00:00:01
Robin Stickley: It is a term that's been getting tossed around a lot lately, but still stumps plenty of people on the street when you ask them to define it.

00:00:09
Clip: Critical mineral, I'm not really sure with that one. Something that we use a lot?

00:00:15
Clip: I think a critical mineral would be vital to human life.

00:00:19
Clip: I would say a critical mineral is a mineral that without it, society would shut down.

00:00:24
Robin Stickley: Well, that last guy's on the right track, but can you name any?

00:00:30
Clip: I don't think I can name a critical mineral.

00:00:33
Clip: Well, there's like gold, but I don't really think gold is critical. Iron. No?

00:00:39
Clip: Cobalt, maybe, lithium?

00:00:41
Robin Stickley: Okay, we're getting warmer. So what are critical minerals used for?

00:00:45
Clip: Computing, processors, batteries. If it's any metals, we're using it every day. Our cars work processors and phones and car batteries, like EVs, are a big topic right now.

00:00:57
Robin Stickley: Bingo, there you go. Critical minerals are, well, critical to many modern technologies that we take for granted, and we're going to need a whole lot more of them in the years ahead. I'm Robin Stickley and this is Why We Mine, presented by Teck. This season we're exploring some of the biggest challenges and opportunities facing the mining industry and our society as a whole, with a focus on themes like trust and transparency, sustainability, critical minerals, reconciliation, and much more. In this episode, we're going to shine a spotlight on the third item on that list. We'll explore why critical minerals are so important, how much we're going to need, what's at stake if we run out, and the mining industry's role in ensuring we don't. Let's dig in.
 
My first guest today is a leading expert on the subject of minerals, metallurgy, and sustainability. Dr. Peter Tom Jones is Director of the KU Leuven Institute for Sustainable Metals and Minerals based in Belgium. Dr. Jones, thanks so much for joining me for this conversation.

00:02:16
Dr. Peter Tom Jones: Thank you. Looking forward to it.

00:02:17
Robin Stickley: I want to start with a little bit about your background. You're an academic, you're an author, you're a documentary presenter, you are a well-known climate activist. Give me a sense of what it was that first sparked your interest in metals and minerals.

00:02:31
Dr. Peter Tom Jones: Yeah, so I must say that for many years I lived the schizophrenic life because on the one hand, I was being a climate author and I also participated in quite a few demonstrations for fighting climate change. And on the other hand, I was a professional metallurgist trying to develop clean steel production. And those two worlds were basically quite separated, but the last five to 10 years, I think people have started to realize that when we want to replace a fossil fuel-based society with a climate neutral society, we're going to need mediators to do so. And this is where metals come in, and without metals, clearly there is no transition to climate neutrality possible.

00:03:13
Robin Stickley: You're talking about the fact that these were two things that were on very separate paths early on in your career, and I remember in watching your documentary, you talking about the fact that you have really, over the course of many years, have really changed your mind about mining.

00:03:26
Dr. Peter Tom Jones: Yeah, basically, let's say 10 to 15 years ago, we had an ideological position even within our predecessor of our current KU Leuven Institute that we were only involved in urban mining, meaning recycling of metals. And in that ideology, mining was bad and we didn't want to be associated with mining. But then as time progressed and more evidence came up with several reports, including the reports of the International Energy Agency that actually calculated the numbers of the metals that we need to make this transition to a net-zero scenario, then you realize that these numbers are gargantuan. The typical example is lithium. The lithium demand will grow with a factor of 42 by 2040 compared to 2020. So when you see these numbers, then you realize that without mining, we can't achieve that. We have to build up the stocks of these metals in the economy before we can even think about a recycling, urban mining-based economy.

00:04:33
Robin Stickley: Tom, I want to take one small step back here before we go further because we've got a lot of people listening who are, what I call, mining curious like me, but don't have a lot of knowledge necessarily of the industry. So when we talk about the term critical minerals, and that's what we're talking about today, it's really become this buzzword. You hear it more and more, but what are critical minerals? Why are they important?

