Rare Metals War and Energy Transition & Digitization

Dutch video, English language.

In the Tegenlicht special ‘The Rare Metals War’, Guillaume Pitron warns about the dark side of the energy transition and digitalization. Pitron is a French journalist and author of the book The Rare Metals War: the dark side of clean energy and digital technologies. Rare metals are essential for the production of electric vehicles, fighter jets, wind turbines and solar panels, as well as our smartphones, computers, tablets and other everyday devices. But most people actually know very little about how they are extracted, or the environmental and geopolitical costs of doing so.

Breaking away from fossil fuels threatens to create a new dependency. China is currently by far the largest player in the battle for the raw materials of the future. Europe and the United States are largely dependent on the supply and processing of these raw materials from China. And that is dangerous, because just like oil and gas, raw materials can be used as a political weapon. The first signs of this are already visible, with the Brabant company ASML playing a leading role. To gain this geopolitical advantage, China has had to sacrifice a large part of its environment, because mining and refining these raw materials is anything but clean. Can Europe do things differently and can this dependence still be reduced? Guillaume Pitron presents several solutions in this Tegenlicht.

China Controls 90% of the World’s Rare Earths Production

https://twitter.com/AZmilitary1/status/1533977412907720705?s=20&t=Bywkw-pR2He6imwIDWYTVw

Perhaps that the folks in Brussels, keen on seeing their renewable energy transition pet project succeed, scratch their head, before they launch their next self-defeating sanction package #312.

Rare Earths Infographic

[source]
Rare earths are an essential ingredient for many modern achievements, like cell phones, computers and wind turbines. There are signs that supplies of these rare earths are depleting rapidly, see infographic (click picture below (twice) to enlarge:)

[globalwarmingisreal.com]
[geology.com]

DoE Allocates $120M To Avert Critical Materials Shortage

[source]
The US Department of Energy allocated $120 million to make sure near-term supply of five rare earth metals, dysprosium, terbium, europium, neodymium and yttrium, will be ensured. These materials are essential components of advanced wind turbines, solar cells as well as electric vehicles and energy efficient lighting. For this purpose a new Energy Innovation Hub is launched, lead by the Ames Laboratory in Iowa, called the Critical Materials Institute and modelled after the successful Bioenergy Research Centers, founded under president Bush. DoE: “The new Hub will focus on technologies that will enable us to make better use of the materials we have access to as well as eliminate the need for materials that are subject to supply disruptions“.

[cleantechnica.com]
[wikipedia] – rare earth elements

Seabed mud contains large quatities of rare earths

Here is another recent discovery concerning rare earths. It turns out that those elements are so abundant on the bottom of the ocean that the mud covering just one square kilometre of ocean floor in the Pacific Ocean could supply one-fifth of the current annual world consumption, according to a new study published online Sunday in Nature Geoscience.
[CBCNews]

Brasil has rare earths in abundance

[source]
Currently China produces 95% of the so-called rare earths. In that light the recent discovery of large deposits of rare earths in Brazil is welcome news for high-tech industrial consumers of these materials. Recent Chinese restrictions on the export of rare earth minerals has made this discovery even more valuable. The deposits were discovered by Vale, the world’s largest iron ore mining company.

[wsj]
[brazilportal]