Department of Energy

Earlier this week, the Department of Energy hosted a social media web event, or “Hangout,” to provide further details on its latest research effort to “address supply disruptions for rare earths and other critical materials” at Ames Laboratory.

During the event, David Sandalow, DoE’s Assistant Secretary for Policy and International Affairs, and Alex King, the new director of the Critical Materials Hub and current director of the Ames Lab, shared details on the objectives and strategy of the new project and answered questions from the audience on Twitter and Facebook. They were joined by Steven Duclos from GE Global Research representing the industry partners with whom the research center will cooperate closely.

Some of the key points brought up during the events were the following:

• DoE has acknowledged the challenges associated with China’s near total supply monopoly when it comes to Rare Earths, and the new Hub is the result of a new and more systematic approach to this issue.
• The Hub will strive to find solutions for the entire life cycle of critical materials – meaning that it will look for points in a material’s life cycle that is amenable to a “nudge” from new technology and new science.
• The biggest research priorities for the new center are:
  • To make mining viable, no matter what the cost profile looks like to create greater diversity of supply.
  • Finding substitutes
  • Reduce demand by increasing efficiency by which we use REEs in the manufacturing and recycling processes
  • Economic analysis and forecasting, as identifying what will become critical will give head-start to enable other parts of strategy to take hold and help avoid price spikes.
• While ocean bed mining is something to watch, near-term efforts should focus on land masses.
• Creating “alternative” materials remains challenging, as in order to avoid redesigns in manufacturing processes you want exactly the same properties without using the same materials.
• “Recycling” must also focus on the early stages of the manufacturing process, as many byproducts are not efficiently used (for more on byproducts see our Gateway Metals study).

According to Alex King, “there are materials where no matter how much money [you have] you might not be able to buy what you need.”

You can watch the full event on DoE’s Youtube channel.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) is stepping up its research efforts in the field of critical and strategic materials. As announced on January 9, the Department is funding the establishment of an “Energy Innovation Hub” through Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa.

Named the Critical Materials Institute (CMI), the new research center will “bring together the best and brightest research minds from universities, national laboratories and the private sector to find innovative technology solutions that will help us avoid a supply shortage that would threaten our clean energy industry as well as our security interests.”

CMI will be directed by Ames Laboratory Director Alex King and will strive to address the issues of domestic supply shortages of Rare Earths and other materials deemed critical by DoE in its 2011 Critical Materials Strategy. The goal of the new research hub is to leverage “existing research programs into a larger coordinated effort designed to eliminate materials criticality as an impediment to the commercialization of clean energy technologies.”

The launch of the Critical Materials Institute holds much promise, especially as it will also draw from research partners from reputable schools, as well as industry labs. Hopefully, the effort will be broadened to a multi-agency approach that ultimately reconciles the definitional dissonances of what constitutes critical and strategic materials throughout U.S. government – dissonances that hamper sound and coherent policymaking, and needlessly leave U.S. manufacturers vulnerable to mineral supply disruptions.

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A high-ranking U.S. Department of Energy official is making the link between American technological progress and green energy to resource development. Assistant Secretary of Energy for Policy and International Affairs David Sandalow told a U.S. Senate subcommittee last week that the U.S. must find ways to mitigate supply risk associated foreign dependence on rare earths [...]

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