00:04:56
Dr. Peter Tom Jones: Well, critical minerals are not critical in the sense that they are geologically scarce, there is enough in our earth crust for all these critical metals that we need for transition, but the point is that often, they are not distributed over the entire earth crust, so that means they are concentrated in certain countries that can control the production of those metals. A typical example is rare earths, rare earths such as neodymium and dysprosium, which are two important elements for electric motors in our electric cars, but also in our direct drive wind turbines.
 
But the main problem is the refining of the metal, so once you have extracted metals and you've produced concentrates, you still need to refine them into high-quality, high-purity metals that you need for your car, your battery, your wind turbine and so forth. And this is why we use the word critical because they're critical, in terms of their importance for our transition, but they're also not evenly distributed. So that means we have supply risks, and the supply of these metals to Europe or to Canada can be cut off. So it's not only critical, but it's also extremely important for certain strategic sectors of our economy.

00:06:16
Robin Stickley: So we hear the statement regularly, there's no energy transition without critical minerals, but that's not the only use, right?

00:06:25
Dr. Peter Tom Jones: Well, that's certainly our focus in the work we do at our KU Leven Institute, our main focus is producing the metals for the batteries that we need for electric mobility and for stationary energy storage. We're talking about the rare earths for the generators of our direct drive wind turbines. We're speaking about solar PV panels. We need specific metals for those, as well. Electricity networks, we need a lot of copper in the future to electrify all our energy mobility housing systems. So copper is really critical and strategic metal. It's an old metal, we all know copper from a long time ago, but copper now will become even more important. And I know that the poster boy for the clean tech revolution has always been lithium, but copper is just as important as lithium without copper, there is no electrification possible of anything.

00:07:23
Robin Stickley: I think most people do understand the key component. We understand EV batteries, but you're talking about a lot of other types of green tech that critical minerals go into.

00:07:32
Dr. Peter Tom Jones: That's a wide range of clean technologies. We also have heat pumps, electrolyzers, and also a climate neutral housing system. So a big question in our buildings, for example in the future, is how are we going to heat our buildings? In the past we used fossil fuels for heating our buildings, either gas or some kind of regular fuel, but in the future we will have to heat with heat pumps, and heat pumps, they require electricity, but they also require the metals for producing heat pumps themselves. So energy, mobility, housing, these are really the key sectors of society where our carbon footprint today is huge, so we need to completely decarbonize them and without metals, we can't do that.

00:08:17
Robin Stickley: So when we talk about all of those applications for critical minerals, Tom, how urgent is the need to secure more of them? Do we currently have the appropriate sense of urgency when it comes to this issue?

00:08:40
Dr. Peter Tom Jones: I think we still have a lot of work to do in Europe, which is a extremely complex political system where you have 27 member states, where you have a European Commission, a European Parliament, a European Council, and they're all partly involved in the decision making, so everything goes extremely slow. And I am involved in many of the European events where these different organizations meet and we keep on talking, we keep on talking that we have to be faster and more agile, but it becomes multi-python at a certain moment. So we all agree that we need more action, and at the end of the meeting we will say, okay, let's have another meeting about having more action. So we keep talking, we keep having more resolutions, we keep having more legislation, and we always say the same things, but nothing changes in reality. And I think there, we can learn a lot from Canada.

00:09:32
Robin Stickley:  Let's talk about addressing the gap here. I hear people say often, why can't we use less? Why can't we recycle more, go towards that so-called circular economy, is that the answer or part of the answer?

00:09:45
Dr. Peter Tom Jones: It's absolutely part of the answer. So I always have to answer the question about where are we going to get the metals from to drive the transition to climate neutrality. So indeed, my first and most important answer is use less metals. This is what we call demand-side management. So instead of everyone having their own electric vehicle, we have shared smaller electric vehicles. In many cities in Europe, you already have these car sharing systems. So in this way you can drive down the need for a number of these critical metals. The same goes for public transport. So yes, demand-side management is a key part of the solution.
 
