Electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles rely on large amounts of copper, and demand for copper and other metals is soaring.

Strategic metals are those metals that are important to the national economy, national security, and green energy plans. In February 2018, the Secretary of the Interior submitted a draft list of 35 minerals considered vital to the United States

The list includes the following metals and semi-metals: aluminum (bauxite), antimony, arsenic, barite, beryllium, bismuth, cesium, chromium, cobalt, gallium, germanium, hafnium, indium, lithium, magnesium, manganese, niobium, Platinum group metals, potassium, rhenium, rubidium, scandium, strontium, tantalum, tellurium, tin, titanium, tungsten, uranium, vanadium, and zirconium. 

Many of these metals were included in the first strategic metal list created by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1973. These metals are then used in petroleum refining and glass manufacturing, and today’s list includes metals needed for electric car engines, missile guidance systems and satellites.

According to a recent report by PBS Newshour, China currently controls 80% of the world’s lithium-ion battery materials, 77% of the world’s battery cell materials and 60% of the world’s battery components.

The United States maintains its inventory of commodities that it considers to be of strategic significance. The agency responsible for managing the United States' natural resource reserves is the National Defense National Reserve Center (DNSC), which is a branch of the United States Defense Logistics Agency.

DNSC is located in Fort Belvoir in Fairfax County, Virginia, and has facilities throughout the United States, including giant storage tanks used to store the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. For many years, the U.S. Department of the Interior has managed the national helium reserve.

China also maintains national reserves. According to a recent Reuters article, on June 16, 2021, China announced a plan to release some of its copper, aluminum and zinc metal reserves. China's purpose in doing so is to control commodity prices.

China is the world's largest consumer of metals, and the release of some of its reserves may have a major impact on global supply and demand. According to Bloomberg News, China is expected to release 150,000 tons of zinc, 200,000 tons of copper and 500,000 tons of aluminum in batches. The last time China sold some of its reserves was in 2010, including: aluminum, zinc, lead, magnesium, steel products, rubber and pulp.

According to another Reuters article in September 2019, in order to reduce its dependence on Chinese metals, the United States established a mining consortium composed of ten countries to discover and develop metal reserves. In addition to the United States, other countries include Australia, Botswana, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Namibia, the Philippines and Zambia.

Under the management of the Energy Resources Governance Initiative (ERGI), the United States will share its mining expertise with other consortium members when searching for lithium, copper and cobalt. The United States will also work with other countries to make its mining industry attractive to international investors.

According to World Atlas, the countries with the most natural resources are:

The top ten countries with the most natural resources are: Brazil, the United States, Venezuela, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Australia.

With the depletion of resources on Earth, the idea of ​​mining asteroids has become increasingly profitable. When the earth formed more than 4 billion years ago, gravity pulled many elements out of the earth's crust and down into the core, where they could not be reached. Then, the asteroid impact brought much-needed metals such as gold, cobalt, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium, and tungsten closer to the surface.

So far, three asteroid excursions have been carried out: The Hayabusa developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency landed on the asteroid Itokawa in November 2005. Hayabusa collected tiny material particles and returned to Earth on June 13, 2010.

Hayabusa 2 arrived at the near-Earth asteroid 162173 Ryugu on June 27, 2018, where it stayed for a year and a half for sampling. It sent these samples back to Earth on December 5, 2020.

On September 8, 2016, NASA launched the OSIRIS-REx mission to the asteroid 101955 Bennu, which arrived in 2018. OSIRIS-REx successfully collected a sample, but some of them escaped when the flaps stuck open. NASA has determined that it retains enough materials and OSIRIS-REx will return to Earth on September 24, 2023.

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