Rare Earths and Critical Raw Materials: what they are and why they are increasingly important

  circular economy | April 24, 2023

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greenmove

The more time passes, the more the presence of technology becomes increasingly predominant in every aspect of our lives, which is inevitably radically changing the world's economic structures, with poor nations discovering sudden riches in their subsoil and consolidated economies that are organizing themselves. to secure a share of these precious materials.

We see it in History, some discoveries have been so powerful as to forever change the course of events of the human race, shaping the world even centuries later.

Let's look at August 27, 1859, when in Titusville, a small village in Pennsylvania with just 125 inhabitants, Edwin Drake discovered, at 21.2 meters deep, the first oil well in the world. The opening of the first profitable oil well in history led to the birth of the US oil industry and the foundation, in 1870, of the first oil company, Standard Oil of businessman J. D. Rockefeller now known as Esso.

Following the refusal of a loan to build machinery to extract crude oil, Drake designed a drilling derrick based on the simple assembly of a wooden stick with a rocker drill, moved by a vertical reciprocating movement.

About forty years later, on May 26, 1908, George Bernard Reynolds, a geologist by profession, discovered the first oil well in the Middle East in the sands of Persia (which became Iran in 1935). The life of Reynolds - who had received from his client, the Englishman William Knox D'Arcy, a pragmatic ultimatum "Dig to 1,600 feet and then surrender" - changed radically and so did that of the rest of the world. The political and economic balance of the entire planet and, unfortunately, the life and death of millions of people will depend, and still depend, on crude oil, which in the years to come will be called black gold.

Rare earths and critical raw materials could do the same thing, moving the needle on the global scale, subverting and disrupting relationships between emerging and rich nations that, for better or for worse, have shaped the world as we know it now.

In order not to repeat the mistakes of the past and not to lose their place in the global economic food chain, rich countries have been working for several years on strategies for the procurement and management of these precious assets, carefully observed by public opinion, which demands supply chains that are safe, transparent and respectful of both the environment and people. As underlined by the President of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen in 2022: "Raw materials such as lithium and rare earths are increasingly replacing gas and oil at the heart of our economy; the EU, faced with the growing demand and the high concentration of the market, must avoid falling into the same dependence on oil and gas".

What Oil was has always been quite clear, the same cannot be said of the so-called Rare Earths and Critical Raw Materials, starting from which elements fall into each category.

Rare Earths

Rare earths, also known as REEs [Rare Earth Elements] are 17 metals present in the periodic table of chemical elements, with colors ranging from gray to silver. They include scandium (Sc), yttrium (Y), the entire lanthanide series and chemical elements between atomic numbers 57 and 71. In order: lanthanum (La), cerium (Ce), praseodymium (Pr), neodymium (Nd), promethium (Pm), samarium (Sm), europium (Eu), gadolinium (Gd), terbium (Tb), dysprosium (Dy), holmium (Ho), erbium (Er), thulium (Tm), ytterbium (Yb), lutetium (Lu).

What makes them so precious are their extraordinary magnetic and conductive properties, while what makes them rare is not their lack of availability, but rather their concentration. In fact, there are abundant deposits of these metals in the United States, Vietnam, Brazil, Russia, Australia and obviously China; however, their concentration is not such everywhere as to justify the expense of extractive activity.

According to some researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who wrote the study "Rare Earth Elements - A comprehensive background":

"Rare earth elements are present in many minerals but typically in concentrations too low to be economically refined; the concentration of REEs in the Earth's crust is estimated to be between 150 and 220 parts per million, which is higher than the concentration of other metals mined for industrial use, such as copper and zinc. The concentration of cerium, the most abundant rare earth, is approximately the same as that of copper although other REEs are much rarer. However, REEs are usually not concentrated in deposits of minerals in quantities that can be easily or economically extracted".

On top of this there is the problem of refining, as the Technology Institute explains again:

"Refining involves the separation of an element from its mineral through the removal of impurities: in order to reduce the cost of transporting the enormous quantity of mineral necessary for the process, this is often carried out at the mine itself. Refining takes place through physical separation of REEs using various chemical techniques, which sometimes involve thousands of steps, and each material requires a different process from the others. Due to the high number of phases that REEs must go through to be purified there is an enormous amount of toxic and radioactive waste generated from the by-products, which must be managed by recycling or pumping to a holding tank. This waste poses several health and environmental problems that must be addressed at the extraction site…".

Given these considerations, the path unanimously considered best is that of recovering rare earths from electrical and electronic equipment, or from WEEE, leaving the underground mineral deposits intact or almost intact.

There is the HPP Group which with its innovative technology allows Governments the possibility of recovering Critical Raw Materials in their territories, in particular from sludge of any nature, electronic waste, batteries and much more, increasing the circular economy and territorial development.

Several recycling centers have been created in Europe, in particular for electric car batteries and recently a group of young researchers from the University of Milan-Bicocca launched the RAREevolution project, which aims to recover rare earths from electronic waste (WEEE) using nanotechnologies but still release polluting waste, unlike HPP which has zero impact.

Furthermore, at the beginning of the year a deposit of Rare Earths was discovered in Kiruna (in northern Sweden), a town where there is already one of the largest iron mines in the world, managed by the Lkab mining group. Although it is still too early to know the characteristics of the deposit, Ursula von der Leyen promptly announced the establishment of a sovereign fund for the industry.

Critical Raw Materials

By Critical Raw Materials, CRMs, we mean non food and non energy ones whose supply problems, from a political, commercial and environmental point of view, make a change in economic strategy and a strong technological update a priority.

Starting from 2011, every three years, the list of CRMs at European level is drawn up and updated, defined on the basis of the economic importance in specific economic sectors that play a central role for the community economy and the supply risk for the European industry, dependent on the conditions of political and economic stability of the producing countries, on the potential for substitutability and on the degree of recycling.

The latest list, updated in March 2023, defines the following elements as critical raw materials: copper, tungsten, cobalt, nickel (battery grade), magnesium metal, platinum group metals (iridium, palladium, platinum, rhodium and ruthenium), manganese (battery grade), natural graphite (battery grade), germanium, boron (metallurgical grade), rare earth elements for magnets (neodymium, praseodymium, terbium, dysprosium, gadolinium, samarium and cerium), titanium metal, bismuth, gallium , lithium (battery grade), silicon metal.

Regarding Critical Raw Materials, the European Union has made available, through its official channels, the RMIS - Raw Materials Information System, which is an information system with which it is possible to know which elements are necessary in a specific sector (renewable sources, medical field, and so on) and also know the identity card of every single element of the list updated in 2020.

Still regarding Critical Raw Materials, the HPP Group carefully supports policies that actively aim at the development of its territories and opens up to investors and sponsors to participate together in the construction of a zero impact world to guarantee a better future, generate new clean energies without compromising the environment and without consuming water, recover Rare Earths and Critical Raw Materials, as well as Strategic Raw Materials including Hydrogen in compliance with current regulations and create the best and healthy Circular Economy.