb comes from the Latin plumbum, the same root as “plumbing” and “plumber,” because the Romans piped water through lead.

Tin

Tin (symbol Sn) is a soft, silvery base metal whose largest modern use is solder, the fusible alloy that bonds electrical connections on nearly every circuit board. Tin is also used to coat steel as corrosion-resistant tinplate and, alloyed with copper, to make bronze.

Why it matters
Roughly half of all refined tin goes into solder, the metal that physically joins the components inside phones, laptops, EV battery packs, solar inverters, and defense electronics. No soldered joints means no working circuit board, so tin is the quiet connective tissue of the entire electronics economy: when the world shifted to lead-free solder under regulations like the EU’s RoHS, tin’s share of every joint rose, tightening its link to electronics demand. Tinplate also keeps the global food-can supply from rusting, and tin-copper bronze remains a workhorse for bearings, fittings, and marine hardware.
Did you know
The word “solder” and the device it builds are why tin is everywhere you can’t see it: the historical Bronze Age was named for bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, making tin one of the first metals humans deliberately combined to change civilization.

Critical mineral

Antimony

Antimony (symbol Sb) is a silvery, brittle metalloid on the U.S. critical minerals list, used mainly as a flame retardant, in lead-acid and liquid-metal batteries, and in military munitions. The United States mines almost no antimony today and imports nearly all of it, with China, Russia, and Tajikistan dominating global supply.

Why it matters
Antimony is a quiet workhorse of modern life and national defense. As antimony trioxide it is the dominant flame retardant in plastics, electronics casings, mattresses, upholstery, and children’s clothing, so most flame-resistant products around you trace back to an antimony mine. It hardens the lead plates in car and backup batteries, sharpens night-vision and infrared optics, and is essential to ammunition, explosives, and armor-piercing rounds, which is why the Department of Defense treats it as a strategic material. Emerging grid-scale liquid-metal batteries use antimony to store renewable power, tying the metal directly to the clean-energy buildout.
Did you know
The element’s symbol Sb comes from stibium, the Latin name for the ore stibnite, which ancient Egyptians ground into kohl eyeliner thousands of years before anyone understood what antimony actually was.

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Molybdenum

Molybdenum (symbol Mo) is a silvery, high-melting-point metal recovered mostly as a byproduct of copper mining and used as an alloying element to make steel stronger, harder, and more heat- and corrosion-resistant. About 80 percent of global molybdenum supply comes from copper porphyry deposits, where the metal occurs alongside copper ore.

Why it matters
A small amount of molybdenum transforms ordinary steel into the high-strength, heat-tolerant alloy that holds up under extreme stress, which is why it goes into oil and gas pipelines, jet-engine and power-plant superalloys, structural steel for bridges and buildings, stainless steel for kitchens and surgical tools, and the hardened steel in vehicles and armor. Roughly 80 percent of the world’s molybdenum ends up in specialty steels, cast irons, and superalloys, with the rest used in catalysts, high-pressure lubricants, and corrosion-resistant coatings. Without molybdenum the alloys that move energy, fly aircraft, and frame modern infrastructure would be weaker and far less durable.
Did you know
Molybdenum has one of the highest melting points of any pure metal, about 2,623 degrees Celsius (4,753 degrees Fahrenheit), which is why even tiny additions let steel keep its strength in jet engines and furnaces that would soften ordinary metal.

Uranium

Uranium (symbol U) is a dense, naturally radioactive metal and the primary fuel for nuclear power. Split in a reactor through fission, a single uranium fuel pellet the size of a fingertip releases roughly as much energy as a ton of coal, which makes uranium the most energy-dense fuel used at scale.

Why it matters
Nuclear reactors supply about a fifth of U.S. electricity and the largest share of its always-on, carbon-free power, and every kilowatt of it starts with mined uranium. Most U.S. uranium now comes up through in-situ recovery (ISR): instead of a pit, operators circulate a mild solution through the ore body underground and pump uranium-rich fluid to the surface, where it is dried into yellowcake and sent for enrichment into reactor fuel. With demand climbing for reliable grid power and for the small modular reactors on the horizon, a secure domestic uranium supply has become a national-security and energy-independence priority.
Did you know
Wyoming holds the largest known uranium reserves of any U.S. state, and because ISR mining uses wells instead of a pit, a working uranium operation can look less like a mine and more like a quiet field of pipes and wellheads.

