Critical Minerals Are A Gold Rush The West Lost Sight Of – CleanTechnica

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Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with Gavin Mudd, director of the centre for critical minerals intelligence with the British Geological Survey. He’s been doing leading research with global collaborators on how much of what resources we can actually get at. Below is the first half of our conversation and a lightly edited transcript.

Michael Barnard [MB]: Hi, welcome back to Redefining Energy—Tech. I’m your host, Michael Barnard. As always, we’re sponsored by TFIE Strategy, a firm which assists investment funds and firms to pick the winners and avoid the losers in climate solutions. My guest today is Gavin Mudd, the director of the Critical Minerals Intelligence center of the British Geological Survey and an expert in a very interesting topic. Welcome, Gavin.

Gavin Mudd [GM]: Glad to be here.

MB: That accent is interesting because it’s not a British accent. It’s British adjacent, I would say. I always start these things by saying, who is Gavin Mudd? How did you end up in a new home in the British suburbs somewhere in the head of your role?

GM: I guess I’m an environmental engineer by trade. That was sort of where I started, sort of my journey. But I suppose part of the reason for that is of course I’m a very die hard Bruce Cockburn fan and the song if a Tree Falls always sort of always inspired me and interested me. So I’ve chosen an environmental career. Once I graduated from environmental engineering back in Australia, I very quickly moved into a PhD and that was looking at the impacts on groundwater from one tailings dam or basically a coal fly ash dam.

I remember thinking probably halfway through as I was sort of doing a bit of work with community groups on environmental issues and mining and things like that, where’s that whole picture of mining? I’m getting a PhD out of the impacts at one site, but what about the whole industry? How do we start to assess the environmental performance of the whole industry? Once you have that thought, you can’t unthink it really. But, but again, it starts with from bottom up or from top down, but really there was no one doing that. There was no one looking at this systemic performance of the mining industry from an independent point of view. So I finished my PhD, then got into academia and started sort of publishing some papers looking at things like declining ore grades and the the changing nature of how we’re managing mining, but also some of these questions around what are the trends in resources so are we really likely to run out soon or things like that.

Initially my focus was just Australia and then I published a bunch of those sorts of papers and things like that. And Tom Graedel from Yale University contacted me and sort of asked to collaborate on what was then being called critical metals. Because one of the concerns was that we didn’t have good data for things like indium, for things like hafnium, tellurium and you know, a whole bunch of the other metals that were predicted to be really important obviously for the new energy technologies that we needed for whether it’s net zero or other things, let alone existing technologies and existing industries, would it be aerospace and construction and so on, which need often specialty alloys or things like that. And so we got stuck into things and looked at cobalt and other work.

Out of that I guess we started looking at these global resources and looking at sort of global scale studies of what was really going on in mining and how do we really define what’s responsible. And so out of all of that, I guess I’ve been doing a lot of work in gradually ticking off the periodic table to the point now where it’s led me to say that’s time for a new challenge. And I came over about a year ago to join BGS and head up the Critical Minerals Intelligence Center. So that’s how I got here, I guess.

MB: So much to unpack there. Why don’t we just start generically with what the British Geological Survey does?

GM: We’re a public good science agency, so we do a lot of research and about half our work is funded by the UK government for national geoscience. That can be all sorts of things. It includes surface water, groundwater, geological mapping, geospatial technologies and information as well. About the half of our other income is what we call external work and that’s still often funded by the UK government. But that’s a lot of the work that we do internationally and that could be capacity building for geological surveys in different countries in Africa, working with our partners similar partners internationally. A lot of our work in our externally funded work is still largely government funded, but it’s to do a lot of things around geology related matters and so on.

That can sometimes be how to set up and run laboratories, it can be geological mapping, it can be assessment of mining or some of the water, all sorts of different things or hazards. We have a large group that does a lot of work around geohazards, so earthquakes, landslides, all of those types of things. That’s a lot of what BGS does. We’re pretty broad based but at heart we are an independent arm’s length, public good science agency.

MB: I have to admit I am not surprised about you having an Australian accent. Part of my weird background is that I worked for one of the biggest technologies in the world. And we bid a lot on solutions for the mining industry. And what was very funny was whenever I was engaged with a bid inside Canada, we would bring in Australian experts because they’re from away and so they’re experts. But if we’re bidding anywhere else, we bring the Canadian experts. Because Canada and Australia are just huge mining countries. It’s underappreciated how much of the minerals in the world come from these two countries and how good we are at extracting. I will say that we probably also share a regrettable tendency to ship them offshore to be processed, refined and higher value goods.

