Tag Archives: rare earths

The New Trump Doctrine: Kiss the Hand you Cannot Bite

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Four US major automakers are racing to find workarounds to China’s stranglehold on rare-earth magnets, which they fear could force them to shut down some car production within weeks. Several traditional and electric-vehicle makers—and their suppliers—are considering shifting some auto-parts manufacturing to China to avoid looming factory shutdowns, people familiar with the situation said.

Ideas under review include producing electric motors in Chinese factories or shipping made-in-America motors to China to have magnets installed. Moving production to China as a way to get around the export controls on rare-earth magnets could work because the restrictions only cover magnets, not finished parts, the people said.

If automakers end up shifting some production to China, it would amount to a remarkable outcome from a trade war initiated by President Trump with the intention of bringing manufacturing back to the U.S.  “If you want to export a magnet [from China] they won’t let you do that. If you can demonstrate that the magnet is in a motor in China, you can do that,” said a supply-chain manager at one of the carmakers.

China in April 2025 began requiring companies to apply for permission to export magnets made with rare-earth metals, including dysprosium and terbium. The country controls roughly 90% of the world’s supply of these elements, which help magnets to operate at high temperatures. Much of the world’s modern technology, from smartphones to F-35 jet fighters, rely on these magnets….In May 2025, industry groups representing most major automakers and parts suppliers told the Trump administration that vehicle production could be reduced or shut down imminently without more rare-earth components from China.

Excerpt from Sean McLain et al., Automakers Race to Find Workaround to China’s Stranglehold on Rare-Earth Magnets, WSJ, June 4, 2025

Two days after the publication of this WSJ article, Trump announced, on June 6, 2024, that Xi agreed to let rare earth minerals flow to US (in exchange of? not revoking Chinese student visas? what else?)

To Own Means Nothing-To Do Means More: Metals and Minerals of the World

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Trump wants to secure the minerals the U.S. needs for everything from smartphones to jet fighters by striking deals in Ukraine, Greenland and even Russia. But even if the Trump administration secures more mines for American companies through agreements like the mineral-rights deal being discussed with Ukraine, it may have to send much of the minerals to China—its main geopolitical rival—to be processed…

In truth, the U.S. already has abundant supplies of rare earths, but it relies on China to refine them. That is because the U.S. has lost much of its capacity to process minerals, while China has become the world’s dominant refiner of rare earths, cobalt, copper and many other metals.

Until the 1990s, the U.S. was a major refiner of minerals and metals. But then China emerged as the dominant player, powered by its cheap labor force and looser environmental regulations of a sector that can be highly polluting. The voracious need of Chinese manufacturers for raw materials during the country’s years of explosive growth was also a boon for Chinese refiners. Today, the sheer scale of China’s refining industry makes it difficult for others to compete. According to industry estimates, the cost of building a refinery plant in China is a third of the cost in the U.S.

Excerpts from  Jon Emon, How China Beat Out the U.S. to Become the Top Player in Rare-Earths Refining, WSJ, Mar. 25, 2025

The Real Green Energy Transition: Mining Minerals from Plants

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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

Get Down and (Very) Dirty: How to Break Free from China’s Grip on Rare Earths and Minerals

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The Biden administration held talks with three firms in the fall of 2024 about purchasing one of the world’s largest non-Chinese cobalt producers…The talks over Chemaf, a mining company based in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are part of a push by the administration to secure global supplies of a metal used in everything from jet fighters and drones to electric-vehicle batteries. For more than a decade, Chinese companies have spent billions of dollars buying out U.S. and European miners in Congo, which produces nearly 75% of the world’s cobalt supply. That has put China in a dominant position in both the production and processing of the mineral.

