Excitement over ‘rare’ elements

The Institute for Human Sciences’ (IWM) rector interviewed the author of Rare Earth Frontiers: From terrestrial subsoils to lunar landscapes during the Vienna Humanities Festival 2024.

Misha Glenny: We are going to be talking about rare earths, rare earth minerals, the extraction of critical raw minerals and their position within the environmental and geopolitical situation. So that we all start on the same page: there are 17 rare earth elements, and these are included in what the US geographical survey has deemed to be 51 critical raw minerals or CRMs. So let’s start with the rare earths, Julie. What are they and why are they important?

Julie Klinger: The term ‘rare earth elements’ is a bit of an anachronism, because these elements are neither ‘rare’ nor necessarily ‘earths’. They refer to the island to the south of the periodic table called the lanthanide series, numbers 57 to 71, plus scandium and yttrium.

They’re grouped together as a family, because they have these really fantastic magnetic and conductive properties, which have enabled the miniaturization of technologies and transoceanic internet communications, the development of space technologies, etc.

Why are they called rare? The name sticks around, because it’s exciting. It’s more exciting than saying ‘lanthanum’ or ‘praseodymium’. But in my research, trying to find out why they were called ‘rare’, came down to this: when they were first characterized in Sweden in the late 1700s, no one had ever seen them before, so they were simply assumed to be rare. The first time I found a chemist lamenting this in print was in 1907, and since then, the scientific community has been pretty cranky about this characterization. But it sticks around. If you call something rare, we get excited and people might be willing to agree to things that they might otherwise quite sensibly refuse.

Misha Glenny: To get a feeling of the wide varieties of usages of rare earths, could you give us a couple of examples?

Julie Klinger: You could really pick any element. But we’ll go with cerium. In a city like Vienna, there’s probably lovely antique glassware that’s a lovely rosy pink, right? It’s cerium that imparts that colour onto the glassware. It’s that same pigmenting property that is used to make lasers that are used in everything from surgery to precision guided missiles. It’s also cerium that can act as a signal amplifier when it’s added to fibre optic cables. If you can picture the global mesh of transoceanic fibre optic cables: about every 30 kilometres or so, there’s a little bit of cerium that amplifies the signal.

Misha Glenny: And without cerium, we couldn’t do that?

Julie Klinger: Well, we could, but it would be slower and who wants to go slower?

Cerium has been really important over the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century because it’s used in petroleum refining. And, in fact, until very recently, the primary application for rare earth elements in the US was in the petrochemical industry. That’s only very recently been edged out by magnets.

Misha Glenny: I wanted to ask you about an element commonly used in magnets, praseodymium: why is it important and what role does it play in the green transition? 

Julie Klinger: Praseodymium and neodymium are important because they’re used in renewable energy technologies among many others, as well as in digital technologies. Picture a wind turbine: magnets are really important in the actual mechanics of the wind turbine that help translate its motion into energy generation. Depending on the size of the wind turbine, you might have a few kilos to a couple of tons of magnets in there.

When it comes to digital technologies, it’s that conductive and magnetic power that enables them to be smaller, more modular, more portable and, therefore, ultimately more accessible. In any scenario that we’re looking at here, whether we’re talking about energy development – renewable or not – or increased access to technology, they require these rare earth elements. The same can be said for just about everything else that’s on a critical raw materials list.

Misha Glenny: So we’ve established that rare earth materials aren’t rare, they can be found in a lot of places, but you have to extract a great deal of rock in order to get them.

Julie Klinger: Yes, they don’t exist in the form of gold nuggets. When we’re talking about 17 chemically similar elements, we’re confronting a very particular extraction challenge.

The first challenge is finding a deposit that contains any of them at a concentration that might be economically feasible. To give you a sense of the proportions that we’re talking about: if you have a big area or a geological deposit that has many, many, many millions of tons of material, if 2% of that contains rare earth elements, that’s considered a really good deal. But that also gives you a sense of the quantity of energy and earth moving that’s involved in getting at the material wanted by the extracting companies.

When dug up, everything else, whatever it may be, whether it’s gold or silver or phosphate or uranium or thorium or arsenic, is left above ground as waste. Think about that: in a good scenario, 98% of the stuff that’s dug up is left behind as waste.

