Mining for renewable tech inflicts huge damage. Is there a solution? todayheadline

Frigid, remote and mostly uninhabited, Greenland isn’t a place that usually attracts much attention. But the autonomous Danish territory has been making headlines this year, with US President Donald Trump bellowing about acquiring it. Why is he interested in such an unassuming place? Perhaps there’s a clue in the recent economic deal he cut with Ukraine and his talk of making Canada the 51st state. Those nations all hold vast amounts of what may be the 21st century’s most important natural resources: metals. 

The world is shifting, however belatedly, away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy. That is good news for the climate, but there’s a catch. Manufacturing all the wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and electric cars we need for a renewable-powered future – as well as all the digital electronics we are already so dependent on – will require huge amounts of lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, rare earth elements and other minerals. As a result, demand for this set of what are often called “critical minerals” is soaring.   

Yet, despite what you may have heard, there is no shortage of these materials. “The Earth has everything we need,” says Simon Jowitt, Nevada’s state geologist. “Getting them out of the ground is the challenge.” Finding commercial-scale deposits and mining them profitably is difficult – and often inflicts enormous damage on people and the planet. Nevertheless, scientists are rising to this challenge. They may not be able to help with geopolitical wrangling over resources, but with innovative technologies and an environmental mindset, they are finding cleaner, more sustainable ways to obtain the metals we need to power the new Mineral Age.   

As I discovered while researching my book, Power Metal, the market for critical minerals is gargantuan: hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth will be needed by 2040. For instance, the International Energy Agency estimates that by 2050, demand for cobalt from the makers of electric vehicles alone will nearly quadruple. Their hunger for nickel will be nine times what it was last year, and for lithium it will be almost 12 times. Or take copper: over the many centuries in which humans have mined this metal, we have pulled 700 million tonnes of it out of the ground. To meet the projected demand, we will need to do the same again within the next two decades.   

Today, the world relies on surprisingly few sources for most of the critical minerals we use. Chile is the biggest producer of copper, providing a quarter of the total supply. It also sits atop what is probably the world’s biggest deposit of lithium, a key ingredient in the batteries for electric vehicles and electronic gadgets. Indonesia has rapidly ramped up mining in recent years and now produces nearly 60 per cent of all nickel, another battery metal. And some three quarters of the world’s cobalt – yet another metal used in batteries – comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

Rare earth metals aplenty

Then there are rare earths, a set of 17 obscure elements with tongue-twisting names like yttrium and praseodymium, which are used for electric car motors, wind turbines and many medical and military technologies. Despite their name, they aren’t rare at all. They can be found mixed in low concentrations with other minerals all over the world. Nevertheless, digging them up and separating them out is difficult and expensive. There are relatively few places where rare earths are sufficiently concentrated to make mining them feasible. Greenland is one, and there has been very little mining there to date. China is another. It holds perhaps the single largest deposit of the metals, at the Bayan Obo complex, north-west of Beijing, and it has capitalised on this natural bounty to become by far the world’s top rare-earths miner, digging up nearly 70 per cent of the global supply.   

Given the soaring demand, it is no surprise that there is a planet-wide scramble under way to find more of these metals. In fact, some people are even looking beyond our planet. Starry-eyed entrepreneurs are eyeing the million or more asteroids orbiting the sun, some of which are jam-packed with metals. Google co-founder Larry Page and Avatar film-maker James Cameron invested in a couple of asteroid-mining start-ups back in the 2010s, both of which fizzled out. Now, a handful of new enterprises are taking a shot.   

Mining asteroids

Leading the pack is California-based AstroForge, which launched an uncrewed asteroid explorer earlier this year. The craft disappeared into the void before reaching its target, however. That underscores just how difficult the whole project is. You need to send a craft millions of kilometres into space, land it on an asteroid, have it extract metals and then bring them back – all at a cost below what you can get from selling those metals. Still, this isn’t a complete pipe dream. The Japanese and US space agencies have managed to extract material from asteroids in recent years. The boom in private space companies like SpaceX has made it easier and cheaper than ever to launch a lander. And new research suggests a slightly more feasible possibility: commercial quantities of platinum could be obtained by mining craters on the moon created by metallic asteroid impacts.  

There is another potential non-terrestrial source a little closer to home: the bottom of the ocean. Parts of the seabed are carpeted with fist-sized rocks, known as polymetallic nodules, which contain what could be hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of nickel, cobalt, manganese and other critical minerals. Companies and governments have long wanted to harvest them. Technology isn’t the problem here – in recent years, underwater nodule-mining robots have been successfully trialled on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. The main obstacle is that, under international law, any commercial-scale sea mining requires permission from the UN-affiliated International Seabed Authority (ISA). The ISA has so far said no to all comers, largely because of fears of environmental damage. Those fears are shared by at least 33 countries, as well as hundreds of scientists, companies and organisations, all of which have called for a moratorium or outright ban on sea mining.  

Things may change very soon, however. The US never signed the treaty that established the ISA, and Trump has called for the US to develop deep-sea mining capabilities. Earlier this year, The Metals Company essentially sidestepped the ISA and applied to the US government for a license to start industrial-scale mining. The application is currently under review, but the move has sparked outrage. “There is no provision in international law for what they are proposing,” says Duncan Currie, a legal advisor at the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. “It’s just the US saying: ‘We’ll do what we want.’”   

