Why using rare metals to clean up the planet is no cheap fix

Demand for rare metals can only increase in the move to a zero-carbon economy. The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron lays out the terrifying cost

The Rare Metals War

Guillaume Pitron (translator Biana Jacobsohn)

Scribe

WE REAP seven times as much energy from the wind and 44 times as much energy from the sun as we did a decade ago. Is this good news? Guillaume Pitron, a French journalist and documentary maker, isn’t sure.

He is neither a climate sceptic nor a fan of inaction. But as the world moves to adopt a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, Pitron worries about the costs. The figures in his book The Rare Metals War are stark. Changing the energy model means doubling the production of rare metals about every 15 years, mostly to satisfy demand for non-ferrous magnets and lithium-ion batteries. “At this rate,” writes Pitron, “over the next 30 years we… will need to mine more mineral ores than humans have extracted over the last 70,000 years.”

Before the Renaissance, humans had found uses for seven metals. During the industrial revolution, this increased to a mere dozen. Today, we have found uses for all 90-odd of them, and some are very rare. Neodymium and gallium, for instance, are found in iron ore, but there is 1200 times less neodymium and up to 2650 times less gallium than there is iron.

Zipping from an abandoned mine in the Mojave desert to the toxic lakes and cancer-afflicted areas of Baotou in China, Pitron weighs the awful price of refining the materials, ably blending investigative journalism with insights from science, politics and business.

There are two sides to Pitron’s story, woven seamlessly together. First, there is the economic story of how China worked to dominate the energy and digital transition. It now controls 95 per cent of the rare earth metals market, making between 80 and 90 per cent of the batteries for electric vehicles, says Pitron, and more than half the magnets in wind turbines and electric motors.

Then there is the ecological story of the lengths China took to succeed. Today, 10 per cent of its arable land is contaminated by heavy metals, 80 per cent of its groundwater isn’t fit for consumption and air pollution contributes to around 1.6 million deaths a year there, according to Pitron (a recent paper in The Lancet says 1.24 million deaths in China a year are attributable to air pollution – but let’s not quibble).

China freely entered into this Faustian bargain. Yet it wouldn’t have been possible had the Western world not outsourced its own industrial activities, creating a planet divided, as Pitron memorably describes it, “between the dirty and those who pretend to be clean”.

The West’s comeuppance is at hand, as its manufacturers, starved of rare metals, must take their technologies to China. It should have seen how its reliance on Chinese raw materials would quickly morph into a dependence on China for the technologies of the energy and digital transition.

By 2040, in our pursuit of ever-greater connectivity and a cleaner atmosphere, we will need to mine three times more rare earth metals, five times more tellurium, 12 times more cobalt and 16 times more lithium than we do now. China’s ecological ruination and global technological dominance advance in lockstep, unstoppably, unless the West and others start to mine for rare metals in Brazil, the US, Russia, Turkey, South Africa, Thailand and Pitron’s native France.

Better that the West attains some shred of supply security by mining some of its own land, says Pitron. At least there consumers can fight (and pay) for cleaner processes. Nothing will change if we don’t experience “the full cost of attaining our standard of happiness”, he says.