Second Edition (2025) will be out in October 2025
Check my blog on the Cambridge website
Fifty Years of International Environmental Law: Looking Back and Looking Ahead
Worries about China’s domination of critical minerals are driving Western scientists and companies to embark on increasingly novel ways to develop alternative sources. One such effort seeks to exploit a quirk of nature: Certain plants, called hyperaccumulators, absorb large quantities of minerals, like nickel and zinc, from the soil. Cultivating these plants, and then incinerating them for their metal, could provide U.S. companies with a small stream of domestically sourced minerals—without the expense and environmental destructiveness of conventional mining….At a greenhouse in Amherst, MA, scientists undertake gene editing to build a new fast-growing, nickel-absorbing oilseed plant. If successful, the plant could be used to harvest the metal from mineral-rich soils in states such as Maryland and Oregon…
Some 10 million acres of barren, nickel-rich soil are scattered around the U.S. In such areas, concentrations of minerals are generally too low to justify large-scale mining, but could offer opportunity for inexpensive nickel farming. In the case of nickel phyto-mining, as such efforts are known, the plants are dried and incinerated, leaving an ashy nickel concentrate. This concentrate can then be further purified and turned into battery-grade material.
To be sure, phytomining is small in scale. Companies in the field are targeting harvests of around 300 pounds of nickel per acre per year, roughly enough for six EV batteries. But the funding for nickel-farming plants is one small piece of a broad effort by the U.S. government to develop secure supplies of the minerals that are needed for defense and cutting-edge industry, and are an area where China is dominant.
Excerpt from Jon Emont, The New Weapon Against China’s Mineral Dominance: Plants, WSJ, Jan. 25, 2025
For the past few years, the West has been trying to break China’s grip on minerals that are critical for defense and green technologies. Despite their efforts, Chinese companies are becoming more dominant, not less. They are expanding operations, supercharging supply and causing prices to drop. Their challengers can’t compete. Take nickel, which is needed for electric-vehicle batteries. Chinese processing plants that dot the Indonesian archipelago are pumping out vast quantities of the mineral from new and expanding facilities, jolting the market. Meanwhile, Switzerland-based mining giant Glencore is suspending operations at its nickel plant in New Caledonia, a French territory, concluding it can’t survive despite offers of financial help from Paris. The U.K.’s Horizonte Minerals, whose new Brazilian mine was expected to become a major Western source, said last month that investors had bailed, citing oversupply in the market. Lithium projects in the U.S. and Australia have been postponed or suspended after a surge in Chinese production at home and in sub-Saharan Africa.
The only dedicated cobalt mine in the U.S. also suspended operations last year, five months after local dignitaries attended its opening ceremony. Its owners say they are struggling against a flood of Chinese-produced cobalt from Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Last year, non-Chinese production of refined cobalt declined to its lowest level in 15 years… The share of lithium mining done within China or by Chinese companies abroad has grown from 14% in 2018 to 35% this year… Over the same time, lithium processing done within China has risen from 63% in 2018 to 70%…China has many advantages in the race to lock up minerals. Its miners are deep-pocketed and aggressive, making bets in resource-rich countries that Western companies have long viewed as corrupt or unstable, such as Indonesia, Mali, Bolivia and Zimbabwe. State banks provide financing for power plants and industrial parks abroad, paving the way for further private Chinese investment.
China’s rapid industrial development also means its companies have spent decades fine-tuning the art of turning raw ore into metals. They can set up new facilities quickly and cheaply. A paper published in February by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies pegs the costs of building a lithium refinery outside China as three to four times higher than building one within the country. In eastern Indonesia, Chinese companies have built a fleet of highly efficient nickel and cobalt plants over the past few years after mastering a technology Western miners long considered glitchy and expensive. The plants run on coal power, some of it new, at a time when the world is looking to phase out dirty energy. “It’s just a simple, straightforward engineering capability that the Chinese have that has been lost in the rest of the world,” said Jim Lennon, managing director for commodities strategy at Macquarie, an Australian bank. “The Chinese have this overwhelming competitive advantage now that can’t really be addressed.”….
Excerpts from Jon Emont, China Is Winning the Minerals War, WSJ, June 19, 2024
Civilization would not exist were it not for miners. Every year the world’s oldest industry supplies hundreds of megatons of the primary metals and minerals that are essential to all subsequent industries—from medical devices to kitchen appliances, aircraft, toys, power plants, computers and cars. Hence it’s consequential when the governments of Europe and the U.S. implement policies requiring that global mining expand, and soon, by 400% to 7,000%. Those policies are meant to force a transition away from the oil, natural gas and coal that supply 80% of global energy. But it’s an unavoidable fact that building the favored transition machines—wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars—will require astonishing quantities of minerals to produce the same amount of energy.