Because of the chemical similarities among rare earth elements, separating them is very challenging. A large part of twentieth century science was devoted to figuring out how to crack these things apart. The upshot is that separating them and refining them is very energy intensive and often very chemically intensive as well.

Misha Glenny: Moving on to critical raw materials – lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper – all materials very important for various aspects of the green transition. How much of this stuff are we going to have to actually dig up in order to power the green transition?

Julie Klinger: Between 2017 and 2022, the International Energy Agency estimated that there was a threefold increase in global demand for lithium, a 70% increase in global demand for cobalt, and a 40% increase in global demand for nickel – the latter two being used in batteries. These are big numbers, but they’re not surprising. On one hand, this is good news. It means that we’re moving forward in terms of rapid deployment for renewable energy technologies.

But there’s a lot that’s hidden in these numbers. Even though a battery in and of itself is a renewable energy technology, it may not actually be used for climate-critical purposes. I think the most vivid example of this is lithium batteries. Several months ago, a big-revelation-turned-social-media-phenomenon showed that a big driver for the increased demand of small-scale lithium batteries was the proliferation of vaping pens – not a climate-critical application.

Less frivolously, three of the PhD researchers that I’m working with has been looking at the military capture of renewable energy technologies. There’s a big push in the US military to develop assault rifles that are powered by lithium batteries. So, there we have a significant increase that is, in part, driven by renewable energy applications, but not climate critical.

Misha Glenny: And we’ve still got a long way to go before we reach the peak of any of this.

Julie Klinger: Absolutely. I think copper is a good example. Copper is what enables electricity to move from here to there. It is important for electrification in general, and energy technology and digitization are at the heart of the international community’s current climate and development goals. The expectation is that copper consumption, in order to meet COP28 targets, will have to exceed all global copper production in human history that was produced up until 2009.

Misha Glenny: China dominates much of the market in rare earths and critical raw minerals, in particular in the processing of these elements and minerals. Much of the research you did for your book was carried out in the Bayan Obo mine, and to some extent processing facility, in China’s Inner Mongolia. Due to current political circumstances, that opportunity is unlikely to occur today. What was it like in the heartland of China’s rare earth industry and what were your impressions of their operation?

Julie Klinger: It would be very difficult to do that research today. For context: I lived and worked in China for a total of about five years between 2003 and 2013. After that I devoted my research to rare earth elements and it became a book. I had professional contacts in academia and in the government. At the time, questions asked by an international scholar with several years of experience in China were received as an opportunity to advance mutual understanding. I think we need a little bit more of that today.

In order to do research within the world’s rare earth capital – a military restricted area – required a lot of patience and lead-up time, talking with multiple people, informing them about my questions and my intentions, and then ultimately visiting the same place in multiple ways, escorted by multiple different parties, but always with permission.

In my book I write about how the strength and robustness of China’s industrial heartland around rare earth mining and processing co-evolved with their nuclear weapons industry. I didn’t go in knowing this. And in fact, it was happenstance that I even found out.

My first officially organized visit to Baotou and Bayan Obo, was facilitated by my host institution, the China Academy of Sciences. Two weeks before I was scheduled to arrive in Baotou, there had been some pretty major unrest: a member of the ethnic Mongolian pastoralists community had been hit and killed by a truck transporting mineral ore, and the community protested. I don’t know what the logic was, but the officials that had agreed to my visit reasoned that it would be too problematic to cancel it. However, no one was to talk to me about mining. I think in a moment of desperation the guides tried to fill up the space during  a drive around the city and pointed out all sorts of things to me. And one of the things was: ‘Ah, this is our nuclear weapons development facility.’

That generated a whole bunch of follow-up questions, which under any other circumstances I would have felt were too taboo to ask. But in this situation, we had quite a conversation. And that then of course generated leads for me to look at the overlap and the co-development of the nuclear and rare earth industries from the mid-twentieth century onwards. That led me to looking at the role of international scientific cooperation around nuclear energy and rockets development centred in places like the University of Chicago and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, all of which overlapped in some ways with rare earths research that eventually found a home in Baotou.

