Sean Collins

What are critical minerals, and what makes them critical?

Avishay Artsy

Critical minerals are the elements that make a lot of the electronics in our world operate. They're used in all sorts of things — from electric vehicles, to hospital equipment, to our laptops and phones. 

They're not that rare, but are only found in certain parts of the world, and China dominates most of the mining and processing of them.

Umair Irfan

Critical minerals are particularly important for making very high-efficiency versions of all those things Avishay mentioned. 

The more efficient electric motors, for instance, use very strong permanent magnets, which are often made from rare earth metals, which are a subset of critical minerals. 

Any time we try to optimize performance, we look for a specific material that does that job really, really well. But there are smaller and smaller pools of materials that can do those things. And many of those materials fall in the realm of critical minerals.

Sean Collins

Avishay, you mentioned that China leads the way on critical minerals. Has that caused any political tensions?

Avishay Artsy

We’ve seen critical minerals become very important politically. They have become a real priority for President Trump, and before him, were a priority for President Biden. Both hoped to make sure that the US can get access to these minerals in ways that don’t involve China, which obviously isn’t a US ally, be that through mining domestically or striking up partnerships or agreements with other countries.

One reason the White House has cared so much in both Democratic and Republican administrations is that from an environmental perspective, the push for electrification requires critical minerals. And then from a national security perspective, a lot of the military equipment that we use requires critical minerals as well.

The fact that China controls most of the production and refining capabilities for critical minerals means it can weaponize that access — and it has done so in the tariff war. On the other hand, as we saw with the deal this week, China’s stranglehold can also provide incentive for both sides to really negotiate and try to get some breakthroughs on tariffs.

It's funny, once you start looking for critical minerals in the news, you start seeing it everywhere. The US has a rare earth agreement with Ukraine in exchange for continuing to send Ukraine weapons and aid. The island’s critical mineral resources are part of Trump's interest in acquiring Greenland. Critical mineral reserves could also be playing a role in Trump's interest in annexing Canada. The minerals are definitely part of the Trump administration's interest in striking up a peace deal between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. 

Critical minerals are really a Zelig in US foreign policy — the issue just sort of pops up everywhere.

Sean Collins

Are there any efforts to find alternatives to the critical minerals that China holds?

Umair Irfan

We are trying to diversify the pool of materials that we can use in many applications. 

The other thing that’s happening is that we're also trying to find a wider range of sources. 

We're trying to increase mining and extraction here inside the United States, but are also looking at trying to extract critical minerals from byproducts of other mining activities like from coal ash.

And increasingly, there's activity in looking for critical minerals on the sea floor. One of the richest areas for critical minerals that we know of is this region in the Pacific Ocean called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. 

It's in this interesting legal gray area, because it's not in any country's territorial waters. And so there's this big international question about how you allocate something that belongs to no one and everyone at the same time.

The United Nations formed a new body called the International Seabed Authority, and their task is trying to come up with ways to equitably allocate these potential resources at the bottom of the ocean.

However, besides figuring out how to make access equitable, there are a couple of other problems.

One, we just don't know very much about the sea floor in general. It's not a very well-documented area. There are also big potential environmental downsides with an ecosystem that's also very fragile, and we don't really know what we're messing with down there. And extracting from the sea floor is very expensive. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone is about 18,000 feet deep, so that’s a long way down to try to operate an extraction operation. 

Developing deep sea extraction may only make sense when we get to a point where we're very, very constrained on these minerals.

All that said, a lot of countries and companies think we will get to that point where constraints get so tight that we need to start looking at these more marginal sources.

Avishay Artsy

This is more in the future, but there is even some talk that maybe asteroids are the solution.

Umair Irfan

Right.

A lot of entrepreneurs are anticipating a major step up and increase in consumption of these minerals. And the main use case for this is likely going to be further space exploration. 

