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Against the backdrop of the accelerating global push towards a low carbon energy future, which as followers of ARPN well know will be mineral-intensive, the mining industry — which currently accounts for between 4% and 7% of man-made greenhouse gases according to a McKinsey & Company report — has in recent years taken significant steps towards reduce its carbon footprint.

Over the past few months, ARPN has been highlighting several industry initiatives to harness the materials science revolution to sustainably green the future — ranging from overhauling supply chain policies to ensure suppliers conform to certain environmental and social standards, to incorporating renewable power sources into their operations to offset some of the carbon costs of resource development.

As columnist Andy Home outlines in an incisive new piece for Reuters, the latest push in this realm involves the concept of carbon capture, which he posits “could allow some to move beyond neutrality to become net carbon negative.” 

Home notes that while “[t]he technology for industrial-scale carbon capture and storage is still in its infancy and largely untested,” there are certain minerals that “do it naturally,” and harnessing their potential could in fact turn miners — who “tend to be the perennial villains in the environmental debate,” into “the unlikely pioneers of large-scale and permanent carbon storage.”

Enter an Icelandic energy company — Carbfix — that has found a way to not only harness the properties of basalt rock formations which are capable of trapping the gas in a stable form by converting it into carbonate minerals, but also reduce the mineral reaction time of what otherwise “plays out in painfully slow geological time,” as Home puts it. By injecting as much carbon dioxide as possible into water before pumping it into basalt rock, the company has successfully captured more than 73,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from a local geothermal power plant and pumped it underground.

With its ISAL aluminum smelter also sitting on Icelandic basalt rock formations, global miner Rio Tinto is looking to leverage this process for its operations, entering into a cooperative agreement with Carbfix, which is currently building out onshore infrastructure for its “Coda Terminal” — the world’s first “cross-border carbon transport and storage hub” — with pilot injections to commence in 2023 and commercial operations scheduled to start mid-2025.

Meanwhile, the mineralization process harnessed by Carbfix and its partners can also be leveraged when working with magnesium oxide, as evidenced by findings made by researchers at BHP Group’s Western Australian Nickel West operations, where tailings “have been capturing around 40,000 tones per year ‘accidentally and unknowingly’” — which could make the company’s nickel — already billed as “green nickel” with a significantly lower carbon footprint, even “greener still thanks to its tailings dam,” writes Home.

While carbon capture via tailings could significantly “shift the carbon dial down towards neutrality,” industry collaboration with carbon transport and storage hubs like the Coda Terminal in Iceland may well pave the way for making mining operations net carbon negative.

Moving from Iceland and Australia to the U.S., Talon Metals Corp is studying ways to harness the carbon capture potential at its Tamarack nickel, cobalt and copper project in Minnesota, both via tailings and rock injection.

As Home argues, the significance of the carbon capture opportunity cannot be overstated, and could inject “a whole new dimension into the heated debate around new mines and metals plants” as the Biden Administration grapples with reconciling its green credentials with the acknowledged need for domestic resource production.

Thanks to the ongoing materials science revolution the future may have arrived. Welcome to Mining 2.0.

Concludes Home:

“Mining is ‘the most toxic industry in America’, according to Becky Rom, national chair of The Campaign To Save The Boundary Waters, an environmental group opposed to the Twin Metals project.

Would new projects attract such venom if they could prove that they were part of the environmental solution rather than the problem?

We may not have long to find out.

The idea of a nickel mine or aluminium smelter being net negative in terms of carbon emissions may seem far-fetched, but the reality may be coming sooner than you think.”

Canada is currently in the process of positioning itself as “a cornerstone of the North American battery supply chain,” writes James Frith in a recent piece for Bloomberg.

Pointing to two battery cell manufacturers choosing Canada as a future site of operation —UK-headquartered Britishvolt and Canadian-headquartered Stromvolt — Frith argues that “Canada is now on course to create a strong domestic battery supply chain” — which, in light of increasing EV demand in North America, could grow to “challenge the dominance of China, and it is quickly catching up with the growing industry in Europe.”

From south of the border, these developments are highly relevant in the context of an emerging North American integrated supply chain for critical minerals, with Canada and the United States being able to leverage a long history of close cooperation and trade, as well as the USMCA free trade agreement — under which “batteries produced in Canada can be sold to the EV supply chain in the U.S.”

 Both countries have in recent years explored ways to cooperate in their efforts to secure critical mineral supply chains, but in the past few months, against the backdrop of starkly rising demand scenarios for the metals and minerals underpinning the green energy transition, calls for a further deepening of cooperation between the two countries have been getting louder.  Most recently, former U.S. ambassador to Canada David Jacobson made the case for tackling “this new challenge by together establishing our place in the global supply chain.”

At ARPN, we’re all in on collaboration — however, it should not distract us from responsibly building out our own domestic mining and processing capabilities for critical minerals.  As we’ve said before:

“Let’s do it. Let’s build out an integrated North American supply chain for critical minerals where possible — but let’s also not forget that closer cooperation with our friends and allies AND strengthening domestic resource development should not be considered mutually exclusive strategies.”

The toilet paper shortage of 2020 may be a thing of the past – or perhaps an annual event… –  but roughly a year and half since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, consumers continue to feel the pinch of supply chain challenges across all industry sectors.  For ARPN, with due appreciation of the dislocations and the (…) more

In early October, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars announced the release of a new report entitled “The Mosaic Approach: a Multidimensional Strategy for Strengthening America’s Critical Minerals Supply Chain.”  According to Duncan Wood, Vice President of Strategy and New Initiatives at the Wilson Center and one of the report’s co-authors, “[the] paper reflects the dialogue sustained (…) more

As the global push towards a carbon neutral future accelerates, it is also becoming increasingly clear that the green energy shift will be mineral intensive, as a score of critical metals and minerals underpin 21st Century green energy technology. It’s not too much to say that shifting green depends on a revolution in materials science. (…) more

Against the backdrop of a new government having been elected in Canada, former U.S. ambassador to Canada David Jacobson makes the case for the United States and Canada to deepen cooperation in the realm of critical mineral resources in a recent piece for the Globe and Mail. Highlighting the longstanding “long and productive partnership on everything (…) more

As the electrification of the global vehicle fleet continues to gain steam, Ford Motor Co.’s president and CEO Jim Farley recently made some comments during a live-streamed interview with the director of Detroit Homecoming VIII Mary Kramer that should give policy makers some food for thought. Expressing his concerns about the affordability of electric vehicles (…) more

As lawmakers on Capitol Hill are scrambling to finalize major federal spending legislation set to include several key provisions relating to natural resources, a recent Wall Street Journal piece on wind power underscores the urgency of our nation’s looming raw material shortfalls. Against the backdrop of surging demand in the context of the green energy transition, wind (…) more

Against the backdrop of the accelerating battery arms race, and a recent growing realization that our nation has become over-reliant on critical mineral imports from adversary nations, the U.S. House of Representatives Natural Resources committee has added language to the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation spending package last week that could throw a serious wrench into (…) more

Shane Lasley has done it again.  Known to followers of ARPN for his stellar reporting on critical mineral resource issues from an Alaskan perspective, his Metal Tech News project has published what may just be the most comprehensive North American primer on critical minerals: Critical Minerals Alliances is a magazine covering more than twenty metals and minerals critical to North American (…) more