OilPrice highlights losses of strategic metals during wars
Modern weapons, drones, communication systems and other military technologies require strategic metals, while materials from destroyed equipment are often difficult or economically unprofitable to return to circulation. This is stated in an opinion column by Kurt Cobb for OilPrice.
The author notes that such metals are needed not only by the defense industry. They are used in solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, displays, semiconductors, batteries, optics and aerospace equipment. In the military sphere, they are used, in particular, in night-vision systems, radars, satellite communications, radiation shielding, armor, submarine hulls and precision weapons.
Germanium and drones
Cobb paid special attention to germanium. According to him, this metal also has civilian applications: in semiconductors, solar energy, autonomous transport, scientific instruments, battery technologies and medical developments.
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The columnist referred to a headline claiming that the drone war in Ukraine allegedly consumes 4% of global demand for germanium amid restrictions on supplies from China. At the same time, Cobb explicitly emphasized that he cannot verify the reliability of this estimate. He suggested that germanium is being consumed in Russia’s war — an aggressor state — against Ukraine, as well as in the war involving Iran, the United States and Israel.
Extraction and processing
In the author’s view, growing demand for critical minerals for electronics, renewable energy and defense technologies increases the need to expand extraction. He cites data according to which half of all copper mined globally as of 2018 was extracted during 2000–2018.
Cobb also notes that lithium extraction rates increased by 2,539% in 1970–2022. He believes that further expansion of extraction will require ever more energy and other resources due to a shift to deposits with lower concentrations of useful components. In his assessment, the use of strategic metals in destroyed weapons reduces the volume of materials available for civilian high-tech manufacturing.