It has been difficult for the U.S. government to interest American investors in any sector in Congo because of the country’s poor infrastructure, limited skilled labor, resource nationalism and reputation for government corruption. U.S. government officials have spoken with mining and artificial-intelligence company KoBold Metals, copper miner First Quantum Minerals and investment firm Orion Resource Partners about participating in a deal to acquire Chemaf, either separately or jointly…

Chemaf, which says its mines could produce 20,000 tons of cobalt annually—making it one of the world’s largest cobalt producers—was put up for sale in 2023 by its founder, Shiraz Virji…When The Wall Street Journal visited Chemaf’s Mutoshi mine in 2018, freelance Congolese miners could be seen descending underground without helmets, shoes or safety equipment. Miners were using picks, shovels and bare hands to unearth rocks rich with the metal. Water sometimes rushed into holes and drowned people, and an earth mover buried one alive, said local workers and mine officials…

In June 2024, Chemaf agreed to sell itself to Chinese state-backed Norin Mining. Shortly after, U.S. pressure helped block the sale…

Excerpts from  Alexandra Wexler and Julie Steinberg, How the U.S. Is Trying to Challenge China’s Cobalt Chokehold, WSJ, Oct. 15, 2024

What Ails the West: the Forgotten Art of Industrialization

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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

The Real Price for ‘Green’ Energy

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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

When Lakes Become a Soup of Minerals: the Fate of Great Salt Lake

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In the summer 2024, a California startup plans to start construction on a project to suck up water from the Great Salt Lake, Utah, United States to extract one of its many valuable minerals: lithium, a critical ingredient in the rechargeable batteries used in electric vehicles. The water will then be reinjected back into the lake, which Lilac Solutions says addresses concerns about the damaging effects of mineral extraction. At its peak, Lilac says it will use a series of pipes to suck up 80,000 gallons of water a minute to harvest the mineral. The company plans to eventually produce up to 20,000 tons of battery-grade lithium a year.

The effort is one of dozens of projects across the U.S. racing to build up a domestic supply of lithium and other battery minerals as the Biden administration is dedicating billions of dollars to strengthening the U.S. battery supply chain and reducing reliance on China, which dominates the global production of battery minerals.

One common extraction method of lithium pumps briny underground water into vast man-made ponds, where evaporation separates lithium from other elements over 18 months or more. Mining companies in Chile and elsewhere have used the approach, which drains scarce water resources and can leave deposits of toxic residues.

Lilac says its technology is much faster, taking a matter of hours from the time of extraction, while preserving water levels. Its method deploys reusable ceramic “beads” that attach to lithium atoms to separate them from the brine.

At the Great Salt Lake, mineral extraction is nothing new. The lake has been shrinking for decades because of agricultural, industrial and other diversions of its feed waters. Extraction of minerals accounts for about 13% of its water diversion, according to a 2019 study. Meanwhile, the lake has become a concentrated soup of minerals, since it doesn’t have an outlet that lets it discharge the ones that flow into it.

Scott Patterson, The Great Salt Lake Is Full of Lithium. A Startup Wants to Harvest It, WSJ, Feb. 12, 2024

The Environmental Harm Caused by the Energy Transition

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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

Economic Consequences of Falling Asleep on Wheel: the Geopolitics of Energy Transition

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American officials see Africa as helping to solve two problems. The first is a global shortfall in the minerals that will be needed if the world is to meet its climate goals.The second problem, at least for the West, is China’s outsized influence on supply chains. China refines 68% of the world’s nickel, 40% of copper, 59% of lithium and 73% of cobalt, according to a report in July by the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank. “China has had free rein for 15 years while the rest of the world was sleeping,” says Brian Menell, chief executive of TechMet, a minerals firm.

America views cobalt, which is used in batteries, as a cautionary tale. In Congo, the source of about 70% of global production, Chinese entities owned or had stakes in 15 of 19 cobalt-producing mines as of 2020. America’s decision to allow a US firm to sell one of Congo’s largest copper-cobalt mines to a Chinese one in 2020 is seen in Washington as an enormous act of stupidity. It is little comfort that battery-makers are trying to use less cobalt, in part because of concerns about operating in Congo. “We cannot allow China to become an OPEC of one in critical minerals,” says an American official, referring to the oil cartel.

It is possible to identify three strands in America’s approach. The first is a multilateral effort involving Western allies. In June, Jose Fernandez, America’s under-secretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment, launched the Minerals Security Partnership, whose 13 members include all the G-7 countries and the EU. Many of these countries are also looking to secure more scarce rocks. Britain launched a “critical minerals strategy” in July 2022 and later this month the European Commission will propose a Critical Raw Materials Act.