Misha Glenny: Pollution remains a really big issue in Bayon Obo and China, doesn’t it??

Julie Klinger: Yes, it certainly does. Industrial foundations were a part of early post-revolutionary China’s industrial planning collaboration with the Soviet Union. The idea was that these places would be industrial heartlands, helping power the development and self-sufficiency of China supported by the Soviet Union. Together, China and the Soviet Union would provide the hard industrial goods and know-how to the rest of the world, in order to achieve a sort of world communist revolution.

Rare earth mine, Bayan Obo, Baotou, Inner Mongolia. A combination of satellite images captured by ASTER, NASA Earth Observatory, via Wikimedia Commons

In the mid-twentieth century a number of these places were set up around the country. Baotou is the priority area number one, which holds the rare earth elements, heavy industry and weapons development. The priority there, since the 1950s, had been to build as much industry as quickly as possible, expand the scope of mining operations as quickly as possible, and waste management really was not a priority. However, because of concerns about agricultural and aquacultural productivity and drinking water, there has been decades of very careful documentation and tracking of soil and water pollution.

But it wasn’t until of critical period in the early 2000s that scientific data combined with the work of local activists and dedicated environmental journalists to enable a shift in China’s priorities from industrial development to actual environmental remediation.

Misha Glenny: Rare earth mining creates a kind of sludge, could you describe it?

Julie Klinger: I mentioned that in the best case scenario, you might have a 2% concentration of rare earths in what you dig up. Some pockets of the deposit might have up to 20%, but if you’re mining over a large area, 2% is considered a good average.

It just so happens that a couple of the other elements abundant in this particular deposit are arsenic, thorium, fluoride and uranium. Although there’s of course secondary processing to capture some of these materials from the waste, for 40 or 50 years you had abundant quantities of arsenic and fluoride just being brought up out of the earth. As part of the separation process, it becomes pulverized as well as more mobile. They proliferate in windblown dust. They get into the waterways.

The uptake of these contaminants by plants and animals has made its way all the way up the food chain. Extensive public health studies show a long-term health impact on infant and child cognitive development, advanced types of bone diseases and specific ailments that result from chronic exposure.

Misha Glenny: Right, so to continue to dig for these elements in order to realize the green transition, regulations are going to be really important.

Moving on to the geopolitics of this: the US used to be the number one producer of rare earths and then, strategizing to make China into the manufacturing heartland of the US, rare earth extraction and processing went over to China. Now the Chinese have had 35 years of processing these materials and can do it a lot cheaper than anyone else. So, given the centrality to military, climate critical and civilian use, what does that mean in terms of geopolitics relationships between the US, China and the EU?

Julie Klinger: This is a really important question. I will say something that is very unpopular in the US right now: China is a reliable trade partner with the US. The intense investments that China’s government and industries made in building up their current industrial and manufacturing capacity fit perfectly within the Washington-driven, free-trade industry relocation doctrines of the past 40 years or so. For a while – I don’t want to say everyone was happy – but it was a relationship that didn’t garner the kind of concern that we’ve seen in the past decade.

A lot of critical technological components – whether it’s for health care or scientific instrumentation, military technologies – the raw materials refining, components manufacture and product assembly, all has been concentrated in China. The US Department of Defense woke up to this about 15 years ago and decided that it was a real problem and has since then been shopping for alternatives, while also continuing to receive many of these components from counterparts and manufacturers in China on a reliable basis.

Misha Glenny: One of the things this has resulted in is, what I called in a BBC documentary, ‘the scramble for rare earths’. We have a global scramble primarily between the US and China, latterly the EU as well, trying to secure supply chains. Tell us a bit about the supply chains and their complexity.

Julie Klinger: The criticality of these materials doesn’t in most cases have to do with their absolute scarcity. It has to do with the geography of the supply chains and how those supply chains are organized. If you consider a less rosy geopolitical scenario, the fact that a lot of the central processing and high technology manufacturing and assembly steps are concentrated in China does constitute a very real vulnerability. And that vulnerability, in the US context, is often described in terms of military vulnerability.

