Industry problems with critical minerals are complex. While significant progress has been made in transitioning to clean energy sources like wind and solar, major challenges remain, such as finding alternatives for non-electrifiable sectors and improving energy storage for intermittent renewables.5 Critical minerals including base metals, energy transition metals, and rare earth elements face issues like scarcity, market volatility, and environmental impacts due to extraction and processing. The humanitarian impacts are significant, as mining often involves labor exploitation, including child and forced labor, particularly in underdeveloped countries. China’sdominance in the extraction and refining of these materials, coupled with geopolitical tensions and regulatory uncertainties, further complicates the secure and ethical sourcing of critical minerals. Such factors contribute to a highly volatile market. Material substitution, recycling, and diversifying supply chains are being explored to address these challenges. The goal is to ensure a sustainable supply of critical minerals for the energy transition.
Experts are accelerating materials discovery through “megalibraries, microchips designed to simultaneously test millions of positionally encoded materials, generating vast amounts of data on material properties.”5 Such an approach is “Materials Acceleration Platforms” (MAPs) – autonomous laboratories that integrate robotic high-throughput synthesis, characterization, data analytics, and advanced simulations to realize materials development at least 10 times faster than conventional methods.6 Early implementations like AMANDA for photovoltaics and BIG-MAP for batteries have already demonstrated key discoveries.6 MAPs can simulate and test rare earth minerals, mitigating scarcity challenges before large-scale extraction. They accelerate discovering eco-friendly alternatives, improve extraction and recycling processes, and enable more efficient reuse. This reduces environmental impact and also diversifies critical mineral sourcing geography..
In March of 2024, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers published a study by a new method to safely extract gold and platinum group metals from electronic waste and low-grade ore, using significantly less energy and fewer chemicals than current methods.1,2 The study states that use in electronics constitutes 8% of the gold’s total demand, but 90% of gold used yearly in electronics is sent to landfills.1,2 Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, this process leverages electrochemical liquid-liquid extraction to selectively pull valuable metals from dissolved electronic waste.1,2 The method, led by Professor Xiao Su and postdoctoral researcher Stephen Cotty, is economically efficient, claimed to run at a cost two orders of magnitude lower than existing industrial processes.1,2 The technique continuously recycles the chemical solutions it uses and selectively extracts high-purity precious metals, such as gold, palladium, platinum, and iridium, while minimizing waste. 1,2
Enabling cross-disciplinary collaboration between physics, chemistry, materials science, engineering, and computer science is also crucial, as emphasized by scientists at Georgia Tech.3 The school is a renowned technological research institution where academics are working to build an “Energy Hub … as a go-to location for modern energy companies.”4 Chad Mirkin, director of the Northwestern University International Institute for Nanotechnology and other experts in critical minerals claim that innovative education models allowing students to customize their skill development could produce a new breed of scientist-engineer-entrepreneurs better equipped to drive this transition.5 They also emphasize the importance of mobility for scientists—systems should more readily support them in moving between R&D, commercialization, and manufacture.5
These catalysts for diverse collaboration along with technological advances like new critical mineral recycling technology and MAPs simulations methods can contribute to a more sustainable and efficient critical minerals journey by enhancing R&D and extraction processes. Together, they reduce the need for new, resource intensive exploration and mining through more efficient recycling, mitigate scarcity challenges, and decrease environmental impacts. Increased recycling abilities and overall resource conservation of critical minerals also diversify sourcing. While 2022 saw $1.7 trillion invested in clean energy (outpacing fossil), far more is needed to drive the impacts of sustainable critical mineral implementation.5 Achieving the needed acceleration requires considerable investment from industry, governments, academia, and private foundations. We will cover these areas of current, emerging, and additionally required investment as they relate to critical minerals in our next writing. Thanks for reading.
REFERENCES
(2)Cotty, S. R.; Faniyan, A.; Elbert, J.; Su, X. Redox-Mediated Electrochemical Liquid–Liquid Extraction for Selective Metal Recovery. Nat. Chem. Eng. 2024, 1 (4), 281–292. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44286-024-00049-x.
(3)Castillo, R.; Purdy, C. China’s Role in Supplying Critical Minerals for the Global Energy Transition; Brookings Institution, 2022. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/LTRC_ChinaSupplyChain.pdf.
(4)Energy Materials: Driving the Clean Energy Transition | News Center. http://news.gatech.edu/news/2024/02/21/energy-materials-driving-clean-energy-transition
(5)Mirkin, C. A.; Sargent, E. H.; Schrag, D. P. Energy Transition Needs New Materials. Science 2024, 384 (6697), 713–713. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq3799.
(6)Stier, S. The successful transition to renewables needs a revolution in materials research. Advanced Science News. https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/the-successful-transition-to-renewables-needs-a-revolution-in-materials-research/