A second strand in America’s approach involves its development agencies “de-risking” projects as they have done in, say, agriculture or the power sector. As well as the us Export-Import Bank, which offers trade-financing, there is the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC)... Another potential success is a memorandum of understanding signed by America, Congo and Zambia in January. America says it will help Africa’s two largest copper exporters do more than just sell the metal in its elemental state. Under it, America agreed to help the two African countries build supply chains to process their raw minerals into battery precursors for electric vehicles.

Excerpts from How America plans to break China’s grip on African minerals, Economist,  Mar. 4, 2023

Mining the Earth to Save it

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The rush to secure green-energy metals is bringing new life to one of the world’s oldest mining hubs. Like the United States, Europe is worried that it is too reliant on China for supplies of once-obscure natural resources, such as lithium and rare-earth metals, that are seen as climate-friendly successors to oil and gas…. 

On both sides of the Atlantic, one of the best answers to long-simmering worries about green-energy security is to look north…, for example, to the “Canadian Shield,” a vast band of rock encircling Hudson Bay. The “Baltic Shield” that stretches across Scandinavia to western Russia is similarly mineral-rich. It helps explain why Sweden in particular has such a long mining heritage. In the mid-17th century, the country’s “Great Copper Mountain” near Falun provided two-thirds of the world’s copper. Even today, 80% of iron ore mined in the EU comes from a site near the Arctic town of Kiruna that Swedish state operator LKAB has exploited for well over a century.

The energy transition is an opportunity for Sweden’s mining complex. LKAB said in January 2023 that it had identified Europe’s largest body of rare-earth metals close to its existing Kiruna operation…Digging up the planet to save it is an awkward pitch. The only way for miners to counter accusations that they are adding to the problem they want to solve is by decarbonizing operations. Here Sweden is again helped by the geology of the Baltic Shield, whose river valleys are favorable for green-energy production. Roughly 45% of the country’s electricity comes from hydroelectric power, with much of the remainder provided by nuclear and wind. It is also cheap, particularly in the Arctic, where many mines are located. Against a favorable geopolitical backdrop, the biggest risk for investors is political. Mines, which can bring a lot of noise and relatively few jobs to an area, don’t tend to be popular locally.

There is a reason the West relies on autocracies for a lot of its oil.

Excerpts from Stephen Wilmot, For Mining EV Metals, the Arctic Is Hot, WSJ, Feb. 14, 2023

After the Oil Shock, the Metals Shock: fueling the green economy

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Indonesia banned exports of nickel ore in 2020 in a bid to capture more of the metal’s value. As a result, exports of Indonesian nickel products were worth $30bn in 2022, more than ten times what they were in 2013. Nickel smelters have sprouted around the country, and makers of batteries, in which the metal is a key component, are building factories. On January 17, 2023 a cabinet official said the government was close to sealing deals with the world’s two largest makers of electric vehicles (EVS), Tesla and BYD, to build cars in Indonesia. Flushed with progress, the government is now thinking beyond nickel.

“This success will be continued for other commodities,” said Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s president, in December 2022. He confirmed that an export ban on bauxite, the ore used to make aluminum, was coming in June 2023. The bauxite industry is scrambling to prepare itself for the shock….The government has suggested that a ban on copper exports could be implemented next, with bans on tin and gold exports to follow.

The country’s pulling power in the global nickel market will be hard to replicate, though. Indonesia produces 37% of the world’s nickel. But its bauxite, gold and copper production is less than 5% of the global total…Bauxite smelters are also expensive and harder to build than nickel smelters. Local firms are struggling to raise the capital needed for them, often around 18trn rupiah ($1.2bn)…All the eight bauxite smelters are under construction are Chinese investments. . 

Indonesia’s resource nationalism also risks falling foul of global trade rules but Jokowi, Indonesia’s president  remains  undeterred. “This is what we want to do: be independent, independent, independent,” he said.

