Critical minerals and the materials we make from them aren't the same

The announcement of a $12 billion stockpile of critical minerals in the US – the so-called ‘Project Vault’ – is the latest news in a rapidly escalating geopolitical conversation about the availability of key elements and materials that modern technologies rely on.

China already tightly controls the rare earths (a specific group of elements at the bottom of the periodic table, also known as the lanthanides), and elements such as cobalt, nickel, and lithium, feeding global concerns about their availability and supply chains.

The transition away from fossil fuels is underway, but has highlighted the role that such specific elements – and others – play in the underpinning technologies. From lithium batteries to computing hardware, these metallic elements allow us to control the behaviour of electrons.

Some elements are more desirable than others due to a combination of size, the number of electrons, and their quantum energies. But now geopolitics is proposed to matter as much or even more so than the chemistry of these elements.

New Zealand is a minor player in mining internationally. However, we do have mineral deposits, and currently, a Government that has repeatedly signalled it wants to open up access to them, despite the inevitable environmental costs. Apparently our endangered species have been holding our economy back: in the words of Shane Jones to an imaginary frog, “Goodbye, Freddie”.

The latest announcement of an agreement to develop a US-New Zealand Critical Minerals Framework needs to be seen in this context. It is clear that many details need to be worked out before the specifics of any deal are announced, but the prospect of expansion of mining is real, including within the conservation estate.

As a materials scientist, I am very well aware that everything we use comes from the earth and we need to get it from somewhere. I cannot, unhypocritically, do anything other than agree that yes, mining is an industry that must exist – we are dependent on it in too many ways to mention.

However we have choices about how we access these minerals and where. As a keen tramper, it is perhaps selfish of me to say that I am opposed to any mining on conservation land. But is this not, after all, the whole purpose of declaring land reserved for the purposes of conservation?

On the other hand, I cannot say outright that we should not scale up mining in Aotearoa New Zealand. There is even an ethical position to be taken. In this country we should be able – both through the cultural value we place on our environment, and our relative wealth – to mine in more environmentally responsible ways than what many countries are able to do.

I would also acknowledge the hypocrisy in preserving our environment while relying on materials imported from elsewhere, extracted with greater environmental damage.

I cannot, unhypocritically, do anything other than agree that yes, mining is an industry that must exist – we are dependent on it in too many ways to mention. However we have choices about how we access these minerals and where.

But it would be naïve to imagine that this idealised scenario is what is playing out in current negotiations with the US around critical minerals, and certainly not given the framework of the fast-track legislation.

Our environment is our responsibility: As the Biosecurity New Zealand in-flight video says; “Look after it. Protect it.”

In addition to the choices available to us about how and where mineral extraction should occur, we have others. While the geopolitical conversation is about minerals, the technological need is for materials. We need to separate the minerals from the materials built from them. The distinction is important.

In New Zealand we have no end of innovative companies working to address these challenges. Mint Innovation and Zincovery are cleantech companies working on the primary strategy needed – the extraction and refinement of critical elements from technological waste itself.

This is the circular economy solution, and it will become ever more important as technologies mature: elements already extracted from the earth can and eventually must be reused. We only have them in finite quantities – iridium is the only element to be sufficiently rare that its occasional arrival on Earth via meteorite does increase its abundance. This is not a solution to the issue.

The second critical materials solution is to replace scarce critical elements in specific material classes by others, ideally more common minerals. One NZ example is that of the start-up Tasmanion – which aims to produce aluminium-based batteries to replace or reduce the global need for lithium.

Materials scientists have spent decades working on strategies to solve the issues of material cost, availability, and toxicity – how to replace one element with another. But it’s never really the specific elements that are important, in actual fact, but the behaviour of their electrons. It’s the electrons that conduct electricity, produce magnetism, and interact with light – and while specific elements may have electrons of the right energies for specific applications, those energy states can be changed, through material design and engineering.

We can engineer the electron energies we need by combining elements, creating chemical bonds and changing quantum energy states. In such ways, replacements and alternatives for all materials exist and more importantly, we can create them.

There is more than one connection between advanced technologies and critical minerals. It is not a one-way dependency. It can help us to move beyond critical minerals. Both the advent of quantum computing and the ongoing development of AI will revolutionise the process of materials’ design and discovery: internationally, computational materials screening is recognised as one of the key practical use cases.

Calculating the energies of electrons is the quintessential quantum simulation problem; evaluating the best combination of atoms to achieve the desired material properties is a pattern recognition problem perfectly suited to AI. Investment in self-driving labs, Microsoft’s investment in deep learning for quantum chemistry, or the demonstration that quantum computing can simulate magnetic materials in ways classical computers can not, are just a few recent steps along this pathway.

We will always need materials. But mineral extraction is only part of the puzzle, and one that will necessarily decrease in importance over time. Trump’s $12 billion bet on which specific elements will matter most in future? It is not one that I would take.

The question is only – as with the energy transition – when and how we invest in change.