Potential US innovation in recycling electronic waste, combined with refining and processing, will allow the US to leapfrog China in critical minerals, an official at the Department of Energy said on Monday amid Washington’s aggressive attempts to counter China’s dominance in the industry.
Recycling metals, materials and magnets within the US is one of the fastest ways the country can impact the critical minerals supply chain, and entrepreneurs across the US are “pioneering” new techniques that allow for more efficient and effective processing, Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson said at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
“New technology in this space will be a game changer ... I think you will see significant gains in the output from recycled black mass and material in the coming 12 months,” Robertson said. Black mass is the powdery residue from lithium-ion batteries that contain valuable critical minerals.
Robertson, appointed in October last year as the head of the Department of Energy’s newly formed Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, also touted US progress in critical minerals refining and processing.
“Our labs right now are working along with corporate partners on technologies that will enable the processing of multiple types of critical minerals within the same flow sheet. That would be game-changing,” she said, adding that the process is currently “heavily intensive”, where it’s difficult to switch from processing one type of ore body to another.
Successfully reducing the US’s dependence on China for critical minerals would be a daunting task, though. Nathan Ratledge, founder and CEO of Alta Resource Technologies, a Boulder, Colorado-based firm specialising in mineral separation technologies, said at Monday’s CFR event that the problem was “worse than you think” as the US tries to “undo 30 years of strategic monopolisation in 24 months”.
However, Robertson argued that, as Chinese firms with existing processes could be hesitant to innovate, US advances would allow the country to overtake China in refining and processing.
“I think there’s a lot of opportunity for significant technology advances in refining and processing to shorten the timeline it takes to create something meaningful once it’s out of the ground ... If you can shave off power, water, and months of processing, we will leapfrog them absolutely,” Robertson said.
Robertson’s comments came as the US President Donald Trump’s administration significantly ramped up its industrial policy and diplomatic efforts to reduce the country’s reliance on China for critical minerals, which last year rattled US industries by restricting rare earth exports in response to Trump’s trade war.
Washington last month launched a US$12 billion initiative to build a large commercial stockpile of critical minerals named “Project Vault”, and pledged to set pricing floors and tariff policy to ensure that the US could break China’s chokehold.
The US Department of State also invited more than 50 countries in February to attend its inaugural Critical Minerals Ministerial, rallying allies to join a preferential trade zone with the US that it said would aim to avoid external disruptions.
In a report published last month, the CFR also said that the US had reached a “dangerous inflection point” in its “overwhelming dependence” on China for critical minerals, and that it would require significant effort to reduce US supply chain vulnerabilities.
The CFR recommended in its report that the US leapfrog China by “scaling disruptive innovation, recovery, and recycling, and sharing research and development efforts with its allies and partners.”
The Department of Energy, meanwhile, will aim to identify innovations that in ten years will allow the US to lead in the field of material science “in a way that’s fiercely independent and resourceful here in the United States of America,” Robertson said. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
