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Chapter 1
General Introduction to Critical Materials
S. Erik Offerman
Department of Materials Science & Engineering,
Delft University of Technology,
Mekelweg 2, 2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands
A growing world population and rising levels of prosperity are driving up the global demand for energy and materials and are increasing the negative impact on the environment.1 Challenges related to energy use, materials consumption, and climate change are closely intertwined. On the one hand, producing materials consumes about 21% of global energy use and is responsible for about the same percentage of carbon emitted to the atmosphere.2 On the other hand, the transition from a fossil to a non-fossil electricity mix — to mitigate climate change — would result in a much higher usage of metals. The increase in the usage of metals would range from a few percent to a factor of a thousand for certain metals.3 Concerns over the future security of the supply of raw materials has led to the identification of critical raw materials for the USA, Japan, and the EU.4–8 As part of the World Scientific Series on Current Energy Issues, this book is focused on ‘Critical Materials’.
A united and worldwide effort to build and share knowledge about the consumption and production of materials appears to be a more recent development than equivalent efforts for energy-related issues and for climate change when the founding dates of the relevant intergovernmental organizations are considered. The International Resource Panel (IRP) of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) was founded fairly recently in 2007, whereas the International Energy Agency (IEA) was founded in 1974 and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was founded in 1988.
Since its establishment, the IRP has published a number of reports that provide insight into the grand societal challenge of materials. In 2011, the International Resource Panel stated that “the annual resource extraction would need to triple by 2050, compared to extraction in 2000, in case the levels of resource use per head for all global citizens reached the levels of current resource use of the average European”.1 Further work of the IRP shows that the material footprint per capita is not uniform around the world.9 For example, North America required about 30 metric tons of material per capita in 2017. In contrast, in Africa the material footprint was just below 3 metric tons per person in 2017. These large differences in the material footprint between North America and Africa point to a large disparity in wealth and opportunity.
Furthermore, the IRP provides information about the changes in the material footprint per capita per region in the world over the last 27 years, which gives insight into the development of material demand per region.9 The average per capita material footprint of Asia and the Pacific has grown from 4.8 metric tons per capita in 1990 to 11.4 metric tons per capita in 2017, a 3.2% average yearly growth. This can be related to rapid economic growth underpinned by the region’s unprecedented industrial and urban transitions (in scale and speed).9 The average growth of the per capita material footprint of Latin America and the Caribbean and West Asia was half that of Asia and the Pacific, at around 1.4% average growth per year in the period from 1990 to 2017. Africa, on the contrary, has seen no growth in the per capita material supply for final demand over the past three decades, which coincides with a stagnating material standard of living of large parts of the population. The material footprint of Europe has remained approximately constant at values that are just above 20 metric tons per capita per year between 2010 and 2017. North America has even seen a decrease in material footprint per capita over the last 17 years from about 35 metric tons to about 30 metric tons. This points to a saturation level of the material footprint in developed economies.
The general trends over the last decades suggest that the material footprints per capita in countries in Europe and North America — with developed economies — generally remain constant or even decrease, but that the average per capita material footprints of developing economies are rapidly increasing. The growth in material footprint per capita in countries with developing economies will have enormous effects in the near future, both economically and politically, as greater numbers of people compete for limited material resources at a viable price.
The first signs of geopolitical tensions related to resources have already appeared in the recent past. In September 2010, following a diplomatic clash with Japan, China briefly suspended exports of rare-earth minerals (REM).10 In January 2011, China reduced its export quota by 35% for REM. Following a World Trade Organization ruling, China officially raised production for the rest of the year but began closing dozens of rare-earth producers in August that year, while forcing private companies to close or to merge with Bao Gang, a state-controlled monopoly. This resulted in a sharp increase in the price of the rare-earth metals. The price of the rare-earth metals also became more volatile. The price for certain rare-earth metals (e.g. dysprosium) temporarily increased by 10–50 times. This was the result of the near monopoly (95%) of the supply of REM by China at the time and the limited availability of substitutes for some of the REM, given their unique properties. The Obama administration filed a complaint to the World Trade Organization at that time, which eased the export restrictions for the time being. However, the underlying causes have not diminished.
At present, we live in a largely linear materials economy of ‘take-make-use-dispose’: raw materials are extracted from the environment, converted into (high-tech) materials, used in products and disposed of at the end of the useful life of the product. This is illustrated by the recycling rates of materials, which may be less than 1% for certain elements in the periodic table (e.g. the rare-earth metals) and which generally decrease for highergrade materials.11 The linear economy is not sustainable in the long term, since the world has a finite capacity to provide resources and to absorb waste. A circular economy, in which material loops are closed, promises to be a more sustainable way of using materials.12,13 Several chapters in this book describe the different aspects of the circular materials economy.