Excerpts from Indonesia’s Industrial Policy: Full Metal Jacket, Economist,  Jan. 28, 2023

The Sacrificial Lambs of Green Energy

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Lithium Americas, a Canadian company, has plans to build a mine and processing plant at Thacker Pass, near the southern tip of the caldera in Nevada. It would be America’s biggest lithium mine. Ranchers and farmers in nearby Orovada, a town of about 120 people, worry that the mine will threaten their water supply and air quality. Native American tribes in the region say they were not properly consulted before the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a federal agency that manages America’s vast public lands, decided to permit the project. Tribes also allege that a massacre of their ancestors took place at Thacker Pass in 1865…

The fight over Thacker Pass is not surprising. President Joe Biden wants half of all cars sold in 2030 to be electric, and to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. These ambitious climate targets mean that battles over where and how to mine are coming to mineral-rich communities around the country. America is in need of cobalt, copper and lithium, among other things, which are used in batteries and other clean-energy technologies. As with past commodity booms, large deposits of many of these materials are found in America’s western states . America, of course, is not the only country racing to secure access to such materials. As countries pledge to go carbon-free, global demand for critical minerals is set to soar. The International Energy Agency, a forecaster, estimates that by 2040 demand for lithium could increase by more than 40 times relative to 2020. Demand for cobalt and nickel could grow by about 20 times in the same period.

Beyond its green goals, America is also intent on diversifying mineral supplies away from China and Russia (big producer of nickel), which—by virtue of its natural bounty and muscular industrial policy—has become a raw-materials juggernaut… The green transition has also turned the pursuit of critical minerals into a great-power competition not unlike the search for gold or oil in eras past. Mining for lithium, the Department of Energy (DOE) says, is not only a means of fighting climate change but also a matter of national security.

Westerners have seen all this before, and are wary of new mines…The economic history of the American West is a story of boom and bust. When a commodity bubble burst, boomtowns were abandoned. The legacy of those busts still plagues the region. In 2020 the Government Accountability Office estimated that there could be at least 530,000 abandoned hardrock-mine features, such as tunnels or waste piles, on federal lands. At least 89,000 of those could pose a safety or environmental hazard. Most of America’s abandoned hardrock mines are in 13 states west of the Mississippi River…

Is it possible to secure critical minerals while avoiding the mistakes of previous booms? America’s debates over how to use its public lands, and to whom those lands belong, are notoriously unruly. Conservationists, energy companies, ranchers and tribal nations all feel some sense of ownership. Total harmony is unlikely. But there are ways to lessen the animosity.

Start with environmental concerns. Mining is a dirty business, but development and conservation can coexist. In 2020 Stanford University helped broker a national agreement between the hydropower industry and conservation groups to increase safety and efficiency at existing dams while removing dams that are harming the environment….Many worry that permitting new development on land sacred to tribes will be yet another example of America’s exploitation of indigenous peoples in pursuit of land and natural resources. msci, a consultancy, reckons that 97% of America’s nickel reserves, 89% of copper, 79% of lithium and 68% of cobalt are found within 35 miles of Native American reservations.

TThe BLM is supposed to consult tribes about policies that may affect the tribes but the  consultation process is broken. Often it consists of sending tribes a letter notifying them of a mining or drilling proposal.

Lithium Americas has offered to build the town a new school, one that will be farther away from a road that the firm will use to transport sulphur. Sitting in her truck outside a petrol station that doubles as Orovada’s local watering hole, Ms Amato recalled one group member’s response to the offer: “If all I’m going to get is a kick in the ass, because we’re getting the mine regardless, then I may as well get a kick in the ass and a brand new school.”

Excerpt from America’s Next Mining Boom: Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Economist, Feb. 19, 2022

When Others Do our Dirty Work: the Costs of Overdependence

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China is tightening its grip on the global supply of processed manganese, rattling a range of companies world-wide that depend on the versatile metal—including the planet’s biggest electric-vehicle makers.