The other challenge involves people. Mining has always been as much about people as it has about geology, technology and money. In “The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives,” Ernest Scheyder highlights the myriad difficulties faced by the people who build mines, as well as those hurt by or opposed to them. As Mr. Scheyder notes, mining is “dirty work.” That’s no invective; it’s just reality…He focuses on the social and political dynamics that accompany big mining projects because, as he writes, there’s “no way around the fact that mines are gargantuan creations that maim the Earth’s surface.” He makes clear that his goal isn’t to question the need for more mines but to understand “whether these lands should be dug up in an attempt to defuse climate change,” especially when some lands are considered sacred by their neighbors and inhabitants.
Excerpts, ‘Mark P. Mills, The War Below’ Review: Digging for Minerals, WSJ, Mar. 3, 2024
In the electric-vehicle business, the quandary is known as the nickel pickle. To make batteries for EVs, companies need to mine and refine large amounts of nickel. The process of getting the mineral out of the ground and turning it into battery-ready substances, though, is particularly environmentally unfriendly. Reaching the nickel means cutting down swaths of rainforest. Refining it is a carbon-intensive process that involves extreme heat and high pressure, producing waste slurry that’s hard to dispose of. The nickel issue reflects a larger contradiction within the EV industry: Though electric vehicles are designed to be less damaging to the environment in the long term than conventional cars, the process of building them carries substantial environmental harm.
The challenge is playing out across Indonesia’s mineral-rich islands, by far the world’s largest source of nickel. These deposits aren’t deep underground but lie close to the surface, under stretches of overlapping forests. Getting to the nickel is easy and inexpensive, but only after the forests are cleared. One Indonesian mine, known as Hengjaya, obtained permits five years ago to expand its operations into a forested area nearly three times the size of New York City’s Central Park. The mine’s Australian owner, Nickel Industries, said that rainforest clearing in 2021 caused greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 56,000 tons of carbon-dioxide. That’s roughly equal to driving 12,000 conventional cars for a year, according to calculations by The Wall Street Journal based on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data. “Unfortunately, land clearing is required for all open-cast mining processes, including our operations,” said the firm’s sustainability manager…. The negative impact is offset, he said, by nickel’s use in environmentally friendly batteries…Auto executives worried about having enough nickel to meet rapidly growing demand for EVs. They had moved away from cobalt, another battery component, after human-rights groups and journalists reported on widespread child labor in cobalt operations and dangerous conditions faced by miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Automakers tweaked their batteries to reduce cobalt by adding more nickel…
The nickel rush has created pressing new environmental concerns. The HPAL process used to process nickel pioneered by Chinese companies involves dousing nickel ore in sulfuric acid and heating it to more than 400 degrees Fahrenheit at enormous pressures. Producing nickel this way is nearly twice as carbon-intensive as mining and processing sulfide nickel found in Canada and Russia. Another way of processing laterite ore that often uses coal-powered furnaces is six times as carbon-intensive, according to the International Energy Agency. Companies also face questions about how to get rid of the processing waste. It is difficult to safely sequester in tropical countries because frequent earthquakes and heavy rains destabilize soil, which can cause waste dams to collapse. A 2018 Indonesian law allowed companies to obtain permits to discard mineral processing waste into the ocean….
China’s domination of Indonesian nickel processing poses risks for Western electric-vehicle companies at a time of fraying relations between Washington and Beijing. Last year, the U.S. government declared nickel a critical mineral whose supply is vulnerable to disruption, with very limited nickel production operations in the U.S.
Excerpts from Jon Emont, EV Makers Confront the ‘Nickel Pickle’, WSJ, June 5, 2023
The Norwegian government in June 2023 opened the door for deep-sea mining in its waters, despite opposition from environmental groups and a growing list of nation states arguing to ban the practice. The government said it was proposing parts of the Norwegian continental shelf be opened for deep sea mining and other commercial seabed mineral activities…Companies and countries are scouring the planet to find and secure additional sources of metals and minerals critical for the energy transition, including cobalt, manganese and nickel. To date deep-sea mining has focused on the extraction of seabed nodules—tennis-ball sized pieces of rock which contain manganese, cobalt and nickel, all of which are used in electric-vehicle batteries.
So far much of the attention has centered on the Clarion Clipperton Zone in the Pacific Ocean: An area of water between Mexico and Hawaii that contains millions of tons of nodules. In Norway however, the focus will be on seabed crusts on the country’s continental shelf. The target crusts contain copper, zinc and cobalt, as well as some rare-earth elements, according to the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate…
Countries including France and Germany have called for moratoriums on deep-sea mining, while in May 2023 a report found that when researching the pacific seabed, 90% of the more than 5,000 marine creatures found living in the Clarion Clipperton Zone were new species. Companies including Maersk and Lockheed Martin have also been divesting their deep-sea mining investments.
