Industrial metals

Industrial metals describes metals and their ores valued as inputs to other production — alloying, hardening, plating, refractory, and process metals — rather than as stores of value or as finished goods. Metals of sufficient individual consequence carry their own tags: Gold, Silver, Mercury, Platinum, Copper, Tin, Aluminium, Cobalt, Coltan, Uranium, Lead, Iron and steel, and Rare Earth Elements (REEs). Industrial metals covers the remainder: nickel, zinc, tungsten, molybdenum, antimony, manganese, chromium, titanium, zirconium, beryllium, bismuth, cadmium, vanadium, and the rarer industrial and platinum-group metals (ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, germanium, gallium, hafnium, indium, niobium, rhenium, thallium, tantalum).

Ores are tagged with the metal they yield, except where the ore is itself the traded commodity — coltan being the standing case, traded and fought over under its own name rather than as niobium and tantalum.