Prof. Saleem Ali, University of Delaware, on the Global Scramble for Critical Minerals

How have politics and geoeconomics turned rare earths and critical minerals into pressure points in the expanding global trade conflict? Listen to Jason Mitchell discuss with Professor Saleem Ali, University of Delaware, about what the energy transition means in the context of environmental security; how multilateral initiatives and increasingly national efforts are working to reshape supply and demand dynamics; and why it’s critical we continue to rethink ways to diversify and secure global critical mineral supply chains.

Recording date: 24 March 2025

Professor Saleem Ali

Professor Saleem Ali is an environmental security scholar whose research and practice focuses on ways of resolving ecological conflicts through technical and social mechanisms, as well as exploring novel ways of peace-building between corporations, governments and communities. He holds the Blue and Gold Distinguished Professorship in Energy and the Environment at the University of Delaware, and is also a Senior Fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Sustainable Investment. Saleem also serves on the United Nations International Resource Panel. Professor Ali’s books include Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and a Sustainable Future; Environmental Diplomacy; and Soil to Foil: Aluminum and the Quest for Industrial Sustainability. His latest book, Sustainability: A Very Short Introduction from the Oxford University Press, is now out.

Episode Transcript

Note: This transcription was generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers and may contain errors. As a part of this process, this transcript has also been edited for clarity.

Jason Mitchell:

Welcome to the podcast, Professor Saleem Ali, it's great to have you here and thank you for taking the time today.

Professor Saleem Ali:

Thank you, Jason. It's great to be here.

Jason Mitchell:

It is, absolutely. So I'm really excited about this episode. It is incredibly topical given the current news and politics. So let's start out with a little bit of scene setting. Daniel Juergens talked about this shift from big oil to big shovel and how the energy transition, at least when it comes to net-zero, is highly levered to mining in areas like lithium, cobalt, copper, and other minerals. Obviously the implications are significant. New cars have, as I understand, at least two and a half times as much copper as conventional cars. And an offshore wind project uses nine times the minerals of a natural gas-fired power plant with the same power generation. So how do you think about energy security in the context of all the demand drivers behind big shovel if you do indeed agree with Juergens characterization?

Professor Saleem Ali:

Yes. No, I think Juergens is pointing towards reality of science, which is that materials and energy production are inextricably linked. So we call this the material energy nexus. So there's really no free lunch on this. If you're going to be shifting from one source of energy to another and you have certain other advantages with reference to pollution generation for example, then you may end up using more materials of another kind. So with fossil fuels, the advantage has always been the density of the energy. You don't need that much material to generate a lot of energy, but then if you're going to have other kinds of materials which are not as directly pollution intensive, then you will end up using more materials to be able to generate that energy. So that is absolutely the case with reference to shifting from fossil fuels to other forms of energy.

Jason Mitchell:

As an extension to this, Vaclav Smil, a previous guest on the podcast continually warns against taking, I guess an overly optimistic outlook around the energy transition. His point is that the primary energy system still stands at more than 80% fossil fuel based despite all the capacity building we've seen over the last two decades in renewable. So talk more about the speed of the transition in a critical metals and minerals context. What are the challenges facing large scale mineral extraction? I've heard that developing, for instance, a new mine could take as much as 15 or 20 years given the logistical construction planning and permitting hurdles.

Professor Saleem Ali:

Yes, no, absolutely. There is a long lag time between exploration and production of a mine, and many times the exploration projects are not able to identify economically viable resources, so only about 10% of exploration projects actually lead to a finished mine. And this percentage may change depending on the location and the ore grades and what new discoveries we may find with new technologies including with AI, which is being employed now for exploration. But currently it stands at a rather humbling 10% or so. So with reference to what Smil is saying and the delay that may happen with the transition itself, we have to kind of differentiate different forms of energy usage. So if you've got large-scale grid production of energy, I think we could very easily shift to different form of energy. I think like nuclear, if we had the wherewithal to build the nuclear power plants and so on for base load power. The issue is with reference to the use of energy in mobile transport kind of uses.

So fossil fuels are very versatile. So you can use them in cars, you can use them in aircraft and so on. And I think that's where it becomes much more challenging. And the electric car revolution has alleviated some of that, but there's still a major challenge with aviation and also with shipping. So that's where the challenge lies. But I do think that in terms of transitioning away from coal, which is what Smil is identifying in terms of the largest source of fossil fuels for electricity generation at the grid level, that transition can happen much more fast if we are willing to specially consider nuclear energy and we are able to build nuclear power plants faster.