Recycling just the same, we really stress the importance of setting up battery recycling systems, magnet recycling systems, and we working on that at KU Leuven. A lot of our activities are recycling of metals that we collect through urban mining initiatives. But again, let's be realistic, large volumes of end-of-life batteries will not be available before 2035. So in the meantime, we still need to build up the stocks.

00:10:57
Robin Stickley: You can't recycle what's not in the system yet.

00:11:00
Dr. Peter Tom Jones: You can't recycle what is available for recycling at this moment. And this is why I get sometimes a little bit cross with the way that some circular economy people try to represent this very complex situation. What comes out of what is available for recycling today is not necessarily the same as what goes into the new products because technologies change over time. To give you an example, 15 years ago there was a huge end-of-life stream of rare earth-based lamp systems, energy-saving lamps, and they were very successful at the time. So we had huge recycling programs to recover the European terbium from those end-of-life lamps. But then five years later, these types of lamps were completely redundant because the LED technology won the battle, and suddenly we didn't need Europium and terbium anymore. So what we need today is not necessarily what we have available for going into the system again.

00:11:58
Robin Stickley: How can the mining sector do a better job of informing people about the importance and the urgency of the critical minerals mission and do it in a way that doesn't risk or damage trust at the same time?

00:12:16
Dr. Peter Tom Jones: Yeah, this is really the big question for the European mining industry that is really facing a population that is completely negative about mining. The problem here in Europe is that people don't understand the difference between the old coal mines of the past and the new energy transition mines of the future in Europe. And yes, it's true that the companies really have difficulties in explaining this to the general public, but we have no other option. We have to do it. That's also the reason why we make these documentaries on a renaissance of mining in Europe on responsible mining in Europe. So I think it's about showing that it is possible to produce metals in a very environment, social, governance friendly way of doing so. And that's why I went to visit the mines in the north of Europe in Finland and in Sweden because there, we have really the best class type of mines which are probably similar with some of those in Canada that you have there. And these are examples where responsible mining is really something tangible.
 
So they mine in a way that is environmentally really friendly, in the sense that they work with only green electricity, they have strongly automated mining system. It's very safe. There are virtually no accidents compared to other mines in the world. They have a very good tailings management practice, much better than in other parts of the world. And thirdly, in terms of governance and transparency, they're also doing better than most other mines elsewhere in the world because they have a very close connection to the local communities who live and work in those areas. So there is a community-based responsible mining model where there is trust between those companies and the local communities. But if you go to the south of Europe, you have a completely different universe and there the opposition to mining is really huge, but that's mainly because people don't really know what this responsible mining can be about in the future.

00:14:23
Robin Stickley: Dr. Jones, what a pleasure to spend some time with you today. I want to say thanks again so much.

00:14:27
Dr. Peter Tom Jones: Thank you very much.

00:14:29
Robin Stickley: That was Dr. Peter Tom Jones, Director of the KU Leuven Institute for Sustainable Metals and Minerals. Up next, we'll explain why governments around the world, including Canada's, are crafting specific strategies around critical minerals. Stay with us. You are listening to Why We Mine Presented by Teck. I'm your host, Robin Stickley. On this season of the podcast, we're focused on the issues that matter most to the mining industry and those who depend on it. Everyday people who care about a more sustainable future for themselves and their communities. If you like what you're hearing, please give us a follow on your favourite podcast platform. We'd also really appreciate it if you could leave us a review. Now back to the show.
 
Today we're talking about critical minerals, what they are, why we need them, and the opportunities they present for Canada. To help me unpack that last point in particular, I'm excited to welcome my second guest of the episode Mark Zacharias. He's the executive director of Clean Energy Canada. Mark, welcome to Why We Mine.

00:15:46
Mark Zacharias: Lovely to be here and thank you for having us.

00:15:48
Robin Stickley: Mark, what is the mission of Clean Energy Canada?

00:15:51
Mark Zacharias: So we are a climate and clean energy think tank. We're based out of Simon Fraser University. That's our academic and institutional home, but we work across Canada and we have offices in Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria. We've been around since 2009, so we're one of the older climate think tanks in Canada. We focus on basically working with the business and industry, governments at all levels, in finding solutions that work for them around climate and the clean economy.