The idea with mining asteroids is that getting stuff off of the ground and into space is very expensive right now, and if we want to do more stuff in space, then we need to start looking at things that are already there. 

Asteroids are believed to have a lot of these critical minerals, and if the current market value of these kinds of minerals holds, some people have estimated that the first trillionaire will be an asteroid miner. 

Sean Collins

Wow, that’s amazing. Avishay, you recently went someplace more familiar to us here on Earth to check out an effort at domestic critical mineral production. Can you talk about that?

Avishay Artsy

Yes — I went to the Salton Sea in California, which has one of the largest known lithium deposits, potentially in the world, trapped inside brine, this very salty water, that's about a mile below the surface. 

People who live around the Salton Sea have already been pumping the brine for geothermal energy for more than 40 years. What they're now looking to do is add an extra step at the end of that energy-producing process and filter out lithium from the brine. 

They're actually already selling lithium that hasn't been extracted yet, because US car manufacturers very much need that lithium to make the lithium-ion batteries that go into electric vehicles. 

California officials are very optimistic about this, and have nicknamed the area near the sea — which is called Imperial Valley — Lithium Valley. They believe there's a lot of potential there for jobs and economic development in a corner of California that's pretty poor and has a very high unemployment rate.

However, there have been some roadblocks with local activists who are concerned about unforeseen environmental consequences of the direct lithium extraction, even though this is probably the greenest and most sustainable way of getting lithium. There’s also some concern that the promised economic benefits won’t trickle down to the community, but will be mostly enjoyed by corporations.

That has slowed down the development of these lithium projects, but proponents are hoping in the next couple years to get the extraction of lithium up and running.

One of the people I interviewed for my story, Manuel Pastor, a professor at the University of Southern California, said that there's a tension here: Companies want to move at the speed of the market and the community wants to move at the speed of trust.

That’s a dynamic you see with critical mineral projects across the country, including in places like in Nevada and Arizona, where you've seen activists go out and try to stop the lithium extraction. 

The US isn’t like China; the central government there can build mines wherever it wants. Here, there are a lot of regulations that stand in the way of moving as fast as some people would like. And that creates a challenge for the US: How do we create these domestic, critical mineral supply chains?

Sean Collins

What does the future of critical minerals, and mineral extraction, look like?

Avishay Artsy

I think there's hope that if we can get lithium out of the Salton Sea, that would meet the US demands for lithium. 

But there are also a lot of rare earths that you can't find in the US, and you can mostly find in China, or a few other countries that China still controls the mining and refining of. So I think we're still going to be reliant on China for a lot of these minerals for a long time to come, unless they can find a way to somehow replace the need for some of these rare earth elements. 

One thing we will have to reckon with is there's a long history of horrible human rights abuses associated with critical mineral mining, particularly with cobalt in the Congo. Governments will need to find a way to access these minerals while also ensuring that the social costs of those minerals don't outweigh the good that they do.

Umair Irfan

Thinking about trade-offs is really important. There’s a tension that Avishay nodded at when he mentioned concerns about environmental cost. 

We're currently in the process of extracting advanced quantities of a resource right now — fossil fuels. And that tends to get overlooked. 

We are mining coal on a much larger scale than anything that's being proposed with critical minerals. We are doing hydraulic fracturing, and oil and gas well drilling on a massive scale around the world, with all the attendant environmental problems those involve.

The idea with critical mineral extraction is that for a smaller environmental cost, we can offset the larger tolls of the mining and the extraction and the consumption and the burning of fossil fuels. The other thing to remember is that when we're talking about critical minerals, once they're extracted, they don't vanish. We're not burning neodymium in magnets; when those things wear out, we can recycle them, whereas with coal and gas, you burn them up, and the byproducts are in the atmosphere and in the air.

So we may see more mining, especially in new areas. And I think politically, we'll see more and more people coming around to the idea that we do need more mining and extraction of these minerals in order to help power renewable and other emerging technologies.