Excerpts from Yusuf Khan, Norway Opens Door for Deep-Sea Mining of Copper and Other Critical Materials, WSJ, June 20, 2023
Rebuilding an entire planet’s energy system is a big job…The most basic problem is knowing what, exactly, you are trying to rebuild. Academic-research groups, think-tanks, charities and other concerned organizations try to keep track of the world’s wind turbines, solar-power plants, fossil-fueled power stations, cement factories and so on. To this end, they rely heavily on data from national governments and big companies, but these are often incomplete. The most comprehensive database covering American solar-power installations, for instance, is thought to miss around a fifth of the photovoltaic panels actually installed on the ground.
In a paper published in Nature, a team of researchers demonstrate another way to keep tabs on the green-energy revolution. Dr Kruitwagen and his colleagues have put together an inventory of almost 69,000 big solar-power stations (defined as those with a rated capacity of 10kw of electricity or more) all over the world—more than four times as many as were previously listed in public databases. This new inventory includes their locations, the date they entered service and a rough estimate of their generating capacity…
Pictures came from two sets of satellites, Sentinel-2 and SPOT, run by the European Space Agency and Airbus respectively. These peer down on the world, recording visible light and also the infrared and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum. The images amounted to around 550 terabytes of data, spanning the period between 2016 and 2018. That is enough to fill more than a hundred desktop hard drives. Sifting through this many pictures by eye would have been impractical. That is where the second technological trend comes in. Dr Kruitwagen and his colleagues trained a machine-learning system to spot the solar panels for them.
More generally, Dr Kruitwagen hopes that his eye-in-the-sky approach—which, despite the planetary scale of the project, cost only around $15,000 in cloud-computing time—could presage more accurate estimates of other bits of climate-related infrastructure, such as fossil-fuel power stations, cement plants and terminals for ships carrying liquefied natural gas. The eventual result could be the assembly of a publicly available, computer-generated inventory of every significant bit of energy infrastructure on Earth. Quite apart from such a model’s commercial and academic value, he says, an informed public would be one better able to hold politicians’ feet to the fire.
Excerpt from Solar-cell census: An accurate tally of the world’s solar-power stations, Economist, Oct. 30, 2021
Wearing blue hard hats, white hazmat suits and respirator masks, workers carted away bags of debris on a recent morning from a sprawling and now-defunct oil refinery once operated by Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES). Other laborers ripped asbestos from the guts of an old boiler house, part of a massive demolition and redevelopment of the plant, which closed in 2019 after a series of explosions at the facility.
Plans call for the nearly 1,400-acre site to be transformed into a new commercial hub with warehousing and offices. All it will take is a decade, hundreds of millions of dollars, and confronting 150 years’ worth of industrial pollution, including buried rail cars and a poisonous stew of waste fuels poured onto the ground. A U.S. refinery cleanup of this size and scope has no known precedent, remediation experts said. It’s a glimpse of what lies ahead if the United States hopes to wean itself off fossil fuels and clean up the toxic legacy of oil, gas and coal.
President Joe Biden wants to bring the United States to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to fight climate change through a shift to clean-energy technologies, while reducing pollution in low-income and minority neighborhoods near industrial facilities. It’s a transition fraught with challenges. Among the biggest is what to do with the detritus left behind. The old PES plant is just one of approximately 135 oil refineries nationwide, to say nothing of the country’s countless gas stations, pipelines, storage hubs, drill pads and other graying energy infrastructure.
In Philadelphia, a private-sector company is taking the lead. Hilco Redevelopment Partners, a real estate firm that specializes in renovating old industrial properties, bought the PES refinery out of bankruptcy for $225.5 million in June…The full extent of the pollution won’t be understood for years. Also uncertain is the ability of the refinery’s previous owners to pay their share of the cleanup. The facility has had multiple owners over its lifetime and responsibility has been divided between them through business agreements and legal settlements.
Oil refining at the Philadelphia site began in 1870, 100 years before the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Gasoline, once a worthless byproduct of heating oil, was routinely dumped by the refinery into the soil, according to historians and researchers. Leaks and accidents spewed more toxins. The June 2019 blasts alone released 676,000 pounds of hydrocarbons, PES said at the time. The Philadelphia site is not unique. About half of America’s 450,000 polluted former industrial and commercial sites are contaminated with petroleum, according to the EPA.
Cleanup in Philadelphia will be painstaking. After asbestos abatement comes the demolition and removal of 3,000 tanks and vessels, along with more than 100 buildings and other infrastructure, the company said. Then comes the ground itself. Hilco’s Perez said dirt quality varies widely on the site and will have to be handled differently depending on contamination levels. Clearing toxins like lead must be done with chemical rinses or other technologies…The site also has polluted groundwater and giant benzene pools lurking underneath, according to environmental reports Sunoco filed over the years with the federal and state governments.
Excerpts from Laila Kearney, 150 years of spills: Philadelphia refinery cleanup highlights toxic legacy of fossil fuels, Reuters, Feb. 16, 2021
Law-In-Action 