00:16:21
Robin Stickley: Let's talk about opportunity or maybe even advantages here, in Canada, when it comes to critical minerals. What in your mind, Mark, are those opportunities?

00:16:31
Mark Zacharias: I would say we've got tremendous advantages. So most people don't know this, but the six critical minerals that go into an electric vehicle, Canada is the only democratic jurisdiction in the world that has commercial quantities of all six. And when you think about it that way, you think, oh my god, that's an opportunity we actually need to jump on and seize here. The other thing we have is we've got abundant fresh water. We've got an electricity grid that's about the 83 to 84% non-emitting, which compared to 39% of the states, gives us this tremendous competitive advantage. We've got a workforce that's skilled in all aspects of manufacturing, mineral production, exploration development. So we're actually really well situated and we've got a reasonably robust transportation network to move goods around North America or export offshore.

00:17:18
Robin Stickley: Let's talk about Canada's critical mineral strategy. And again, for a listener who's tuning in and isn't familiar with that, hasn't heard that term before, let's start with something really basic. What is the strategy?

00:17:29
Mark Zacharias: The way to best think about it is it's basically an industrial strategy focused on developing critical minerals. So what it did, and maybe what it did differently than a lot of other efforts in this space, not just in Canada but around the world, it clearly explained what critical minerals were, which ones Canada has, how they're useful in building Canada's economy in the future, particularly as Canada moves towards net-zero. And then the other thing, what I really liked about it wasn't all thanks to all people. It said there are 31 critical minerals in Canada, but we really care about these six right now, plus there's another 12 that Canada cares less about, but our partners do care about, so we want to pay attention to those.
 
But I think the most important thing about this strategy relative to other ones is it actually got attached to budget 2022. So there was well over one and a half billion dollars behind the strategy. And in the intervening years between 2022 and 2024, we're actually looking at government making repeated announcements, whether it's policy, or funding, or environmental investment tax credits that actually loop back to the strategy. So the strategy is slowly getting implemented year by year and you don't see that in a lot of government policy initiatives. And also this summer, the government announced the first results on the federal minister's working group on regulatory efficiency. So again, trying to figure out how do you actually get these mines permitted faster and get them built. Because it's one thing to talk about them, it's other one to actually get the authorizations and permits in place so you can start construction.

00:19:00
Robin Stickley: That was going to be the next question, timelines. Because everywhere I go in these mining conversations, the pace at which we need to move comes up and that we're not necessarily moving fast enough. So are timelines something that the strategy addresses?

00:19:13
Mark Zacharias: The strategy doesn't address timelines per se, but some of the work that's come after the strategy has done quite a good job. So just give you an example. In the Prime Minister's office a couple of years ago, they set up the Clean Growth office, so it's a one-stop shop for foreign investors looking at Canada around what would it take for us to invest in Canada. Two years later, now they've got a permitting coordinator in the Prime Minister's Office to actually figure out are these mines getting permitted? Are they in the queue? How long is it taking? If it's taking too long, what does that mean? And also just a couple of weeks ago, the federal government announced that for the environmental assessment process, they're actually going to have targeted timelines around how many years it will take at the absolute max to get something through the system.

00:19:57
Robin Stickley: Are there any areas that you would criticize, Mark, where you feel the strategy maybe didn't go far enough?

00:20:03
Mark Zacharias: Yeah, there's three or four areas I think that the federal government probably could do more in. If you look at how the oil and gas sector works provincially or federally, you have the BC Energy Regulator. That is the one-place, one-stop shopping for all of your permits for an oil and gas project. The Canada Energy Regulator does the exact same thing at the federal level. So what's missing here would be a one window where any mine proponent or anybody interested in going through environmental assessment process would actually enter through the single office, and you've got one place to coordinate all of your regulatory pieces and your authorizations. I would love to have seen measurable goals in the strategy. I'd love to see X projects by Y date.
 
