Rare Earth Elements and the Electric Vehicle Revolution
The electric vehicle is often described as a triumph of software, batteries and bold design — and it is all of those things. But spin the story back to its raw materials and you arrive at a quieter, less celebrated truth: the modern EV is, at its core, a machine built around a small group…
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Why Global Industries Need Rare Earth Minerals
Most people will never hold a rare earth mineral in their hands, yet they touch the results of these elements dozens of times a day. The phone that wakes you, the car that moves you, the wind turbine spinning on a distant ridge, the MRI machine in a hospital, the guided systems that defend a…
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Why Ilmenite is Important in Aerospace Manufacturing
Hold a handful of ilmenite and it tells you nothing about the sky. It is dark, heavy, unglamorous — a black sand that smudges your palm and looks, frankly, like dirt. I have run countless tonnes of it through my fingers over twenty-five years on the Jos Plateau. And yet every time I do, I…
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Industrial Uses of Titanium Dioxide
There is a moment I never tire of. I am standing on the Jos Plateau with a handful of dark, heavy ilmenite sand running through my fingers — grains so black they look almost like gunpowder — and I think about where they are going. Because that same black sand, after a long industrial journey,…
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Why Investors are Targeting African Lithium Deposits
The phone calls have changed. For most of my twenty-five years on the Jos Plateau, the people who rang me wanted tin, columbite or tantalite. These days, more and more of the voices on the line — some from Lagos, many from Shanghai, a growing number from London and Toronto — ask about one thing:…
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Battery Minerals and the Clean Energy Transition
A few years ago, the young men who used to bring me cassiterite and columbite from the pegmatites around the Plateau started showing up with a different rock. Pale, glassy, sometimes faintly pinkish or lilac — spodumene and lepidolite. They did not always know what they had. I did. The same lithium-cesium-tantalum pegmatites that have…
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Mineral Recovery Techniques in Heavy Mineral Sands
The first time I really understood heavy mineral sands, I was crouched beside a stream on the Jos Plateau watching an old tin miner swirl a calabash of black sand. He wasn’t a metallurgist. He had never read a flowsheet in his life. But as he tilted and washed, the heavier grains — the cassiterite,…
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Future Demand for Strategic Minerals
There was a time when every buyer who reached out to me asked the same question: what do you have available right now? The mineral business was a business of the present tense. You had a parcel of columbite or tin sitting at a buying station, a buyer wanted it, and the deal lived and…
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The New Global Competition for Strategic Minerals
For most of my 24 years in this trade, the producer sat at the bottom of the table. The big buyers held the cards, set the prices, and we who dug the minerals out of the Jos Plateau took what we were offered and were told to be grateful for it. That arrangement felt permanent.…
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Industrial Minerals Driving the Future Economy
For most of my 24 years in this business, the spotlight has always fallen on the glamorous minerals. On the Jos Plateau, where I learned the trade, everyone wanted to talk about tin, columbite, tantalite — and lately about lithium and rare earths. The materials with the dramatic headlines. But standing on those minesites year…
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