The aim of this book is to give the reader a deeper understanding of the underlying causes of what is nowadays termed ‘Critical Materials’ and to give the reader insight into possible sustainable mitigation strategies. The topic of critical materials requires both a ‘systems view’, which considers the geopolitical, economic, energy and environmental aspects of materials, and an ‘in-depth materials view’, which considers the mechanical, chemical, and physical properties, the processing, and the microscopic structure of materials. Parts I and II of the book are mainly related to the systems perspective of critical materials, whereas Parts III and IV mainly focus on the in-depth materials perspective. However, ‘zooming in’ and ‘zooming out’ is inherent to the complexity of the topic of critical materials and therefore present throughout this book.
The following sections describe the coherency between the different chapters and the structure of this book.
Part I: Geopolitics and the Energy–Materials Nexus
Raw and high-tech materials are an important commodity for most economies in the world and are therefore of geopolitical importance. The combination of population growth and economic development can be a driver for resource nationalism, which is centered around the availability and control of raw materials, as presented in Chapter 1 by Rademaker. The rare-earth-metals-crisis in 2011, which was the result of export restrictions of rare-earth-metals imposed by China, is an illustrative example of this.
The geopolitical role of raw and high-tech materials cannot be fully understood without considering the changing geopolitics of energy, which is presented by De Jong in Chapter 2. Access to cheap, reliable sources of energy has always been a key requirement for economic development. Throughout history episodes of economic growth have been underpinned by a reliance on particular types of fuel. History shows several disruptive changes in global energy production. A major disruptive change that occurred recently in the global energy landscape has been the rapid increase in renewable sources of energy, which are considered to be our future because they are sustainable.
This has important implications, since ‘energy’ and ‘materials’ are two different sides of the same coin. On one hand, materials are needed to convert the different primary forms of energy into electricity and other usable forms of energy. On the other hand, about 21% of global energy production is needed to produce and process materials from ore and waste into products.2 The intimate relationship between energy and materials becomes stronger with the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, since renewable energy technologies are more material intensive due to the more diffuse nature of renewable energy sources compared to the high energy density of fossil fuels.3 Certain materials which are used in renewable energy technologies are critical in terms of scarcity, geopolitics, supply risk, competition with the food industry, carbon footprint, and/or conflict minerals. This is illustrated in Chapter 3, in which Kelder shows that the global quest for intermittent renewable energy sources (wind, solar) requires a strong increase in the use of rechargeable energy storage devices, such as batteries, and the associated materials.
Part II: Defining Critical Materials
Geopolitical developments around materials and energy stimulated scientific efforts to address the lack of understanding of and the lack of data on nonfuel minerals that are important to the economy. This has led to the identification of critical materials for the USA and Japan in 2008 and for Europe in 2010. The work of Peck, which is presented in Chapter 4, shows a historical perspective to critical materials thinking, which led to the defining of critical materials from 2006 onwards. Critical materials thinking has been present through the Second World War and the Cold War and includes concerns over energy availability and environmental impacts. Chapter 4 shows how the historical military–energy framework for assessing strategic materials has evolved into critical materials approaches to help address the challenges of energy, materials, and the environment in the 21st century.
Criticality can be defined as “the quality, state, or degree of being of the highest importance”. But how can we understand what is meant by “highest importance”? In Chapter 5, Graedel and Reck define and describe a multi-parameter approach to the criticality issue that involves (as do the efforts of other researchers and governments) a variety of geological, economic, technological, environmental, and social concerns. Their results suggest that the highest level of concern should be for metals whose processing and use involves extensive separation from parent ores, high levels of embodied energy, little opportunity for substitution, and low levels of recyclability. Improved approaches to material use should thus involve the preferential utilization of non-critical materials, attention to the potential for material reuse at the design stage, and a focus on increasing the efficiency and the total amount of recycling.
Lists of critical materials may change from country to country, from business to business and from time to time. In Chapter 6, Goddin identifies supply chain risks for critical materials from a business perspective. For companies, understanding the environmental impacts of their products and operations is steadily rising in their business agenda. Common business drivers include:
1.Legislation on energy consumption, hazardous substances and conflict minerals.
2.Volatile material and energy prices.
3.Product marketing, brand value and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
4.Stimulus for product inn...