The other one, too, that I would like to see, if you look at how Canada attracted the 48 to $ 50 billion worth of automotive battery investments in Ontario and Quebec, how that was done is you had federal ministers, provincial premiers, large delegations, going in the markets, so going to Germany, going to Japan, going to Korea, basically working with companies to say, what would it take for you to come to Canada and set up shop in Canada? And I think that's a lesson for how the mining industry can work, as well, in terms of large trade delegations going in market to bring investment back to Canada.
 
And then I think the last one, if I had to criticize, would be that things like workforce development, things like infrastructure development, they're moving along, but again, those are under the purview of different federal ministries and different federal ministers. So again, there's lots of coordination to make sure that all happens.

00:21:35
Robin Stickley: You've talked a little bit about how a good critical mineral strategy would drive supply and demand. Can you expand a little bit on that for us, mark? How would that work? What does that mean?

00:21:46
Mark Zacharias: I'll give you an example right now. So the federal government brought into place just under a year ago what is essentially an electric vehicle sales mandate. So by 2035, a hundred percent of light duty vehicles sold in Canada have to be zero emission, and you back that down to, I think it's 26% by 2026. So there's incremental goals there, and what that means is that you're actually driving the customer base towards buying products that would use Canadian critical minerals and metals. So that's just a way to drive the demand side.
 
Another way that governments can do this at the local provincial federal level to drive demand of Canadian products is through what's called buy clean policies. So these are requiring, for example, low carbon or low carbon intensity construction materials be used in infrastructure projects. And if you do that, whether it's steel or it's cement or it's forest products or it's aluminum or whatever, generally what you find is that the lowest carbon intensity products come from Canada. So it's not a buy America type provision. It's actually based on carbon intensity that benefits Canadian industries, and particularly the mining industry.

00:23:03
Robin Stickley: We've been focused here at home for the first portion of the interview. I want to zoom out a little bit now, and maybe have a look at Canada, in terms of how we stack up as a global player in this critical minerals race. How well positioned is Canada right now to be competitive?

00:23:21
Mark Zacharias: It really depends on what part of that supply and value chain you look at. If you look at the resource that we have in Canada, in terms of the deposits, if you look at the ability to explore and find those deposits, I think we're among the best in the world and we really are. We've got the workforce to be able to do that Once a mine is permitted and gets to final investment decisions, do have the workforce and we do have the infrastructure or the ability to provide the infrastructure to that mine. I think if you had to find one example where Canada is, not lagging, because every jurisdiction has the same problem, but it really is the ability to get new mines built and brownfield mines expanded and improved. It's just very, very hard to get through regulatory processes. And as a mine proponent, you have not only federal, you've got provincial, and often you've got local government regulatory processes, as well.
 
Jurisdictions like BC have one project, one process, which is basically a harmonized environmental process, that's a model for the rest of Canada that I think a number of their provinces are looking at. So there are some ways to move through this, but it is hard to get a mine up and built in Canada right now. And I think the investment community knows this, so there's trillions of dollars of green capital sitting on the sideline worldwide and they're looking across the world around where the best investments are. And one of the things they'll need to do is they're going to need to find places where they know they can get a project built within a certain timeline.

00:24:49
Robin Stickley: I think it's somewhere around the 15 to 18 year mark in Canada, currently. Do you think that's changing? Are you optimistic that we're going to speed that up?

00:24:58
Mark Zacharias: I'm optimistic for a number of reasons. The first is mine proponents in the business community now recognize that indigenous consent is required and equity stakes and partnerships are required. And once you actually start your journey from that perspective and that position, then you're not playing catch up at any point during the mine development process. You knew right up front what you need to aim for.
 
I think the second piece, we're seeing governments across Canada realizing, and this is not only in mining, but it's just very hard to get things built in Canada right now. So again, we come back to the regulatory processes and there is a whole bunch of work happening on how do we expedite projects through regulatory processes. And as those get recognized and get addressed, what you're seeing also is you're seeing the investment community go, okay, we've got a little bit more comfort in Canada that we can bring in and we can step in and we start looking at projects.