China produces more than 90% of the world’s manganese products, ranging from steel-strengthening additives to battery-grade compounds. Since October 2020, dozens of Chinese manganese processors accounting for most of global capacity have joined a state-backed campaign to establish a “manganese innovation alliance,” led by Ningxia Tianyuan Manganese Industry Group, setting out in planning documents goals and moves that others in the industry say are akin to a production cartel. They include centralizing control over supply of key products, coordinating prices, stockpiling and networks for mutual financial assistance.

The squeeze sent prices soaring in metal markets world-wide, snagging steelmakers and sharpening concern among car makers. China’s metal industries already dominate the global processing of most raw materials for rechargeable batteries, including cobalt and nickel. Three-quarters of the world’s lithium-ion batteries and half of its electric vehicles are made in China.  High-purity forms of manganese have increasingly become crucial for battery-powered automobiles, touted by Volkswagen AG and Tesla Inc. in recent months as a viable replacement for other, more-expensive battery ingredients….

While manganese ore is relatively abundant around the world, it is almost solely refined in China. Battery-grade manganese is traded mostly privately, and pricing can be opaque. Miners say a metric ton of the purified metal could cost up to $4,000—barely a 10th of the cost of cobalt, a widely used battery metal. By replacing cobalt, manganese could help auto makers produce 30% more cars with the same amount of nickel, analysts say.

Rival manganese projects outside China view the cartel-like activities as an opportunity to gain momentum for their own battery-grade developments…Still, analysts say such projects outside China might take years to start and heavy cost investments to develop. Viable bases of manganese ore are often located in remote regions, which require expensive infrastructure to ferry and process extracted ores.

Excerpt from Chuin-Wei Yap, China Hones Control Over Manganese, a Rising Star in Battery Metals, WSH, May 21, 2021

The Geo-Economics of Rare Earth Minerals

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Greenland is rich in rare-earth minerals, and the superpowers want them…These 17 elements are used in  all things electronic. The renewable-energy revolution will also rely on them for power storage and transmission. On the darker side, weapons—including nuclear ones—need them too.

A new open-pit mine at the top of Kuannersuit, a cloud-rimmed mountain near the settlement of Narsaq in the south of Greenland may be rich in rare earth. So believes Greenland Minerals, an Australia-based company, which has been angling for the excavation rights for the past decade.

Greenland’s environment ministry has given a tentative go-ahead. A majority of parliamentarians have already declared themselves in favor of digging. In early February 2020, the townsfolk of Narsaq will hear representations from the island’s government. In Greenland, Urani Naamik (“No to Uranium”), a community lobby, has strong support. Nobody wants (mildly) radioactive dust, an inevitable by-product of mining. Many worry about the waste—a sludge of chemicals and discarded rock fragments—that mining would leave on top of the mountain.

The bigger long-term issue is who gets the mine’s spoils. Shenghe, a Chinese conglomerate, is the largest shareholder in Greenland Minerals. The Danish government, in a frenzy of Atlanticism, earlier managed to stop Chinese companies from investing in the expansion of two airports on the island. Will it preserve Greenland’s rare earths for NATO?

Cloud mining: In search of Greenland’s rare earths, Economist, Jan. 16, 2021, at 41

Human and Environmental Costs of Low-Carbon Technologies

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Substantial amounts of raw materials will be required to build new low-carbon energy devices and infrastructure.  Such materials include cobalt, copper, lithium, cadmium, and rare earth elements (REEs)—needed for technologies such as solar photovoltaics, batteries, electric vehicle (EV) motors, wind turbines, fuel cells, and nuclear reactors…  A majority of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a country struggling to recover from years of armed conflict…Owing to a lack of preventative strategies and measures such as drilling with water and proper exhaust ventilation, many cobalt miners have extremely high levels of toxic metals in their body and are at risk of developing respiratory illness, heart disease, or cancer.

In addition, mining frequently results in severe environmental impacts and community dislocation. Moreover, metal production itself is energy intensive and difficult to decarbonize. Mining for copper,and mining for lithium has been criticized in Chile for depleting local groundwater resources across the Atacama Desert, destroying fragile ecosystems, and converting meadows and lagoons into salt flats. The extraction, crushing, refining, and processing of cadmium can pose risks such as groundwater or food contamination or worker exposure to hazardous chemicals. REE extraction in China has resulted  threatens rural groundwater aquifers as well as rivers and streams.