But the discussion today is explicitly about critical minerals. There’s just been a lot of nonsense by no hopers and doomers who shall remain unnamed about critical minerals saying we can’t get there from here. So what I wanted to do today was kind of break down this challenge with someone who actually knows all the answers. Because among other things, I look at your papers, you’ve actually done the surveys for how much recoverable resource there is in major parts of the world. So let’s start with defining critical minerals and give the list you touched on, but be a bit more fulsome about what we consider critical minerals today.

GM: At heart, critical minerals is stuff we care about and we’re worried about not having it. That’s really the simplest way to explain it all. Now, the way that we sort of put some numbers around that and data and as much objectivity as we can is we talk about global supply risk as sort of one axis of looking at this. And that can include things such as which countries produce particular metals or minerals. Global supply risk can also look at global trade. It can look at recycling. Many elements are only available because we’ve mined something else to start with. So indium, for example, we have to mine zinc first and then in refining the zinc concentrates, we can then extract indium and cadmium and a handful of other elements if we wanted to, if the concentrations are right.

So that companion metal fraction as we often call it, or byproduct to be a probably simpler way. So many byproducts are only available when you mine something else. We put all of these types of things together to look at global supply risk. Often it’s an economic focus and that’s certainly been the dominant focus, but it’s not necessarily the only one. Some countries, like the US and others for nearly 100 years, actually have used very much a national security focus in many ways. So you can use the economic value or economic impact, or you could look at it from a national security angle, certainly for some countries, like the US and others. That economic impact would be the sort of thing that we’re saying, well, what’s the scale of value that might be use?

If we’re looking at something like, let’s just pick tellurium, the global tellurium market’s literally $100 or $200 million US annually and that’s it. That economic value would be pretty small. If you’re looking at iron ore, you’re probably talking a couple of trillion dollars or thereabouts. When you’re looking at these sorts of things, it has to add up. Put all of that together, you can work out what the total economic value is. Therefore, if you didn’t have the supply of, whether it be tellurium or iron or something else, that gives you a sense of how vulnerable your economy is. Often we phrase the economic side as an economic vulnerability in so many ways. It’s a risk assessment and a risk assessment.

We talk about probability, we talk about consequence or likelihood and severity. We can think of critical minerals really in that same way. Some things, like iron, are very well supplied globally. From Australia, 9 billion tonnes a year, thank you very much. Then look at China’s a few hundred million tons, as is Brazil. So iron ore is pretty well supplied globally, but something like rare earths, for example, is still mostly mined in China. Now we’re increasing a few other countries, whether it be Myanmar, at great environmental and social cost. But also in Australia, we’ve been increasing our production there, so we’re starting to get a bit more diversity into the rare earth supply chain. But at the moment it’s still 75% or so China.

When you’re looking at that, you would say the supply risk for global, for rare earths, for example, is actually very high. Whereas when you’re looking at the supply risk for iron, we would rank it pretty low. But when you’re looking at the economic importance, certainly iron is so much more widely used. It’s in construction, it’s in automotive, it’s in aerospace. A lot of our electronics still have some iron and so when we’re looking at all of those things. We would say that the economic vulnerability for iron is very high.

Compared to say, rare earths, where it’s sort of more mid range, has sort of more specialist technologies, but of course those specialist technologies, whether it be renewable energy, electric vehicles and all of the other things that we use rare earths for, especially chemicals, specialty alloys and even in electronics and so on, we want that stuff and we need it. We need it to help us address things like climate change, mitigation and so on. That’s the typical way we think about sort of critical minerals. Generally speaking, if we get into the semantics when we say minerals, we could be talking about a metal, an element, material or mineral or a gas.

Typically if you look at something like helium, for example, it can often be considered critical, but it’s a gas, it’s not really a mineral. But just keep the policy language simple and so on, we typically talk about minerals. The EU of course uses critical raw materials. There’s variations on a theme, but largely it’s sort of anything, any material in whatever form largely that flows through our societies to achieve the stuff we want.

