The head of the Swedish state-owned mining company LKAB, Jan Moström, said when presenting the find that it could take “several years” to explore the deposit of over a million tons of rare earth elements and the conditions to mine it “profitably and sustainably”. . That also depends on the permits, he said at the press conference in the mining town of Kiruna.
They are aware of the land use challenges and impacts associated with mine development. According to Moström, an application for an environmental assessment can only be made once these have been analysed. Either way, the find would become an “important building block in the manufacture of the critical raw materials that are absolutely critical to the green transition.”
Rare earths are used in many technological areas, such as screens, alloys in batteries, magnets, glasses and lighting. Above all, however, they are considered drivers of the energy transition: A hybrid vehicle contains up to twelve kilograms of rare earths, and the permanent magnets of wind turbines could even need up to two tons of rare earths, writes the German Federal Environment Agency in a report.
Rare Earths (SE)
The rare earth elements include the elements cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, promethium, samarium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, lutetium and the chemically similar element yttrium.
Important for the energy transition, bad for the environment?
However, the mining of rare earths is controversial because of its ecological consequences. Because the metals are mined in huge open pits that pollute the environment and can affect entire ecosystems. If not regulated properly, quarrying could create ponds filled with acids, heavy metals and radioactive material that could seep into groundwater, according to the US website ScienceNews.
Natural occurrences of the rare earths are limited and difficult to reach because they are often very deep. Preparing the raw ore into a form suitable for making magnets and other technical devices is considered a lengthy process that uses large amounts of water and potentially toxic chemicals, and produces a lot of waste. One of the largest and most important rare earth mines in China, the Bayan Obo mine in Baotou, is one of the most polluted places in the world, according to ScienceNews.
BBC reporter Tim Maughan, who accompanied a project team to the Baotou area in 2015, described the black, toxic pool of waste product pumped out of the mine via pipelines as “hell on earth”. Not only the workers of the mines complain about health problems, also residents of the region show symptoms of arsenic pollution and skeletal fluorosis. The mortality rate from lung cancer is significantly higher, and the description of the villages around Baotou as “cancer villages” made international headlines.
More environmentally friendly mining possible
“We need rare earths (…) to make the transition to a climate-proof future,” Michele Bustamante, a sustainability researcher at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, told ScienceNews. But “everything we do in mining has an impact on the environment”. However, the extent can be reduced, quotes ScienceNews Thomas Lograsso, director of the Critical Materials Institute.
Scientists from the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry have developed a method to drastically reduce the amounts of ammonium salts used in the mining of rare earths in the future. Electric fields could make mining more sustainable. If the method catches on, regions such as the USA or Brazil could also benefit in the coming years, writes the website Heise.de.
More recycling demanded
Researchers also see great potential in terms of recycling: According to the “Global E-waste Monitor”, 7.3 kilograms of electronic waste per person end up in the garbage every year – including rare earths. However, the quantities used in computers, mobile phones and monitors are so small that recycling often does not appear economically viable, according to the science page of the German broadcaster ARD.
Researchers at Rice University in Texas have developed a method with which rare earths and metals can be extracted from industrial waste and electronic scrap in an energy-efficient manner, they write in the journal ScienceAdvances. Due to the low energy requirement, the method is easily scalable and has the potential to be used on a large scale in the future. It has been shown that the method works – but now companies have to take it up and develop it.
In Austria, too, for example at the University of Applied Sciences Krems, a project is currently being carried out in cooperation with Czech researchers to recycle rare earths without producing environmentally harmful waste. But mining companies must also be willing to invest in change, says Lograsso. “We want to make sure that the science and innovations that we do are driven by the needs of industry, so we’re not creating solutions here that nobody really wants.”
Do not outsource environmental impacts and social problems
Since the 1990s, global production of rare earths has been unchallenged by China. Not only because of the economic dependency, but also for environmental reasons, there are increasing calls to oppose this monopoly. It would be possible: Around two thirds of the global deposits of rare earths are located outside of China, for example in Australia, Brazil and the USA.
It was China’s lax environmental standards that allowed the country to produce rare earths at about a third the price of its international competitors, according to a report by the Washington-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.
The social and ecological problems associated with the mining of rare earths would be deliberately shifted abroad, geologist and raw materials expert Jochen Kolb from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany recently told West German Broadcasting (WDR).
Demand for rare metals increases
One thing is certain: research into more environmentally friendly mining of the rare metals will probably continue to gain in importance in the future. According to the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, lithium and rare earths will soon be more important than oil and gas. The demand for rare earths alone will probably increase fivefold by 2030 – partly because the EU wants to ban new cars with combustion engines by 2035.