Although large-scale mining is often economically efficient, it has limited employment potential, only set to worsen with the recent arrival of fully automated mines. Even where there is relative political stability and stricter regulatory regimes in place, there can still be serious environmental failures, as exemplified by the recent global rise in dam failures at settling ponds for mine tailings. The level of distrust of extractive industries has even led to countrywide moratoria on all new mining projects, such as in El Salvador and the Philippines.

Traditional labor-intensive mechanisms of mining that involve less mechanization are called artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). Although ASM is not immune from poor governance or environmental harm, it provides livelihood potential for at least 40 million people worldwide…. It is also usually more strongly embedded in local and national economies than foreign-owned, large-scale mining, with a greater level of value retained and distributed within the country. Diversifying mineral supply chains to allow for greater coexistence of small- and large-scale operations is needed. Yet, efforts to incorporate artisanal miners into the formal economy have often resulted in a scarcity of permits awarded, exorbitant costs for miners to legalize their operations, and extremely lengthy and bureaucratic processes for registration….There needs to be a focus on policies that recognize ASM’s livelihood potential in areas of extreme poverty. The recent decision of the London Metals Exchange to have a policy of “nondiscrimination” toward ASM is a positive sign in this regard.

A great deal of attention has focused on fostering transparency and accountability of mineral mining by means of voluntary traceability or even “ethical minerals” schemes. International groups, including Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, have all called on mining companies to ensure that supply chains are not sourced from mines that involve illegal labor and/or child labor.

Traceability schemes, however, may be impossible to fully enforce in practice and could, in the extreme, merely become an exercise in public relations rather than improved governance and outcomes for miners…. Paramount among these is an acknowledgment that traceability schemes offer a largely technical solution to profoundly political problems and that these political issues cannot be circumvented or ignored if meaningful solutions for workers are to be found. Traceability schemes ultimately will have value if the market and consumers trust their authenticity and there are few potential opportunities for leakage in the system…

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is a framework that stipulates that producers are responsible for the entire lifespan of a product, including at the end of its usefulness. EPR would, in particular, shift responsibility for collecting the valuable resource streams and materials inside used electronics from users or waste managers to the companies that produce the devices. EPR holds producers responsible for their products at the end of their useful life and encourages durability, extended product lifetimes, and designs that are easy to reuse, repair, or recover materials from. A successful EPR program known as PV Cycle has been in place in Europe for photovoltaics for about a decade and has helped drive a new market in used photovoltaics that has seen 30,000 metric tons of material recycled.

Benjamin K. Sovacool et al., Sustainable minerals and metals for a low-carbon future, Science, Jan. 3, 2020

Who Bears the Costs of Technology? Lynas and Hazardous Waste from Rare Earths

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Companies and governments around the world are anxiously watching the fate of a sprawling industrial facility 30 kilometers north of this city on the east coast of peninsular Malaysia.The 100-hectare Lynas Advanced Materials Plant (LAMP) produces 10% of the world’s output of rare earth oxides (REOs), minerals needed in technologies including mobile phones, hard drives, fiber optic cables, surgical lasers, and cruise missiles. Lynas, an Australian company, imports concentrated ores from mines on Mount Weld in Australia and refines them in Malaysia, where costs are lower; it sells REOs—which include cerium compounds, used in catalytic converters, and neodymium, critical to permanent magnets—to Japan, the United States, and other countries. The plant produced almost 18,000 tons of REOs in 2018.

Now, the LAMP faces closure, barely 7 years after it opened. Environmental groups have long opposed the storage on the site of slightly radioactive waste from the extraction process, and they found a sympathetic ear in a new government elected in May 2018. In December 2018, the government demanded that the facility ship its radioactive waste back to Australia if it wants to renew its operating license, which expires on 2 September. On 12 March 2019overnment task force to help organize the shipments was announced. But the company says exporting the more than 451,000 tons of residue by the deadline is “unachievable.”