MB: I always think of critical minerals as the metals and I have a somewhat informed layperson’s perspective on this because I’m on the demand side. I look at the global transformation of transportation, global transformation of energy, things like that, which creates a certain class of the demand, especially EVs and renewables. We have enough of the stuff to build those things in order to decarbonize our economy, energy services. I’m on that side, so I hear about it from, and in that regard, certainly one of the big ones is probably the two primary battery metals that get discussed are cobalt and lithium.

From my perspective, is that accurate, Is there another metal that you tend to hear about or is emerging as something you’re concerned about in the Critical Minerals Intelligence Center?

GM: No, I think when you look at the recent criticality assessment we’ve finished for the UK, a lot of the particular elements or metals that were designated as critical are largely the same as the EU and the US and others. Now just by, I suppose, a peculiarity of the data. Palladium is no longer considered critical, but the other four platinum group elements we still do list as critical, namely platinum, rhodium, iridium and ruthenium. A lot of those make sense because the ones that we’re looking at that we’ve labeled critical are for all of the technologies that we need for net zero and the energy transition and things like that. So certainly there’s some elements that I think we might see an increase in demand in the future, such as scandium, which is used for aluminum, scandium specialty alloys.

Globally, no one’s really bothered to develop supplies of scandium because there’s been no demand. People doing the demand side haven’t worried about it because there’s no supply. That classic sort of chicken and egg problem. Now we know historically there’s been many examples throughout mining over the last sort of 200 odd years or so, when we get to these inflection points where the demand starts to grow and then miners start to think about, oh, there’s demand there, we’ll start developing supply and things accelerate from there. And as of course, things take off. And you could, you can see this with aluminium as aluminium is the whole Héroult process and the Bayer process came along that radically changed the economics of aluminium production and so it made it very large scale.

We’re able to see that very rapid growth in aluminium demand really take off. We’ve seen similar patterns in nickel where Inco, of course, in Sudbury, invested a huge amount in its early decades into R and D, basically encouraging people to use stainless steel. They invested in basically manufacturing their own demand. By getting people to take up stainless steel, that created the need for them to develop the supply. It was quite an ingenious strategy and something I think that Inco, I think people have forgotten that the role of that innovation in the very early decades of Inco, over a century ago.

I think when you’re looking at a lot of the elements, we’re seeing some of these elements go through, certainly lithium is going through extraordinary growth at the moment because that’s also what is happening with the demand. We’re seeing supply sort of get there. I think at the moment what we’re seeing is a classic oversupply problem into the market that’s crashed the price. We’re seeing the same with nickel as well. I think probably the thing with cobalt that’s sort of been that surprised a few people in recent years is the fact that we’ve seen the shift to lithium iron phosphate batteries in China. That has really removed the need for batteries that are NMC based batteries in nickel, manganese, cobalt based lithium type batteries. We haven’t needed as much cobalt.

For most of the last decade, cobalt production was actually flat. The last couple of years it started to really shoot up again. We’ll see where that goes. For at least the next decade, I think what we’re seeing is that batteries for EVs will still be mostly lithium based. There may still be a role for sodium and others. It’s really difficult to predict exactly, of course, how all of that comes together and I think it’s beyond the next 10 years, who knows?
What we’ve seen, I suppose in the evolution over the last sort of 10 to 20 years in terms of this sort of technology is that as we start with classic sort of industrial learning curves, they get cheaper, they generally get more powerful and things evolve. We do see changes, whether it’s in the battery chemistry, whether we see changes in things like the drivetrains for EVs as well. I think we’re still most likely to remain rare-earth based, but that’s certainly not the only option for permanent magnets. I guess it’s an interesting space and we always have to keep an eye on things.

MB: So much to pull apart there. I’m going to start with a personal anecdote. I grew up about 80 miles from Sudbury, from the INCO site. There are two things that are pertinent here. I was in Sudbury as a child watching the pouring of the slag. They just dump molten slag onto these hills of slag. The story was that NASA trained its astronauts by having them for moonwalks, by walking over these fields of barren, desolate slag. It was always interesting driving to Sudbury because as you approached Sudbury, the trees got shorter and shorter. The nickel processing process pumped stuff out of their stack that was poisonous to trees. It was clear that they were stunted.