Proponents of deep-sea mining argue that it will be less harmful than the terrestrial version. Although that is contested, it is undeniable that mining and processing metals on land often wreaks havoc. Mines destroy landscapes, devour resources and excrete waste on a colossal scale. Around 35 kilograms of ore must be wrested out of the ground to get the metals required to build a single iPhone. In just one area of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, more than 85 square kilometres of rainforest – the equivalent of 12,000 football pitches – has been wiped out since 2000 to make way for nickel mines and related infrastructure. In Chile’s arid north, copper and lithium mining is straining water supplies, imperilling rare animals and millennia-old Indigenous communities. Chemical run-off and toxic waste from mines and refineries often foul the nearby air and water. Almost half the rivers in the western US have been polluted in this way, and those Indonesian nickel mines emit a carcinogenic toxin ​that has seeped into drinking water in some areas.   

In China, rare earth mining and refining has turned the area around Bayan Obo into one of the most polluted places on Earth. Baotou, the region’s main city, used to be surrounded by fields of watermelons, aubergines (eggplants) and tomatoes. Now things are very different. “These days, the soil can no longer support crops, the livestock has died off,” writes Aaron Perzanowski, a law professor at the University of Michigan in his book The Right to Repair. He also reports that local people are experiencing a range of illnesses that seem to be connected with the mining.   

In some parts of the world, mining is carried out by enslaved people and children. According to a US Department of Labor report, there is evidence of forced labour in the supply chains of Indonesian nickel and Chinese aluminium and silicon, as well as child labour in the supply chain of South Korean indium. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, thousands of children work in cobalt mines under often brutal conditions. In Bolivia, adolescents dig for silver, a key ingredient in solar panels. “Children as young as age 13 work inside mines, where they haul heavy loads of ore, work in narrow tunnels at risk of collapse, are in close proximity to explosives, inhale toxic fumes and dust, and generally lack protective equipment,” notes the report.   

China in command

There is also a major geopolitical concern that can be summed up in a single word: China. By plundering its own huge reserves and aggressively investing in mining operations around the world, the country has come to dominate the supply chain for critical minerals. Regardless of where minerals are dug up, most will be sent to China for refining and processing. The country has more than half the world’s refining capacity for lithium, cobalt and graphite (another battery ingredient), while for rare earths, the figure hovers at around 90 per cent. All of which gives China not only a commanding economic position, but powerful political leverage, which it isn’t shy about using. Earlier this year, for example, China restricted exports of rare earths and other metals in response to Trump’s trade tariffs.  

Although science can’t help much with international relations or trade negotiations, researchers are making good progress in addressing the technical and environmental issues.  

Some are looking at ways to clean up mining. A US team, for example, has found that pumping carbon dioxide into rocks deep underground releases nickel and cobalt, with the potential to make extraction carbon negative. Another group in China is developing an approach called electrokinetic mining, which uses electric currents to shake rare earths loose from soils, reducing the need for toxic chemicals. And several research groups are trialling techniques to extract lithium directly from underground brines, reducing the huge amount of water that is currently used. Improvements are also coming in refining critical minerals – the stage of the production process that generates the most greenhouse gases.

What could have an even greater impact than these innovations, though, is a growing movement to reduce, reuse and recycle. There are vast quantities of critical minerals hidden in the hundreds of billions of tonnes of mining waste all over the world – elements that weren’t in demand when the original mines were operating, or that were too difficult to extract with the technology of the time. Now, researchers are looking at ways to obtain resources from that trash. “Half the problem is already solved: you’ve got the metals above ground,” says Scott Dunbar, professor of mining engineering at the University of British Columbia in Canada.   

One approach is to use plants called hyperaccumulators that suck up tiny specks of metals through their roots and concentrate them in their sap, stems or leaves. Researchers in the UK, Australia and Albania are experimenting with a range of these, putting them to work pulling metals out of mining waste or polluted soil. If plant-based metal harvesting, known as phytomining, can be made to work at scale, it could offer a double win: cleaning up poisoned ground while simultaneously providing new supplies of critical minerals.   

Reduce, reuse and recycle

A technique devised by scientists at the University of Missouri promises similar benefits. They have figured out a way to use a compound made from ground-up shrimp shells to draw neodymium – one of the most in-demand rare earth elements – from iron mine waste. Meanwhile, in West Virginia, researchers have found that they can extract rare earths from coal mine run-off by lowering the acidity of the water. Mining giant Freeport-McMoRan is trying to pull copper out of waste rock at one of its Arizona mines. And in Europe, several companies are extracting manganese and rare earths from tailings – leftover materials – at old mines.   

Our discarded electronic gadgets are also full of recyclable metals, yet less than a quarter of the 62 million tonnes that people throw out each year is properly recycled. That is a colossal waste of energy and leads to more greenhouse gas production, since recycling metals incurs a far lower greenhouse gas cost than mining fresh ones. It is also a waste of money because these products contain more than $62 billion worth of metals. One reason why so few old electronics get recycled is that sorting and separating out all their component metals and other materials is difficult and costly. Advances in technologies like X-ray fluorescence sorting, which can identify elements in e-waste, and AI-driven sorting systems could help. So could more efficient methods of recovering metals from used batteries, using techniques like microwaves to extract lithium, selective leaching and plasma arc recycling. 

Advances in the design of products made from critical minerals could have huge effects too. For example, most electric vehicle batteries in use today are made of cobalt and nickel, but so-called LFP batteries replace those metals with iron and phosphate – materials that are much more abundant and have less troublesome supply chains. LFP batteries are rapidly gaining market share, particularly in China.  

From the Stone Age onwards, humanity has relied on a succession of different materials to achieve progress. One way or another, we will get our hands on the metals we need to power our renewable future. The challenge is to make sure we don’t trash the planet in the process.