In fact – very ‘gallows’ humour here – but one of the conclusions in the recent DOD report, which projected out the material needs for a hypothetical war with China by 2027, was that it wouldn’t be feasible, because so much of the important components for defence technologies come from China.

One important thing that has happened over the past 15 years is that the geography of extraction has changed. Places like the US, Myanmar, Vietnam, Brazil, Madagascar are supplying raw material. But most of that critical, early middle-step of refining and separating these materials, is still routed through China. And so, what the US and the EU have been working on is building out value-added processing in order to have more independent capabilities in this area.

There are three scenarios under which we, quote-unquote, ‘don’t have enough raw materials to meet our energy transition goals’. One of them is, under this global scramble for rare earth elements and other energy-critical raw materials, we have the global duplication of supply chains and efforts. Any framework that considers ‘how much of these things are actually needed in a given territory or context in order to achieve energy transition goals’ is absent. Under this scramble, all parties are going for as much capacity as possible, irrespective of how much might actually be needed for critical purposes such as the energy transition.

Misha Glenny: So, since the Cold War, the West has periodically introduced technology export controls, usually on dual-use technologies. This was a quite well codified system during the Cold War through CoCom. However, in the last 10-15 years, as the Americans started to panic about China’s development and rivalry and competitiveness, they’ve started, together with the EU started restricting Chinese access to manufactured materials, particularly microchips. But, for the first time, the West is having to take some of its own medicine: China has started to impose export controls, not only on processing technology of rare earths, which they do more or less better than anyone else now, but also on the rare earths themselves. How powerful a lever is this for the Chinese to use?

Julie Klinger: There’s a couple of ways in which that’s a really powerful diplomatic and geopolitical tool. And then there’s a bunch of other ways in which restricting those two things specifically allows a lot of business as usual to continue. I think it’s important to keep this complex supply chain picture in mind – in part because China is not only a source market for these technologies but also a major consuming market for technologies that might be finished in the West and then exported back to China.

With those particular export controls that you’ve mentioned, markets will certainly react. But the export controls on the most advanced processing and separations technologies is a pretty direct blow for the US and EU, who plan to build out their industrial capacity, and are looking for state-of-the-art technology and equipment. And where is this state-of-the-art technology and equipment? In China, of course, which makes sense because they’ve had 40 years of working on this and supplying most of the world. Over that same 40-year period, the US and the EU not only drew down industrial capacity but also research and development capacity.

Misha Glenny: So, both sides have leverage here. And if it’s not properly managed, then it could turn nasty at some point. There are some voices in the US saying, quite loudly now, ‘be careful about how far you go on restrictions to Chinese companies because it might come back and bite us in the end’.

There are two ‘more out-there’ ways of getting hold of rare earths and critical raw minerals. The first one is deep sea mining: what are the dangers there? And the second one, which you’ve written about in your book Rare Earth Frontiers, is the moon. You’ve also explored the idea of moon mining as a potential future. Is this idea nuts or should we take it seriously?

Julie Klinger: The way that deep sea mining is often represented is that there’s these lumpy nodules of lots of different metals just sitting on the ocean floor waiting to be vacuumed up. This idea makes it so much easier and less controversial than terrestrial mining because: one, nobody lives there; and, two, you don’t have to dig any holes to get the metals.

At that level, deep sea mining seems like a very compelling alternative to terrestrial surface mining – particularly when you consider the human rights violations and the environmental impacts that plague the industry. However, we have explored more of the moon than we’ve explored of the deep seabed. So, in a way, we’re tinkering with the unknown. This factor has been one of the reasons why there have been global campaigns to get major potential consumers of battery metals to promise that they will not use materials acquired through deep sea mining.

One of the things that we do know about this deep-sea ecosystem is that there are theses methane-gobbling microorganisms that are performing a critical climate service for us. Methane seeps up through the ocean floor, and they eat it up, keeping it from escaping into the atmosphere. That’s significant because other previous non-anthropogenic climate-warming events have been caused in part by massive ‘belches’ of methane from the deep ocean. Potentially, what we’re looking at here is destabilizing a largely unknown ecosystem that is performing a really critical climate function for us, in the name of fighting climate change, in the form of the energy transition.