This gets to the sustainability question of minerals processing that you started your career with and have continued with. There’s a tie in there. But there’s also something else that’s very pertinent. You mentioned lithium iron phosphate batteries. That brings in the key topic which we’ll return to again and again, which is substitutability of minerals for other minerals. One of the pieces of news that came out this week, RenewEconomy of Australia, edited by my acquaintance Giles Parkinson, reported that at an auction in China, the average price for a full battery energy storage system, that’s the cells, the container, thermal management, battery management system, everything was $66 US per kilowatt hour. At the beginning of the year we were shocked by $67 per kilowatt hour for cells alone.

Now we’re seeing 66 bucks for the entire pack. It’s stunning, it’s mind blowing. Also this year CATL started delivering 300 watt hour per kilogram lithium iron phosphate batteries, above the standard for lithium ion batteries that Tesla has been using in its cars and getting great range. Above the level that the Tesla semi truck uses, which are about 256. The thing that I keep seeing over and over again is people people keep saying in the battery space, well, this is the limit and it’s not enough and there’s no way to solve that. But now with something which is perceived to be a lower energy density battery metal combination, lithium iron phosphate, we’re seeing higher because we’ve got a long way to go on electrochemistry and we’ve got a lot of substitutability of minerals.
The entire critical mineral thing at a certain point is a misapprehension because we’ve got so much stuff and we can use different stuff. You mentioned iron and aluminum. I’m going to use the North American pronunciation because I just can’t wrap my head around that extra i, even though I have a British dad.

GM: That’s okay, I’ll forgive you.

MB: As we think about iron, well, we can actually substitute aluminum. We don’t do it that often because it looks more expensive than steel. Another one that we have a lot of questions about, likwe need a lot of wires. Cars have a lot of wires in them. Transmission has a lot of wires in it. Heat pumps have wires and everything has wires. They’re all copper. Well, no, many of them are aluminum because aluminum is a conductor as well with different characteristics.

You’ve probably heard about the advanced reconductoring of transmission wires. That’s a case where it’s actually a carbon fiber core and annealed aluminum conductor wrapped around it, which is much lighter and much less saggier than the current ones, which are steel core, copper wrapped. We can actually run transmission with the pylons further apart or we can string new wires with higher capacity over the same pylons. We have this amazing substitute ability. It’s not magic, it’s engineering.

I will say that there’s also this belief that if a metal is processed in one place badly for whatever reason, for example child labor in the Congo being classic for cobalt. That doesn’t mean that’s true everywhere. Generally we have supplies in a lot of places. Let’s take the rare earth one. You know the quote that I always love about rare is they’re not rare and they’re not Earth’s. They’re everywhere.

In the United States there used to be a big rare earth mine and processing facility. They exist on every continent as far as I can tell. Actually I’m going to ask you, are most rare earths available on every continent?

GM: There’s deposits everywhere. There’s lots of different types of deposits that contain rare earths. Now sometimes rare earths are the primary product. It’s the stuff you mine for, like you would mine a gold deposit. But often there’s as much rare earths in as by product. They’re a lower value product compared to other things. You can find examples in Australia where a mineral called monazite, which is a rare earth phosphate mineral, is associated with heavy mineral sands. Wherever you’re mining heavy mineral sands, the question is what small fraction of the heavy mineral concentrate, which is things like rutile or titanium dioxide, but also zircon, which is zirconium silicate. You’ve got other minerals like garnet and ilmenite, which is an iron titanium trioxide. But you also get monazite.

Monazite Australia used to be one of the biggest exporters of monazite globally and that was used to produce rare earths until China really took over the rare earth market in the 1990s. Ever since the 1990s and mineral sands producers have largely been either dumping monazite back into the tailings or in Western Australia they’ve been stockpiling it for 30 years. They now have this very large stockpile of monazite which they’re now building a new rare earth refinery to process. I think rare Earth deposits you can find all over the world. It’s just a matter of understanding whether they’re a primary deposit or byproduct. Then you’ve also got to look at the mineralogy and how they’re processed and everything else. That’s where the fun really starts, because that’s the hard stuff.

MB: Historically they’ve been problematic in North America because the processing was quite environmentally devastating. So there’s a classic pattern across industries, ones that are benign that the neighbors don’t mind and the Sierra Club likes, stay more often than not. The ones that are dirty get exported to the third world. And so China, being farsighted and knowing what it wanted to do since the 80s anyway, has not. It’s not like China ist the only place that has rare earths. It’s not the only place that can process rare earths. It was the place that said we’re going to do this and we’re going to own a lot of this market.

