To explain that Ukrainian minerals deal

This could, logically, be true:

Ukraine is believed to have vast ­mineral reserves, including 19 million tonnes of graphite and a third of Europe’s lithium, both of which are used in batteries, as well as large ­deposits of rare earth metals, used to produce electronics used in everything from iPhones to fighter jets.

Ukraine could have vast mineral reserves. We could go and look it up and see - for by definition mineral reserves are what people have worked upon and shown can be profitably mined. Not just shown in fact, proven.

This could, logically, be true:

“It will only become practical when the United States provides the first contribution,” Yulia Svyrydenko, 39, told The Times in her first interview since signing the agreement alongside Scott Bessent, the US Treasury secretary, in Washington on April 30.

“We need a $5 billion to $10 billion investment — implementing critical raw materials projects is time-consuming and very costly. New projects require us to conduct a geological survey, a pre-feasibility study and a feasibility study.”

If we are to go off and look for minerals then we’ve got to go off and look for minerals. There’s all sorts of stuff in the ground beneath our feet after all.

The problem is that both cannot be true at the same time. For the way that we prove that profitability of extraction, make a mineral reserve, is by doing the geological survey, the pre-feasibility study and the feasibility study. The last of those (more commonly called the DFS, the definitive feasibility study) is what actually creates the mineral reserve.

Now of course, this is geopolitics so it doesn’t actually have to make sense. But the larger point still stands. There are three types of minerals out there. Deposits - what God’s engineer sprinkled around - resources - what we think we can extract profitably - reserves - what we have proven we can extract profitably, using today’s technology, at today’s prices, and which we’ve already got all the licences to do so with.

If we run short of reserves we can apply for more licences. Or work up some resources to greater certainty. Or go exploring for new deposits, new extraction methods, work up some resources and so on.

It is absolutely vital to grasp this point: mineral reserves are something man-made. Sure, sure, mineral deposits are God (or Gaia, or geology) made but everything after that is a creation of us and our efforts. As we say, vital to grasp this.

For all that squinnying about how we’ve got to recycle everything because we’re about to run out is based upon measuring mineral reserves. No, really. Blueprint for Survival, the Club of Rome*, the EU’s critical minerals plan, all of it and everything keeps shouting that we’re about to run out of mineral reserves therefore recycle. When the correct action could be - do note the could - to just go and do the work of qualifying some resources up to reserves, or deposits up to resources etc.

Which leads to an even more general point. When attempting to discuss a subject it might be worth doing just that little bit of research to see what the terms of art are in that subject. So, you know, you begin to grasp the first iota of a clue of what everyone’s talking about?

Ukraine does not have vast mineral reserves. It does have lots of lovely mineral deposits. In that distinction is something very important about the wider economy. For so does everywhere else have lots of lovely mineral deposits as well. And if we want to extract from them all we’ve got to do is that work of doing so. There is absolutely no element that we currently use which we’re going to even run short of, let alone out of, for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years.

*The Club of Rome assumed - just assumed - that resources were 10x reserves. As reserves tend to last 30 years or so - why do the work to qualify them up if there’s enough around already? - then we run out of resources in 300 years and civilisation dies. That is how they reached their claim. Just by that incorrect assumption that there’s some sort of linkage between the volume of reserouces and reserves. It’s actually an astonishing hoist of political policy to base on that one vile error.