 A shutdown would be “a significant event with a ripple effect,” says Ryan Castilloux, a metals and minerals analyst at Adamas Intelligence in Amsterdam. For one thing, the shutdown would strengthen China’s position as the dominant supplier of REOs, which many countries deem a strategic risk. Japan’s electric vehicle industry, for instance, would lose its main supplier of REOs for permanent magnets; “it would have to reestablish a relationship with China after almost a decade of friction” in the REO trade, Castilloux says…. “Although rare earth oxides production worldwide is only worth several billions of dollars, it is essential for industries worth trillions,” Castilloux says.

Rare earth deposits themselves are not scare..Refining them takes lots of corrosive chemicals and generates huge amounts of residue. China was long the sole supplier; when it reduced exports in 2010, citing environmental concerns, prices jumped as much as 26-fold and major consumers scrambled for alternate sources. Lynas has become a “flagship” of REO production outside China, Castilloux says. The United States and Myanmar mine REEs as well, but they are processed in China, which today produces about 89% of the global REO output…

But in Malaysia, the waste has raised red flags. At the LAMP, concentrated ores are roasted with sulfuric acid to dissolve the rare earths and then diluted with water in a process called water leach purification, leaving a moist, pastelike residue. By September 2018, the LAMP had already produced 1.5 million tons of residue; because the ores contain thorium and uranium, almost 30% of it is slightly radioactive.  Some REO facilities elsewhere have built permanent, secure facilities to store such waste, says Julie Klinger, a geographer and expert in REO mining at Boston University; others are secretive about what they do with it.  Radioactivity isn’t the only risk…heavy metals as ickel, chromium, lead, and mercury could contaminate groundwater.

Excerpts by Yao-Hua, Radioactive waste standoff could slash high tech’s supply of rare earth elements, Science Magazine, Apr. 1, 2019

Rare Earths Pollution: Australia, Malaysia and Lynas Corp.

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According to the Oeko Institute, a non-profit association: The facility for refining Australian ore concentrate rich in rare earth metals of Lynas Corporation in Malaysia has several deficiencies concerning the operational environmental impacts. The environment is affected by acidic substances as well as from dust particles, which are emitted into the air in substantially larger concentrations than would be state-of-the-art in off-gas treatment in Europe. The storage of radioactive and toxic wastes on site does not prevent leachate from leaving the facility and entering ground and groundwater. For the long-term disposal of wastes under acceptable conditions concerning radiation safety a sustainable concept is still missing. These are the results of a study of Oeko-Institute on behalf of the Malaysian NGO SMSL.

In its facility in Kuantan/Malaysia Lynas refines ore concentrate for precious rare earth metals. These strategic metals are applied for example to produce catalysts…The ore concentrate to be refined in Malaysia additionally contains toxic and radioactive constituents such as Thorium. The NGO commissioned Oeko-Institute to check whether the processing of the ore leads to hazardous emissions from the plant or will remain as dangerous waste in Malaysia.

Storage of wastes insufficient

The storage of wastes, that are generated in the refining process, shall be stored in designated facilities on the site, separately for three waste categories. According to chemist and nuclear waste expert Gerhard Schmidt, there will be problems with the pre-drying of wastes that is of a high Thorium content. “Especially in the wet and long monsoon season from September to January, this emplacement process doesn’t work”, says Schmidt. “The operator has not demonstrated how this problem can be resolved without increasing the radiation doses for workers”.

Additionally the storages are only isolated with a one-millimeter thick plastic layer and a 30 cm thick clay layer. This is insufficient to reliably enclose the several meters high and wet waste masses. “For the long-term management of these wastes Lynas has urgently to achieve a solution”, claims Gerhard Schmidt, and adds: “in no case those wastes should be marketed or used as construction material, as currently proposed by the operator (Lynas) and the regulator (AELB/MOSTI). According to our calculations this would mean to pose high radioactive doses to the public via direct radiation”.

One of the most serious abnormalities is that in the documents relevant data is missing, which prevents reliably accounting for all toxic materials introduced”, says project manager Gerhard Schmidt. “So it is not stated which and to what amount toxic by-products, besides Thorium, are present in the ore concentrate. Also in the emissions of the facility via wastewater only those constituents are accounted for that are explicitly listed in Malaysian water regulation, but not all emitted substances.” The salt content of the wastewater is as high that it is comparable to seawater. This is discharged without any removal into the river Sungai Balok.

