battery tech

In a recent piece for Reuters, columnist Andy Home unpacks the U.S. Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure package.   While the bill has yet to make it through the U.S. House of Representatives and a likely conference committee, it is worth taking a look at what its passage could mean for the critical minerals sector.

According to Home, the $1 trillion package, as passed by the Senate, “is undoubtedly good news for industrial metals,” as more funding for highway and railway systems as well as power grid upgrades “will mean more demand for steel, copper, and aluminium [as they say in the UK].”

He adds that “when it comes to battery metals and critical minerals, the bipartisan bill is as much about boosting domestic supply as demand,” and its provisions mark a “broader investment drive across the full length of the metallic supply chain.”

Home highlights the following provisions:

• Building on the Department of Energy’s R&D efforts across the REE spectrum ranging form primary processing to recycling, the bill “hardens the commitment with a $140 million grant to build a facility ‘to demonstrate the commercial feasibility of a full-scale integrated rare earth element extraction and separation facility and refinery’” in the context of a public-private partnership.
• The bill also earmarks $100 million annually for through 2024 for critical mineral development, processing and recycling, with a minimum of 30% designated for recycling projects.
• U.S.-based projects will be prioritized and no project may export to a “foreign entity of concern.”
• While the bill only allocates $7.5 billion for EV battery charging, Home says “the direction of electric travel is clear,” with President Biden having signed his executive order stipulating that 50% of all domestic new vehicle sales by 2030 should be EV battery powered.
• To address rising demand for battery tech metals, the bill designates $3 billion for processing, and an additional $3billion for battery manufacturing projects.
• Grants in this context will be only be awarded to applicants demonstrating “U.S. ownership, North American intellectual property rights and a commitment not to ‘use battery material supplied by or originating from a foreign entity of concern.’”
• Acknowledging that Federal permitting process has served as “an impediment to mineral production and the mineral security of the United States,” the bill introduces performance metrics for approving critical mineral mines.

Home sees a challenge in fast-tracking Federal permitting in light of the “growing push-back against ‘dirty’ mining.”  However, he sees an opportunity to bridge this “green-green divide” in new efforts by mining companies to re-think mine “waste,” — and essentially harness gateway/co-product metal relationships.

He points to Rio Tinto’s Scandium operations in Quebec, Canada, as an example:

“Companies such as Rio Tinto are now going back to re-examine what they’ve been throwing away. In the case of the company’s Canadian titanium business, they found scandium, designated a critical mineral by both the United States and Europe.

A relatively modest $6 million investment will produce three tonnes per year of scandium oxide – around 20% of the global market – without the need for any additional mining.”

As Home points out, the infrastructure bill embraces the “whole-concept” or “total mining” concept, instructing USGS to comprehensively survey national minerals resources, “using a whole ore body approach rather than a single commodity approach, to emphasize all of the recoverable critical minerals in a given surface or subsurface deposit”.

Home sees provisions calling for USGS to “map and collect data for areas containing mine waste to increase understanding of above-ground critical mineral resources in previously disturbed areas,” as the ones that can help reconcile the “green-green” issue, because “building new mines will remain a headache for critical minerals planners everywhere so going back to the stuff already mined makes a lot of sense.”

While changes to the bill must be reasonably expected in the coming weeks, the general thrust is clear, and it is encouraging to see that lawmakers are acknowledging and addressing the importance of critical minerals and the urgency of associated supply chain challenges.

Friends of ARPN will know that “much of our work is grounded in a conviction that the Technology Age is driven by a revolution in materials science – a rapidly accelerating effort that is unlocking the potential of scores of metals and minerals long known but seldom utilized in our tools and technologies.”

In this context we have long argued that while it is essential to focus on the metals and minerals that are driving headlines, such as the Rare Earths and battery tech metals like Lithium, Cobalt, Nickel, Manganese and Graphite, we must not forget about the inter-relationship between what we have been calling “gateway metals” and their “co-products.”

Gateway metals – which include mainstay metals like Copper, Aluminum, Nickel, Tin, and Zinc, are not only critical to manufacturing in their own right, but “unlock” tech metals increasingly indispensable to innovation and development. For too long, these “unlocked” tech metals were dubbed “by-products,” or even “minor metals” — labels that don’t do these materials and their increasingly broad applications justice.

Courtesy of the ongoing materials science revolution, both groups of metals and minerals are increasingly becoming the building blocks of 21st Century technology, which is why we believe the “by-products” should be referred to as “co-products.” Meanwhile, many of them are fraught with similar dependency issues like the news-grabbing Rare Earths or battery tech metals.

As such, we were pleased to see that the DoD-led chapter of the White House’s 100-Day Supply Chain Report not only draws attention to this issue complex, but also appears to have embraced the “co-product” label – using it interchangeably with the term “byproduct.”

Under the header “Byproduct and Coproduction Dependency,” the DoD chapter argues that “[b]yproduct production of strategic and critical materials can add significant value to an existing production operation and improve the business case for a nascent producer. However, some strategic and critical materials are derived exclusively from byproduct production, which means a fairly small market depends on the prevailing dynamics of a separate but much larger commodity market. (…) In some cases the concentration of supply can be so extreme that U.S. or global production is concentrated in a single source. (…) More generally, in DoD modeling of strategic and critical materials under national emergency conditions, a domestic sole-source provider exists for 29 of the 53 unclassified shortfall materials, and 18 materials have no domestic production at all.”

This is a significant development, because unlike the recently released Canadian government’s official critical minerals list, the U.S. Government’s List of 35, released in 2018, did not acknowledge the connection between primary mining materials and their critical-co-products.

With the gateway/co-product challenge finding its way into public discourse by way of the 100-Day Supply Chain report, there is hope that the drafters of a forthcoming updated U.S. Government Critical Minerals List will acknowledge the importance of Gateway Metals — and that policy makers will factor this issue complex into the “all of the above” approach. As yesterday’s “minor metals” become major materials in tech applications, America’s mineral resource security may well hinge on encouraging innovative sources of supply.

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