And the moon. When I was researching for this book, I had a moment of serendipity. I was back in the San Francisco Bay area in between research trips to China, and I went to a very nerdy sort of party where we all brought our favourite board games. I ended up playing with someone who, after hearing me say that I was researching rare earth elements, noted to me that his company had just signed a US$10 million contract with NASA to develop a robot to mine rare elements on the moon.

This was part of a large XPRIZE grant co-sponsored by Google that was going to award US$20 million to a company that could deploy a robot on the moon for whatever purpose. A number of them had seized on the geopolitical crisis of the 2010s that swirled around rare earth elements and said ‘we’re going to get these things from outer space and not from China’.

None of those projects panned out. But the first thing I came to understand through researching the space mining industry was, that for a fair number of them, the objective was never to actually meet their stated objective but to develop interesting technologies and maybe be bought up by a larger entity so they would cash out and move on to the next thing.

The second realization was that if you talk to folks serious about developing space mining capabilities, they are thinking about it strictly in terms of long-term space travel, long-term space missions. So, you don’t have to take everything you need from Earth to do interesting stuff in outer space. From a sustainability standpoint, that makes sense. But it’s not about the energy transition.

And then there are the space cowboys – and I think we’re all familiar with a couple of prominent space cowboys. Their objective is perhaps more to set up libertarian colonies or luxury resorts on the moon or on Mars. And these projects are yet another manifestation of this long-standing escapist fantasy, I would say, significantly empowered by the rise of the billionaire capitalist as a figure.

But to come all the way back around to the question of criticality and provisioning the energy transition, there’s really no plausible scenario under which mining in space to provision activities on earth makes economic sense.

Misha Glenny: One final, a bit complicated question. You are developing some ideas about how to avoid the issues around the supply chain scramble. Could you briefly outline what that is?

Julie Klinger: Earlier this year, the UN Secretary General put together a panel on critical minerals and materials for the energy transition. And earlier this month, they published their seven principles and action items. They emphasize cooperation, justice, transparency and the benefit for communities in provisioning the renewable energy transition. The world bank projects that CRM needs to increase four to six-fold in order to meet the renewable energy targets by 2030 and the net zero targets by 2040 and 2050.

The question is then, how can this be done in a way that doesn’t continue to cause the tremendous social and environmental violence associated with extractive industries to metastasize in the name of fighting climate change, undermining climate resilient landscapes and livelihoods.

It’s a real conundrum. But in the new UN Secretary General’s principles, principle number seven states that multilateral cooperation must underpin efforts to provision the energy transition. My team has developed some ideas. We have a piece in Nature Energy journal that outlines a framework for nationally determined contributions to energy transition materials.

This works within the ‘National determined contribution framework’ that really distinguished the 2015 Paris Accords, aiming to determine how many units are actually needed of any given energy transition material. There’s all sorts of data about capacity but it tends to be expressed in watts and not in terms of the actual hard materials that you need to build this infrastructure.

Our proposal also calls for parties to do an inventory of their reserves, prioritizing above ground reserves. The key thing here is that this is the stuff that has already been dug up, languishing as waste, that may be found a landfill in the form of a decommissioned or discarded technology. The key thing that I think we need to remember here is that these critical raw materials are fundamentally different from fossil fuels. When you use a fossil fuel, you combust it to perform its function. But with many of the CRM and rare earths, we don’t destroy them through use. They’re sitting above ground.

The other goal is to do an inventory of domestic climate assets like biodiversity, resilient landscapes and freshwater resources. These are codified under any number of environmental protection measures. They perform critical social and ecological services, and enhance local and regional resilience. The idea there is that if you look at your map of your reserves, and you look at your map of your climate assets, potential areas for industry development are what’s left.

This, of course, can be decided in a context-appropriate referendum, a vote, a plebiscite. And it has to be determined by a given country. But we’re excited that there’s been a positive response to this idea’s incorporation into the conference of parties going forward.

This conversation took place on 8 October 2024 at the Vienna Humanities Festival 2024, which was organized by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) and Time To Talk (TTT) in cooperation with FALTER, the Open Society Foundations, the City of Vienna, ERSTE Foundation, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the Wien Museum and the Volkstheater.