Regarding the Bayan Obo in Mongolia, up the north of China, I’ve read books about the place. There’s an amazing book by a woman who actually learned Mandarin and went in country into the wilds of the mining parts of China and went to the mines and came back with these amazing stories. [Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes]. Her point was that with all of these things with mining and mineral extraction, there’s this tremendous tendency to go to places that are hinterlands where there’s disputed jurisdictional things so regulations can be ignored and disputed. China did that with Inner Mongolia where there was an interstitial thing. Her perception is that seashore mining nodules in the deep sea, same kind of thing, because there’s no regulations that cover that and it’s international waters. Who’s going to stop you?

Back to rare earth processing, it has a reputation as being one of the worst sets of minerals to process and refine. Could you characterize and provide more accuracy around that and say, what are the real challenges and have they been overcome?

GM: Certainly China has worked out how to overcome the processing because the rare earths are a family, if we use the full definition. Normally the whole lanthanoid sort of series from lanthanum right through to ytterbium plus yttrium and scandium, that’s 17 elements you’ve got to separate. Normally we don’t worry about scandium because normally scandium is in separate minerals. We just talk about the lanthanoids plus yttrium. They’re very chemically similar. Now you’ve got to separate them out into often very high purity forms. That takes a lot of energy, it takes a lot of chemicals. That’s part of the reason why rare earths require such specialized processing.

The other part of the equation which is often overlooked or just politely ignored perhaps is the radioactivity. You always get thorium and uranium associated with the rare earth minerals. Now some parts of the world, the monazite minerals have a higher percentage of thorium than say other parts of the world. Often they’re more thorium dominant than they are uranium. Some rare earth deposits also have economic grades of uranium associated with. Sometimes there’s a lot of uranium there as well. Certainly that’s the case in some deposits in Australia. The issues around Mount Weld in Australia, for example, the export of the concentrates from there to Malaysia, and I’ve provided advice to the Malaysian community there that never wanted the radioactive thorium residues left behind in Malaysia. They never wanted that process in the first place. They would much rather that liners have built their refinery in Australia in the first place.

The problem is that when we look at it from an engineering point of view and we go through the regulatory criteria, the way we classify radioactive waste is people look at thorium and go, well, it’s got such a low specific activity, in other words a low rate of radioactive decay, that it’s kind of not even low level waste. It’s barely above sort of natural background levels perhaps. When you look at the decay products from thorium, they’re not like that. They’re actually much shorter half lives. Any exposure to those is a significant public health risk. We have to make sure that we’re managing those residues and keep them isolated.

The problem is people looking at the radioactive waste classification guidelines from groups like the International Atomic Energy Agency and they look at the parent, the thorium and go, it’s so low it doesn’t matter. But therefore we’ll put the minimal engineering criteria on it, communities look at the decay products and go, well, hang on, they’re really significant. If that stuff gets exposed then you know, you’ve got a potential exposure risk there that you really need to take seriously. The problem is the way that regulations work.
That’s not the way that whether it’s the regulators and this is not just Malaysia, it’s a much more universal problem is that there’s this conflict between the way that the IAEA sort of radioactive waste classification work versus the way that communities see that risk and so, and that risk needs to be dealt with. I think part of the problem globally as to why rare earths have such a reputation is because no communities really see that risk is being well managed. That’s an issue in China as it is in Malaysia and elsewhere. There’s certainly some rare earth deposits that have much lower levels of both thorium and uranium. And so, but again, Norra Kärr in Sweden would be one.

There are other rare earth projects that have significant uranium associated with them that’s potentially economic to extract alongside say the rare earths. Kvanefjeld in Greenland would be one. The Dubbo project in Australia is another one in New South Wales a few hours west of Sydney. But in New South Wales it’s actually illegal to extract and then sell uranium. They’ve kind of answered that question. It means that we need to understand where all the thorium and the uranium radionuclides and all of the decay products go to as well.
I think when I’ve looked at that project in particular the standards array about how they’re proposing to manage it and it’s probably one of the next rare earth projects to get built globally are excellent. They’ve done really detailed studies and they’ve got the engineering criteria right there above what people would normally expect as a low level radioactive waste facility. I think it can be done. We know what we need to do. In the same way, when you look at Sudbury, for example, they built the super stack and put in sulfur dioxide captures and then made acid out of that. They realized that the value of the acid was basically covering the costs of stopping the sulfur dioxide emissions. It was not necessarily profitable, but at least covered their costs and it was good enough.

