Using natural resources sustainably

Indeed, we’re not used to large scale mining in our backyards anymore. However, we need to use way less mining for renewables than we have used and still are using for coal mining.

That’s true. We should be aware of that and understand it. However, we have this problem with many aspects of the energy transition, whether it’s mines or wind turbines or power lines. We also have good ways to deal with these concerns in terms of public involvement during these processes. That’s why Europe sometimes cannot act quickly.

There has been a huge resistance against compensating people for impacts that they have encountered. Let me give an example from my country: We have closed a huge gas field in the North of the Netherlands because the extraction of the gas caused small earthquakes—without catastrophic consequences. The operator and the government made a huge sum of money from extracting the gas. If you had one percent of that revenue flow into the local communities, it might have solved all the issues. The gas field could probably still be open and play an interesting role in the current energy situation.

There are a lot of places in Africa where local communities are very disappointed with the way the Chinese operate in their countries—paying to the elite, extracting the resources, and maybe building a railway or a road here and there. I think we can act differently. We can bring long term commitment. We can bring a social and responsible type of mining there. We can help the people to earn some money from extracting resources, and at the same time also develop local communities. I know this sounds a bit idealistic and would be difficult to make happen in countries where a lot of corruption exists. But I do think this could be a unique selling point for European sourcing activities.

Kleijn Yes, I think we have to pay for more security of supply. Furthermore, the European Commission is aiming for responsibly sourced materials. And that means that there is also a price premium for materials being responsibly produced and mined, in Europe where we have environmental legislation and take care of local inhabitants, whilst materials from mined in an irresponsible manner and refined in China might not have that label.

Indeed, you could really question whether everybody should have a 60 kWh or even 100 kWh battery in his or her electric vehicle. That leads to a huge amount of material wasted because the car is just standing there for most of the time not being used. Do we really need that? Once you start integrating cars into the electricity network, it’s maybe going to be a different story. But a reduction of energy use and material consumption is always the best and cheapest and most sustainable option. Sometimes, we tend to forget about that.

I’m very optimistic about what technology can do. We already have lithium ion phosphate batteries that don’t use any cobalt. They have a little bit less capacity than other batteries but at the same time they are also safer in terms of fire hazards. However, in the end, it’s not only engineering, it’s also economics, it’s business models: The product that sells best and makes the most money is not necessarily the one that is engineered best. Therefore, it’s important for governments to set out biases. If we really want to steer our engineering capabilities, our ingenuity, our creativity in the right direction we should have something like a carbon price, for example.

…which is a good start. Including the costs of environmental degradation into the cost of materials increases the price of materials and makes the circular economy a lot more attractive. People take care of materials much better than before.

Yes, raw materials will become more expensive. But I don’t see how you could do it in any other way. The extraction of raw materials leads to a lot of environmental degradation that’s in many cases not being paid for at the moment. There is no way we are going to meet our climate goals if we don’t have carbon pricing.

We live in a throwaway society where materials are just too cheap to actually matter. Within the EU Horizon 2020 funded SUSMAPRO project we work together with the university in the German city of Pforzheim and investigate the recycling of rare earth metals, which are crucial ingredients for the energy transition. They are in the magnets of wind turbines and the motors of electric vehicles. There will be a huge need for magnets. The technology to recycle them is currently being optimized within the project—that will not be the issue. Another part of the problem is: How do you get these magnets from the electric vehicles to the recycling plants? Have you ever seen the motor of an electric car with its rotor? It consists of steel blades with holes. The magnets are often glued into the holes. So if you want to recycle these magnets, you have to dismantle all of the housing in order to get to the motor. Then you have to take out the motor, dismantle it to reach the rotor and somehow get these magnets out of the rotor that they are glued in. After that, you have a hundred euro or so of material. This is not going to fly economically.

Yes. Either you have to enforce recycling of this stuff or you need a huge price premium on recycled materials. That’s the only way this will work out. Today, the price of the material alone is not enough to steer the system in the right direction. Materials are extremely cheap, and labor is extremely expensive in countries like the Netherlands or Germany. That’s in part because environmental and social costs are not included in the price of materials. They’re often mined in places where there is not enough environmental legislation and awareness of social issues. Calculations show that if you sourced materials responsibly, something like an iPad might actually cost around 10.000 Euros.

Again, it’s about the prices of the materials. Nickel and cobalt are more valuable than lithium. However, the price for lithium has increased dramatically over the last couple of months. So maybe recycling is getting economically more attractive. Technically, recycling the main ingredients of batteries is not very difficult: You can basically discharge the battery, throw it into a shredder and then separate the materials from each other. That’s a cheap process that you can do at a large scale. And that’s the point: There’s only a business case for recycling if you can do it at a large scale.

It’s not going to be for the next 10 to 20 years that we can rely on the circular economy to provide a significant part of the inputs. So for the moment, we need to have a lot of input from primary sources—we are building up our stock of materials. But today we have to make sure that products are designed in such a way that one day we can actually get those materials back and recycle them.

That’s a dilemma, indeed. Miners are generally hesitant, because 20 years ago they were promised a large market for materials that are needed for all these green technologies. They invested in mines, but as it turned out the market took up much slower than they anticipated. There was overproduction and the prices went down. So why should they invest now?

This could be a valid strategy. Take as an example rare earth materials, which actually aren’t rare at all: Their price is extremely low if you compare it to the price of the final products in which they are being used. So the added value you can create with just investing in a few hundreds kilotons of material is huge. It’s strange that the US or the EU—huge economic powers—have just not acted upon that. Unlike Japan that has invested in specific mines and refineries like the Australian Lynas.

In Japan, the industry is very much linked to the government and therefore the government really acts upon what the industry wants. In China, a lot of these companies are basically state owned. In the US, we can see huge government involvement to secure the supply of raw materials for batteries by using legislative measures like the Defense Production Act. Here in Europe we don’t have that tradition of interfering in these industries, except for maybe France. In Germany it’s already a lot softer. If the large car manufacturers complain that they don’t have enough raw materials, the German government will act with bilateral agreements with other countries. Countries like the Netherlands or Denmark are not into that at all.

The ERMA is an organization that is at least thinking about these issues. And there’s a lot of funding going into research projects. But I don’t see that power politics in Europe that you have in Japan, in the US or in China. Although that might change in the near future since a Raw Materials Act is coming up in the EU. I’m not sure what that will entail, but it’s one step in that direction.

Indeed, circumstances are changing. In many regions solar power is the cheapest energy that you can have—even without intervention from governments. So it should prevail in a free market. But now, again, prices are rising because of raw material prices going up. I think we can solve a lot of issues. But governments have to set the right boundaries within the market economy so engineers can go in the right direction. Engineering and economics will not do that by themselves.

Photos: Barbra Verbij (2), Bernd Hartung / Focus Agency, VCG via Getty Images, Imago / ITAR-TASS, Imago / Wolfgang Maria Weber, Imago / Tim Wagner