The Rare Metals War

Guillaume Pitron

The biggest quantity of rare earths is extracted from the bowels of Jiangxi, in the heart of tropical China, which is where our story begins.

Wang Jing knows this better than anyone.. he spent years working at this illegal mine concealed by a copse of eucalyptus trees. He tells me how he would chip away at red-tinted rock and crush prodigious rubble aggregates alongside other miners, both men and women...

‘It’s poison,’ says Wang Jing. ‘The chemicals used for refining the minerals were poured straight into the ground.’ The sulphuric and hydrochloric acids would pollute the nearby stream to the point that ‘it was impossible for any plant to grow’. Because the closest housing lies far from the Yaxi mountains, there was no visible impact on residents. But elsewhere, housing was much closer, he said. The 10,000 or so mines spread across China have played a big role in destroying the country’s environment. 20 Pollution damage by the coal-mining industry is well documented. But barely reported is the fact that mining rare metals also produces pollution, and to such an extent that China has stopped counting contamination events..

Latin America has already started to experience similar problems with lithium mining — a white metal lying below the salt flats of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentine. It is considered critical by the US, and demand is expected to soar on the back of the electric car boom that has jacked up its global production. Naturally, Argentina has its sights set on becoming the giant of lithium, and between now and 2025 the country has the capacity to produce up to 165,000 tonnes a year, or 45 per cent of global demand, provided it can get foreign investors on board.

In May 2017, all the rare metal exploration, mining, and refining companies operating in Latin America met on the banks of Rio Plata near Buenos Aires for the Arminera international mining trade fair...

[S]ome thirty Greenpeace activists had blocked the entrance to the trade fair, brandishing banners calling out the lies of the mining industry. ‘Everything they say is pure greenwashing,’ said one of its members, Gonzalo Strano. ‘There’s no such thing as sustainable mining. Not only does it dig out the ground by definition, it uses chemicals and massive amounts of water, which is a problem.’...

In 2006, some sixty companies producing indium — a rare metal used in the manufacture of certain solar-panel technologies — released tonnes of chemicals into the Xiang River in Hunan, jeopardising the meridional province’s drinking water and the health of its residents. In 2011, journalists reported on the damage to the ecosystems of the Ting River in the seaside province of Fujian, due to the operation of a mine rich in gallium — an up-and-coming metal for the manufacture of energy-efficient light bulbs. And in Ganzhou, where I landed, the local press recently reported that the toxic waste dumps created by a mining company producing tungsten — a critical metal for wind-turbine blades — had obstructed and polluted many tributaries of the Yangtze River...

A recent report by the Blacksmith Institute identifies the mining industry as the second-most-polluting industry in the world, behind lead-battery recycling, and ahead of the dye industry, industrial dumpsites, and tanneries. It has moved up one rung since the 2013 rankings, in which the much-maligned petrochemical industry doesn’t even crack the top ten. Given China’s dominant role in the global supply of rare metals, we cannot accurately assess the progress made in combating global warming without properly accounting for Beijing’s ecological performance. Which is catastrophic, to say the least...

[Another] party pooper was John Petersen, a Texan lawyer with an extensive career in the electric battery industry. Based on number crunching, countless academic papers, and his own research, Peterson reached an astonishing conclusion. Rewind to 2012, when researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) compared the carbon impact of a conventional fuel-driven car against that of an electric car. Their first finding was that the production of the supposedly more energy-efficient electric car requires far more energy than the production of the conventional car. This is mostly on account of the electric car’s very heavy lithium-ion battery. The battery of prominent US company Tesla’s Model S, for instance, weighs in at 544 kilograms, or 25 per cent of the car’s weight...

Then there’s the composition of the lithium-ion battery: 80 per cent nickel, 15 per cent cobalt, 5 per cent aluminium, as well as lithium, copper, manganese, steel, and graphite. By now, we are familiar with the conditions in which these minerals are extracted in China, Kazakhstan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But we also need to consider how these minerals are refined, not to mention the logistics of their transportation and assembly. The UCLA researchers reached the conclusion that industrialising electric vehicles is three to four times more energy-intensive than industrialising conventional cars.

[Not requiring petrol] brings down its carbon dioxide emissions to 32 tonnes from factory to scrapyard, compared with almost double that for a conventional vehicle.. [but] a battery that is powerful enough to drive a vehicle for 300 kilometres emits twice as much carbon as production-phase emissions — a figure we can then triple for batteries with a 500-kilometre range. Therefore, over its entire lifecycle, an electric car may produce as much as three-quarters of the carbon emissions produced by a petrol car. And the more powerful the electric cars are, the more energy they need for their production, potentially increasing greenhouse gases... Petersen’s conclusion? ‘Electric vehicles may be technically possible, but their production will never be environmentally sustainable'...

The 2016 report by the French Environment & Energy Management Agency (ADEME) finds: ‘the energy consumption of an electric vehicle over its entire lifecycle is, on the whole, similar to that of a diesel vehicle.’ The report also finds that its environmental impact is ‘on a par with [that of] the petrol car’...

This leaves us with a list of unanswered questions. Is the replacement impact of EV batteries, which have a short lifespan, being taken into account? Do we know the precise ecological cost of all the electronics and connected components packed into these electric vehicles? What about the environmental impact of recycling these mostly still-new vehicles in the future? And how much energy will it take to build the necessary electric grids and plants to meet these new needs?

Ultimately, as was quietly admitted to me by a US rare metals expert in Toronto that day, ‘No one in the green-energy business is going to communicate on these points. Besides, don’t we all want to believe that we’re making things better rather than making things worse?’

[Up]