We know what we need to do and we can clean up that industry, but we’ve got to make sure we understand what criteria we’re using and make sure that the community accepts that criteria. That’s been a big problem in the rare earth space.

MB: You said something specific. I talked about rare earths being one of the ones that are characterized as much more environmentally challenging. You said something which I’d heard but don’t have details on, which is that China’s figured out how to do it. My understanding is around 2010, China pivoted and said we’ve got to actually clean up that Inner Mongolian processing area. They’ve invested a tremendous amount in the processes to the much more environmentally benign. Can you A, tell me if I’m right with my time frame and characterization and B, tell more about that?

GM: You always have to be careful about some things that are always said. Certainly China’s recognized its environmental impacts. That was happening before the 2010 stringent export controls were put in place. Part of it is China’s saying, well, yes, we’re producing them cheaply, but that’s because we’re not covering our costs on things, whether it be impacts on communities, pollution impacts and so on. When you look at the way we’ve been doing things in the west broadly for the last 50 odd years since we’ve introduced environmental regulation, we put either pollution control technology in place, we use cleaner production processes to sometimes design out the generation of pollution in the first place where we can. But also we then get involved actually looking at waste management in much more stringent ways.

If we’re looking at the residues after processing, so you take an ore and that might be in the case of a rare earth mine, say 1 to 5% rare earth oxide. So you’re dealing with say 95 to 99% of that rock that you’re processing that is not actually rare earths. It’s actually, it’s silicates, it’s iron, it’s other elements. That’s the residue that we call tailings and goes off to these days, we would use a large tailings dam. Now if you’re not managing that tailings dam to, let’s say, keep it water covered, it’ll dry out, that generates dust. Now depending on what part of the world you’re in, you may have different options for how you manage dust coming off a tailing stand, but certainly dust is one of the big issues in Bayan Obo, it’s a dry area.

There’s various examples all around the world that we could point to for different types of pollution risks. We’ve worked out what we could do in terms of getting better environmental outcomes and getting better safety outcomes, including for workers, but also for local communities. That’s just the mining side. And then where China’s really been, I suppose, much further down the track than the rest of us, is processing, and that’s the refining into the different rare earth elements and then transferring that into technologies such as permanent magnets and so on. And that’s where they’re extremely protective of their IP.

That’s where I think China’s certainly been able to get a stranglehold, not just on the mine supply, but then also on that processing side through refining into the specific elements, individual rare earth elements, that are then used in technologies such as permanent magnets or other things.

MB: This definitely gets into a subject that I wanted to talk about, which was my observation about China, is because it took a lock on it, because it’s done the cleanup, that there were a whole bunch of things where the west would have to go to China and its experts for how to process and refine rare earths in an effective and productive way. What I’m hearing is confirming my bias that’s true. But you said specifically they’re very protective of the intellectual capital. Are they willing to license it? Are they willing to share that or for a lot of money. Is the west just having to redevelop that expertise ourselves?

GM: I think certainly when you’re looking at it, a lot of the export requirements now from China are actually limiting not just the flow of material, but also the technologies associated with processing. Whether that be permanent magnets and other things as well. They’re very protective of their IP. Now, we could and there are countries around the world whether it’s Japan, the UK, the US and Canada and others, we’re all working to sort of build our own capacity in that space. But yeah, China is serious about looking at the environmental side and making sure that they actually do that. That’s based on their own experts and so on. And it’s not just in the rare earth space.

The recent restrictions around antimony exports are largely because China used to produce about 70% or so of world antimony maybe I think up to 75% actually now because they’ve had a lot of pollution problems and communities being impacted by that. They’ve gone in with much more stringent environmental regulation and that’s caused about 60% of their antimony industry to shut down mines and smelters and refineries. That means that they no longer have an excess amount of antimony to be able to export. What they are producing, which is literally just about 40% or so of what they used to a decade ago, they have to use themselves. Antimony is a really good example to show I suppose some of the complexity of the way that China approaches things.

It’s not all just about geopolitics or you know, things like that. Sometimes they’ve taken genuine action to clean up some of their own industry sectors and then that means that they have to start changing what they export. Certainly in the rare earth space they’re evolving in that space doing a lot more work on getting better environmental outcomes. But it’s a long term process. You’ve got large sectors or mines like Bayan Obo that have been around for decades. Like Sudbury, you don’t change the outcomes from a place like that very quickly. Certainly they remain very protective of their IP. From everything I’ve seen, this does get into a question of expertise.