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Tellurium

Tellurium is a rare, silvery-white metalloid recovered almost entirely as a byproduct of copper refining rather than mined on its own. Tellurium’s defining commercial use is cadmium telluride (CdTe), the semiconductor compound at the heart of thin-film solar panels.

Why it matters
When copper ore is electrorefined into pure metal, tellurium settles out in the anode slimes at the bottom of the refining tanks and is collected and purified from there. That recovered tellurium is then combined with cadmium to make CdTe thin-film photovoltaic panels, the leading US-manufactured alternative to silicon solar. So a metal most people have never heard of, pulled from the sludge under a copper refinery, ends up generating electricity on rooftops and in utility-scale solar farms. Tellurium also hardens steel and copper alloys for machining and goes into thermoelectric devices that turn heat into power.
Did you know
Tellurium is rarer in Earth’s crust than gold, yet it is far cheaper because it comes nearly free as a copper-refining byproduct, so its supply rises and falls with how much copper the world refines, not with demand for tellurium itself.

Tungsten

Tungsten is a dense, gray refractory metal (symbol W) that has the highest melting point of any metal, at 3,422°C, and is among the hardest metals known. Alloyed with carbon as tungsten carbide, tungsten becomes one of the hardest manufactured materials on Earth, second only to diamond among everyday industrial materials.

Why it matters
Tungsten is what lets industry cut, drill, and defend. Tungsten carbide gives the cutting edge to the drill bits, saw blades, and machining inserts that shape nearly every other manufactured metal part, from engine blocks to aircraft frames. The same density and hardness make tungsten the core of armor-piercing ammunition and military penetrators (now replacing depleted uranium) and a structural element in missiles, jet engines, and radiation shielding. The United States produces almost no tungsten of its own and relies heavily on imports, which is why it sits on the federal critical minerals list: no domestic tungsten, no reliable supply of the tools that build everything else.
Did you know
Tungsten’s name comes from the Swedish for “heavy stone,” and the metal lives up to it: tungsten is so dense that a basketball-sized chunk weighs about as much as an adult person. Its element symbol, W, comes from its older German name, wolfram.

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Battery metal

Lithium

Lithium is a soft, lightweight silvery metal (chemical symbol Li) and the lightest metal on the periodic table. Lithium is the core ingredient in the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that store and deliver energy in electric vehicles, phones, laptops, and grid storage.

Why it matters
No lithium, no EV. Every electric-vehicle battery pack carries several kilograms of lithium (extracted from hard-rock spodumene or pumped brine, then refined into battery-grade lithium hydroxide or carbonate) that gets built into the cathode and electrolyte of thousands of lithium-ion cells. The same chemistry powers the phone in your pocket, cordless tools, and the large battery banks that hold solar and wind power for the grid, which is why lithium sits at the center of the energy transition and is classified as a critical mineral by the U.S. government.
Did you know
Lithium is so light it floats on water and is the only metal that reacts with nitrogen gas at room temperature, yet a single EV battery pack can hold enough of it to power a home’s worth of electronics for years.

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Cobalt

Cobalt is a hard, silver-gray metal (element symbol Co) mined mostly as a byproduct of copper and nickel and refined into the cathodes of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. Cobalt stabilizes those cathodes so the battery can be charged thousands of times without overheating or losing capacity.

Why it matters
Cobalt is what keeps a high-energy battery safe and long-lived. In the lithium-ion cells that power electric vehicles, laptops, and phones, cobalt holds the cathode’s layered structure together so the cell resists thermal runaway and survives years of charging cycles. No cobalt mine, no dependable EV range or all-day phone battery: the metal travels from a copper-belt mine to a refinery to a cathode plant and into the battery pack under the floor of an electric car.
Did you know
Cobalt gets its name from the German “kobold,” a mischievous goblin: medieval miners blamed these spirits when the bluish ore poisoned them and yielded no copper or silver.