The scientists at Oeko-Institute evaluate the detected deficiencies as very serious. Those deficiencies should have been already detected in the licensing process, when the application documents were being checked. However the operator received a construction license in 2008 and a temporary operating license in 2012.

Especially for the safe long-term disposal of the radioactive wastes a suitable site that meets internationally accepted safety criteria has to be selected urgently. A consensus has to be reached with the affected stakeholders, such as the local public and their representatives. “If it further remains open how to manage those wastes in a long-term sustainable manner, a future legacy associated with unacceptable environmental and health risks is generated”, considers Schmidt. “The liability to prevent those risks and to remove the material is so shifted to future generations, which is not acceptable.”

Rare earths are important metals that are used in future technologies such as efficient electro motors, lighting and catalysts. In its study from 2011 “Study on Rare Earths and Their Recycling” Oeko-Institute showed that no relevant recycling of these metals is performed so far. Albeit recent positive developments in this direction: satisfying the prognosticated global requires the extension of the worldwide primary production.

Rare earth refining in Malaysia without coherent waste management concept, Oeko Institute Press Release, Jan. 28, 2013

See also  Oeko Report on Lynas (pdf)e

The iPhone, radioactive waste and rare earths: the Lynas case

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Lynas Corporation, an Australian based mining company are constructing a rare earth processing plant, known as the Lynas Advanced Materials Plant (LAMP) in Gebeng industrial estate in Kuantan, Malaysia. The LAMP will process lanthanide concentrate which will be trucked from the mine site in Mt Weld Western Australia to the Port of Fremantle where it will be shipped to Malaysia. This report provides an assessment of the emissions from the LAMP plant rather than Lynas Corporation‟s activities in Western Australia. The LAMP plant will have significant atmospheric, terrestrial and waterborne emissions of toxic chemicals and radionuclides including uranium, thorium and radon gas.

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A Malaysian high court put on hold until October 4 a temporary operating license granted to Lynas Corp Ltd’s controversial rare earth plant near the eastern city of Kuantan, prompting an 8 percent fall in the Australian firm’s shares on Tuesday (Sept. 24, 2012).  The rare earth plant – the world’s biggest outside China – has been ready to fire up since early May, but the company has been embroiled in lengthy environmental and safety disputes with local residents since construction began two years ago [regarding the handling of radioactive waste at the plant].

The plant is considered important to breaking China’s grip on the processing of rare earths, which are used in products ranging from smartphones to hybrid cars.

Lynas confirmed the Kuantan High Court’s decision on Tuesday, but said it would not affect production at the plant and that it plans to strongly assert its rights at the next court hearing…Lynas shares plunged more than 8 percent after the court order to A$0.795, their lowest close in almost three weeks as investors closely track each move in the sensitive case. Earlier this month they rose up to 50 percent when Malaysia approved the license.

Activists linked to the environmental group, Save Malaysia Stop Lynas, want the court to suspend the temporary license until two judicial review cases challenging the government’s decision allowing the plant to operate are heard.  “It’s a small victory, but there is still a long way to go,” Tan Bun Teet, a spokesman for the group, told Reuters after the court decision. “We will fight tooth and nail. We have a lot at stake,” he added.  The group’s previous attempts to legally stop the plant had failed.

Lynas received a temporary operating license for its long-delayed $800 million rare earth plant earlier this month, enabling it to start production as early as October.  The Malaysian Atomic Energy Licensing Board (AELB) issued the permit following an earlier recommendation from a government committee.  Protests over possible radioactive residue have drawn thousands of people and the project has become a hot topic ahead of an election that must be held by early next year.

Sources

Lee Bell, Rare Earth and Radioactive Waste: A Preliminary Waste Stream Assessment of the Lynas Advanced Materials Plant, Gebeng, Malaysia, National Toxics Network. April 2012

Siva Sithraputhran, Malaysian court puts license on hold for Lynas rare earth plant, Reuters, Sept. 25, 2012