MB: I’ll lean into the Northvolt example because it’s top of mind for a lot of the west right now, Northvolt’s collapse. One of the observations that gets made is they had 4,000 employees and they had a thousand in their R&D organization whereas CATL has 16,000 people in their RD organization alone. I was in New Zealand last year and did a four city speaking tour which talked about the demand side for critical minerals with mining and minerals audiences there and I was saying it’s great time to be in minerals because the west needs to develop them. What they told me was that universities in New Zealand had stopped teaching the mining programs and the minerals programs.

A question for you is the gap in mining and metallurgy and processing and refining human resources strong between China and the rest of the world? How big is that gap and how long is it going to take us to fill up?

GM: It’s a huge gap and it’s a serious problem across all mining countries of the west, whether it’s Australia and elsewhere. The University of Wollongong just announced recently they were looking to close their sciences department. There’s literally only four or five universities in Australia that teach mining engineering as well. Most universities in Australia still have a geology or an earth sciences department, but often that’s focused on a whole range of other aspects of geosciences, not just sort of economic geology and mining alone. It’s a real struggle to get students into geology. I think part of it, there’s a perception that mining is a dirty industry and certainly historically that’s, even the industry would agree with that historically the mining has caused significant impacts.

Now often I like to characterize them because when we compare say farming or agriculture to mining people say, oh, look at all that land that agriculture uses and it’s cleared. Lots of all biodiversity impacts. That’s already happened. When we’re dealing with a lot of the way we farm, we can change practices and start to get back some of the biodiversity. Often not all of it, but they’re chalk and cheese. We still need food, we still need metals, we still need energy. When we’re looking at mining, you’ve got a much smaller area.

When you’re looking at farming, it’s a very large area, but a very low level impact spread over that large area. That does add up. It’s not like those issues aren’t worth dealing with and many parts of the farming community are. When we look at mining can cause very acute impacts and sometimes those impacts can actually get off site very quickly, as we’ve seen with tailings and disasters in Brazil, including Mount Polley in Canada. When we’re looking at mining, it can cause very acute impacts if it’s not managed well. That’s part of what we need to sort of really think through is that ultimately it just comes back to these same basic issues. We’ve got the impacts there, we know how to manage them and how to do better. It’s just a matter of actually making sure that we’re doing that. In the west, that’s the perception of mining, is that it’s still this old acute impact.

It’s from the historic time, but largely we’ve learned how to do better. I think people often say that Australia Canada and so on are some of the best jurisdictions in terms of regulating mining. They’re certainly better than average, but still not good enough. We can do better. You didn’t get Mount Polley happening in a developing country. It happened in British Columbia, a major mining sort of province of Canada. There were regulatory failures there as well as the company and so on as well. I think this is what communities are reacting to. We’re looking at redeveloping mining or ensuring we can get, improve the sort of diversity and reliability of our critical mineral supplies. That’s the sort of thing.

We need to train a lot more geologists, but there’s a perception that mining is still dirty and we haven’t dealt with that. I think that’s something that the industry has got to work out how to deal with. It can’t just be industry alone. It’s our professional bodies, it’s the government as well. That’s the sort of space when we’re thinking about what we’re seeing in the earth sciences and especially in fields like mining engineering and economic geology. The number of graduates is declining and it’s to the point where you’re getting universities shut down programs and so, and they’re getting harder and harder to sort of to sustain.

When you’ve got the scale of China, that means they’re producing a lot of graduates in that space. It’s a difficult problem and it’s one that’s certainly on the agenda around the place. But it’s a very difficult one to solve and one that’s not going to happen very quickly. I think one of the ways that we can move forward in that space, and this helps link a whole bunch of different ideas together, is recently the UN Secretary General had a panel that looked at critical energy transition minerals. They just have to change the terminology bit, but that’s okay. But one of the key recommendations was a global Mining Legacy Fund.

If we put, let’s just make up a random number for argument’s sake of 0.01% of global mining revenue went into this fund, or let’s even say profit, something like that, you’d be generating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue a year going into a fund like that. That could then be used to clean up some of these problematic mines. Now whether that’s really contentious sites like Bougainville or Ok Tedi and other sites we could fix and there’s still more work to do in Sudbury as there’s work to do at other abandoned mines in British Columbia, as there is in Australia and elsewhere. If we had a fund like that, we could clean up some of these mines, deal with this perception around mining is always a dirty industry and actually start to move forward on things.