Nickel

Nickel is a silvery, corrosion-resistant transition metal (symbol Ni) mined mainly from sulfide and laterite ores. About two-thirds of the world’s nickel goes into stainless steel, and a fast-growing share goes into the cathodes of high-energy electric-vehicle batteries.

Why it matters
Nickel is the metal that makes both rust-proof steel and long-range EVs possible. Alloyed with iron and chromium, it produces the stainless steel in kitchen sinks, surgical tools, industrial pipework, and building facades. Inside a lithium-ion battery, nickel is the dominant metal in high-energy NMC and NCA cathodes, where more nickel means more energy stored per pound, which translates directly into more driving range. Without mined nickel there is no stainless steel and no high-range electric car: a clean mine-to-product line from ore body to the vehicle in your driveway.
Did you know
Nickel is named from the German “Kupfernickel,” meaning “devil’s copper,” because medieval miners thought a goblin (Old Nick) had bewitched the reddish ore that looked like copper but yielded none.

Graphite

Graphite is a soft, naturally occurring crystalline form of carbon, mined from the ground or manufactured synthetically from petroleum coke. Graphite is the standard anode material in lithium-ion batteries, the electrode that stores and releases lithium ions every time the battery charges and discharges.

Why it matters
Every lithium-ion battery has two electrodes, and graphite is the anode in nearly all of them. A single electric vehicle battery pack contains 110 to 220 pounds of graphite, more than any other battery material by weight, which makes graphite the largest single mineral input in the cells that power EVs, phones, laptops, and grid storage. No graphite anode, no rechargeable battery: lithium gets the headlines, but the charge has to land somewhere, and that somewhere is graphite.
Did you know
Graphite and diamond are both pure carbon, identical atoms arranged differently: graphite is one of the softest minerals and writes your pencil marks, while diamond is the hardest. The United States mines no natural graphite at all and imports 100 percent of what it uses, which is why graphite sits on the federal critical minerals list.

Manganese

Manganese is a hard, brittle, silvery-gray metal (element symbol Mn) that is essential to steelmaking and to lithium-ion battery cathodes. Nearly every ton of steel produced relies on manganese to remove impurities and add strength, which makes manganese one of the most-used industrial metals on Earth.

Why it matters
Manganese is the workhorse of the modern world in two ways. About 90 percent of mined manganese goes into steel, where it pulls out oxygen and sulfur and toughens the alloy, so it is in the rebar, beams, rails, car bodies, and appliances around you. The rest increasingly feeds the battery economy: manganese is a core cathode ingredient in lithium manganese oxide (LMO) and nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) chemistries that power electric vehicles and grid storage, where it stabilizes the cell and lowers reliance on costlier cobalt. No manganese, no affordable steel and no high-energy EV batteries.
Did you know
Manganese is so tied to steel that there is no economic substitute for it in the process: every ton of steel needs a few kilograms of manganese, and no other element does the same job at the same price, which is why governments classify manganese as a critical mineral despite it being one of the most abundant metals in the Earth’s crust.

Rare earth

Rare earth elements

Rare earth elements are a group of 17 metallic elements, the 15 lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium, prized because several of them produce the strongest permanent magnets ever made. Despite the name, rare earth elements are reasonably abundant in the Earth’s crust but rarely occur in concentrated, economic deposits, which makes mining and separating them difficult and strategically important.

Why it matters
A handful of rare earths, neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium, are refined into neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnets, the most powerful magnets available. Those magnets spin the traction motors in nearly every electric vehicle, turn the generators inside wind turbines, and aim the fins and seeker heads in precision-guided defense systems, so the rare earth supply chain sits directly between the mine and the EV, the wind farm, and the missile.
Did you know
A single large offshore wind turbine can contain more than a ton of rare earth permanent magnets, and a typical EV motor uses about 1 to 2 kilograms of rare earths, which is why these 17 elements have become a flashpoint in global trade.

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