Compared with ancient humans, we have an inordinate amount of stuff. We are obsessed with possessions and infrastructure. Every skerrick that doesn’t grow on Earth’s surface is extracted from underground. There’s no free ride for energy from sun, wind or water, either, because mined materials are used to convert, transport and store it.
Jim Goddin is head of circular economy at sustainability company thinkstep-anz and a materials engineer who contributed to the UK’s critical minerals strategy. “To make the transition to low-carbon energy, we need solar panels and wind turbines,” he says. “Our only option is to mine or extract the minerals needed for those, but we need to seriously up our game in terms of how these materials are produced.”
Then, he says, we should be better stewards of them. “We need to use resources responsibly, not throw them away after a short time, and to think about durability, repair, reuse, shared ownership. If we use stuff for longer, we minimise the material we have to dig out and we decouple from growing risks in the supply chain.”
China has a virtual monopoly on heavy rare earths. Professor Chris Bumby of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology confirms the geopolitical risk. In some cases, China and Russia control more than 90% of global supply of these minerals, he says. Pressure is therefore growing for “friendly” countries to collaboratively shore up critical mineral supply.
Critical minerals are those that governments deem essential for the nation’s economy or security and pose significant supply risks. They’re sometimes confused with rare earths, which are a defined list of elements that only rarely occur in rock at high enough concentrations to be economically viable for mining. Most rare earths are also critical – for magnets, motors, electronics and computing, medical imaging, lasers, aerospace alloys, petroleum refining and more.
Here, rare earths occur mostly in the South Island, where Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood billionaire protagonist illegally mined them and shipped them overseas – and that’s where most would go if we extracted them. “The supply chains for these sorts of technology are incredibly complex,” says Bumby. “They go through multiple different countries. Eventually, all those bits come back together in the device at your retail store. If you disrupt any single link in this chain, it can all go wrong. All the bits need to arrive just in time, and that makes us incredibly vulnerable.”
Add to the mix the soaring demand for energy-transition paraphernalia: batteries, photovoltaic panels and wind turbines. Metallic elements have core new applications in these industries, he says, but processes are not in place to deliver the volumes the market is now demanding to build these things.
High demand maketh a financial opportunity, but Bumby says New Zealand isn’t poised to maximise that. “We do not have industry that is converting neodymium into powerful magnets for wind turbine generators, or other high-tech ends where these actual elements all end up being used. But perhaps we could develop new high-tech green industry that produces the next stage in the value chain. Not going all the way with wind turbines, but we might make the magnets.”
It’s possible that what’s in demand will change. For example, scientists everywhere are working on battery technologies that use more easily obtainable elements. “But the timeline to market is long: 10-15 years is common,” says Bumby. “Most of the trajectories say we need to be well on the way to reducing our CO₂ emissions within the next decade. We are constrained to dealing with the materials that we know work well, that are in the development pipeline right now and can see the light of day as a commercial product within the next few years.”