00:25:50
Robin Stickley: Why, Mark, is it important to mine critical minerals here at home as opposed to importing them?

00:25:57
Mark Zacharias: Well, a number of reasons. One is the economic benefits of actually mining the minerals here, processing them here, and then using them in, for example, cathode or anode manufacturing where they go into a battery which goes into an automobile assembled in Canada, and then recycled, and end of life. There's an economic efficiency argument for doing this that basically builds jobs, grows the economy, and sets Canada up to be competitive in the coming decades.
 
I think the second one, it really ties to economic security arguments, we don't want any one region of the world to have a stranglehold on critical minerals. And that third aspect is the US is still and will be our largest trading partner. They're looking at us as helping them out with their clean manufacturing base as they transition to the lower carbon economy, and we need to be there for them to them out on that journey, as well.

00:26:44
Robin Stickley: You touched on this a little bit earlier, in terms of indigenous communities, we've set out our strategy for critical minerals. How do we now make sure that we're still being mindful of these environmental impacts and ensuring equity for indigenous partners?

00:26:58
Mark Zacharias: Well, there's a reputational piece that needs to get addressed in Canada around mining, and I think that is starting to happen over the last decade. We're seeing things like towards sustainable mining. We're seeing mining companies step up with new technologies, looking at going underground or having new different types of tailings or water management. So we're actually seeing the industry adapt fairly quickly on this, and a lot of the technological innovation, the jumps that have happened in the last decade have been quite impressive to watch.
 
But really, the answer to your question is really there's a trust that needs to be built between the industry and governments, indigenous or otherwise, and local community members. You see that happening now in parts of Canada where we now have communities seizing the mining opportunity and other parts of Canada where the trust hasn't, yet, been built. So it's a process, it's ongoing. I think industry has made some very good steps towards that.

00:27:51
Robin Stickley: As we wrap up here, Mark, I want to project into the future a little bit. If Canada is playing its cards correctly now, in terms of critical minerals, how do you see Canada being better off 10 or even 20 years from now?

00:28:03
Mark Zacharias: One of the interesting things about critical minerals is they'll occur geographically across Canada. There's something for everybody everywhere. We are going to have a Canadian economy that, over the coming decades, can transition off of our largest exports. We've got 200,000 people in the oil and gas sector that we'll need over the coming decades to transition to something new and critical minerals is one of these areas where those skills are transferable and the workforce is transferable and the wages pay well. The other one too, we do have a very large manufacturing base still in Canada, and if you look at what's happening over the last five years with electric vehicles, it's rejuvenated industry in Ontario and parts of Quebec. We can bring something that we used to do a lot of back, and part of bringing that back is Canadian critical minerals.

00:28:52
Robin Stickley: It's been really fascinating to listen to you, Mark. Thank you so much for joining us today.

00:28:57
Mark Zacharias: Thank you very much for having me.

00:28:59
Robin Stickley: That was Mark Zacharias, the Executive Director of Clean Energy Canada. Okay, full disclosure here; I am a word nerd. So it really struck me that Miriam Webster's definition of the word critical starts out with the adjectives indispensable and vital. It also includes the phrase "being in or approaching a state of crisis". And for me, that underlines two very important takeaways from our guests in the critical minerals conversation. First up, these minerals are, indeed, vital to all aspects of our modern lives from technological progress and economic stability to environmental sustainability, and as we've heard time and again, there's no net-zero transition without them. And then secondly, while they didn't use the word crisis explicitly, both Dr. Jones and Mark Zacharias made it very clear the stakes here couldn't be higher.
 
While Mark believes Canada's critical mineral strategy is a good start, both our guests raise concern that the biggest threat we face is a collective sense of complacency, a risk of getting bogged down by too much talk, meetings, paperwork, and red tape, and simply put, not enough action. I'm Robin Stickley, and this is Why We Mine, brought to you by Teck. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks, also, to our talented production team. Our Senior Producer is Reaon Ford. Luke Batiot is our Sound Engineer, and our Project Lead is Maria St. Aubin. Additional support provided by JAR Audio. Until next time.