That to me has always been something I’ve advocated for a long time. I was certainly overjoyed when I saw that as a key recommendation in the UN Secretary General’s report. We need to be able to do it. This is a long term sort of process where we need to make sure that we’ve got the engineers, the scientists that actually do understand things, whether environmental engineer like myself who has worked in the mining space or the mining engineers and you know, all the other aspects that we need to make sure that we do mining properly because we can’t afford to. We can’t afford to get it wrong again.

MB: The human resources gap and the intellectual capital gap are very problematic. It hadn’t occurred to me that we’d go this route, but I look at various examples. I look at the semiconductor industry being one company in Taiwan, so much just TSMC. I look at high assay, low enrichment uranium, HALEU, that entire industry supply chain being monopolized by a historically bad and unreliable actor, Russia. Now we have this concern about rare earths where the west has just allowed themselves to abandon rare earth extraction, processing and refining and outsource it all to China. These seem to be fairly obvious things from the lens you put upon it of security and economics that were obvious what was happening and yet governments didn’t seem to care or do anything about it for a long time.

Can you, do you have any idea or why it just was ignored? Because it’s not like the idea of critical materials and minerals is a new one. It’s not like the security of a country is a new one. It’s not like resilience of supply is a new concept. How did we in the west especially lose the plot on that?

GM: To be honest, I don’t actually have a very good answer. What I can say is that I think we’ve allowed the free market to rule too much, we’ve relied on just getting the cheapest price and not asking too many questions about that, the true cost of where that supply comes from. We could look at cobalt from the Congo and the artisanal miners and child labor for some of the cobalt production coming out of the Congo is certainly a huge problem. The blood diamond concept as popularized from the late 90s. I think very simply that’s what we’ve done is we’ve just relied on the cheapest price and let the free market sort of rule. Now. Markets are never perfect. There’s monopolies, there’s duopolies, there’s in the rhenium space, you’ve got one company that’s 70% Moly-Met, a Chilean company.

We used to think Chile was a very a good progressive country that was very mining friendly until 2019. I had just bought a plane ticket to go to Santiago later in late 2019 for the annual COP meeting there. I wake up the next morning and there were really severe riots throughout Santiago. That sent shockwaves through the mining world because Chile was supposed to be progressive where they used their copper money as they called it. You’ve got the government owned company Cadelco, which generates a very large revenue stream obviously for the Chilean government and a very profitable company too, I might add. But that hasn’t been as wisely invested in, I guess, progressive development for communities and especially in the mining communities.

The bone of contention there is that communities are saying we need to do better. That’s really raised concerns around some of these sort of supplies. I think that to me is the only way I can really view it is we’ve relied on things that have been okay. We’re starting to see a lot more tension now and you know, whether it’s tariffs being threatened, whether it’s the export quotas, restrictions on some of the technologies as well. All right, so I think we’re seeing that and it’s a, whether it’s over chips, whether it’s over other technologies. I suppose it’s a new world order. The belief in the free market I think now has really been rattled.

I think governments around the world are saying, well actually we need to intervene in the market, we need to do things. The whole sort of drama around critical minerals is that our job is to provide the best advice to the government to say, well, where is the best way to actually help achieve the different goals we have, whether it’s net zero, all sorts of other things. That’s the best way I’ve come to think of it anyway.

MB: I certainly tend to agree. Industrial policy for governments in the west, especially in the UK and United States, fell completely out of favor. One of the ways I describe it is that China as a big soccer playing country is always running to where the ball will be, whereas Europe and North America have been chasing the ball through the markets.

So we have this challenge in the west that just something which worked well for many things, worked poorly for other things. The global geopolitics of globalization and liberalization of markets and free trade had a whole bunch of really positive impacts globally. In China, it’s a big reason why they were able to lift 850 million of their citizens out of abject poverty, abject poverty that Mao’s policies put them in. But still that’s obviously a good thing. Now China is hammering in 300 gigawatts of renewables every year and it’s pivoting on a whole bunch of stuff.

It’s electrified its economy more so we’re going to actually and you know, wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, electricals, heat pumps manufactured in China are essential components for decarbonizing the world. It’s not perfect what’s happened, but that’s what it is. It’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out over the next while.