So for base load power, I think nuclear, there is consensus now that in terms of climate mitigation, that's going to be an important part of the base load solution. It's not a panacea, but it's certainly it's going to be part of the equation. That's why at COP28 you had a commitment from all of the major economies to triple their nuclear power production by 2050. There are a few exceptions like Germany, but even there the political situation has changed recently, which may allow for that to happen as well.

Jason Mitchell:

Interesting. I guess I want to talk a little bit about supply chains here. An area that, given your focus around environmental security, there's obviously a close linkage. What does history teach us about the ability to diversify and de-risk supply chains? When I think about this sort of question, I'm always reminded about that time back in 2010 when Japan fell into, I believe it was a territorial dispute with China, which ended up with China implementing an export ban on rare earths elements. The dispute I think only lasted two months, but the upshot was prices spiked and it kind of felt like an aha moment with the world coming to this realisation that China produced, it was at that point 97% of rare earths oxides, but Japan ultimately found substitutes. So what lessons can we borrow from that? I want to use this as sort of a jumping off point for the supply chain discussion.

Professor Saleem Ali:

Yes. So in 2012, the reason actually that China gave for constraining supply of rare earths was that they were trying to clean up their mines because there had been a lot of opposition regarding the environmental damage from some of the rare earth mines, particularly the Bayan Obo Mine in Mongolia, and then several smaller rare earth mines in Jiangxi province. So in China, that was the ostensible reason given that, "You keep telling us that we've got dirty industry we're trying to clean up, so we have to have a pause on exports." However, both Japan and the United States, and in fact also the European Union, they took Japan to the WTO's dispute resolution system and the WTO ruled against China, and then China actually complied with the ruling and they then opened up their supply. So that's an interesting story also in terms of how the international governance system around commodity trade has worked.

And it's challenging to me right now why people think that the system would not work in the future. And so, one of the reasons is because the WTO's dispute resolution mechanism itself has been hampered somewhat by several countries, including the United States also has resisted appointing some of the new arbitrators to the dispute resolution system. So that leads us to the question more about governance of supply. I mean, minerals are geologically determined, so you can't just set them up anywhere. So I think we have to be also conscious of that reality that supply is going to be inherently concentrated at some level, unlike with other kinds of resources. We can try and diversify it, but there are certain geological constraints.

So a better way to approach it in my view is to make sure the governance system around the supply is much better and dependable because that way you will also prevent ecologically inefficient mines from opening where people are just going around resource nationalism and saying, "We have to have our own mine," where there may not even be appropriate minerals to extract, or you may have a situation where you have economically inefficient outcomes also, because you have supply chains which are being set up that are not really meeting market imperatives. So my focus is much more on improving the governance system for the supplier.

Jason Mitchell:

I really want to dig into this a little bit more with a couple questions. I mean, how has China's policies led to effectively their dominance in the supply chain of many critical minerals? Could it be said, I guess also that the west is realistically too far behind?

Professor Saleem Ali:

Well, I mean this can be traced back to the 1980s. The US was in fact the world's largest producer of rare earths in the 1980s. You had the Mountain Pass Mine in California, not far from the border with Nevada, just a few hours drive from Las Vegas. So it was in a very central location, was producing rare earths for decades in very high levels. But then actually there were regulatory pressures which led to economically the mine not being very competitive. And that is where China really capitalised on the opportunity to develop their own deposits, which I mean they are geologically blessed with great deposits. The Bayan Obo Mine in Inner Mongolia, it just happens to have a very specific high concentration of rare earth metals. And that is an accident of geology. It's just the same reason why in Canada and Sudbury, Ontario, you have a lot of nickel.

It's because about a billion plus years ago, there was a big asteroid which collided with that part of Ontario and deposited a lot of nickel. So I mean, you have to recognise that there are some of these features of the landscape which lead to these resources, and then the countries can invest in harvesting them and making sure that they're available. And that's what China did. Because it's a large area of land and they have some of these geological deposits, they're then invested from the eighties that made a very conscious effort. They are very long-term oriented in their thinking to develop their mineral industry.

Jason Mitchell:

So there's a lot of talk about whether we're just trading one national vulnerability to petrostates for another vulnerability to China, specifically in the energy transition. And I guess the counter argument to this is that while you buy oil daily, you only need to source the minerals for let's say a solar panel or a wind turbine once every 10 to 20 years. What's your read on this shifting national dependency problem?

Professor Saleem Ali:

Yeah, so I mean I think we don't have very good data in terms of also the life cycle of the renewable energy infrastructure. It's still a relatively new sector. Ultimately what we want is a circular economy around the infrastructure for solar and wind and so on. And then you wouldn't need to mine, but we need to have some good planning scenarios with recycling of these metals. The real conundrum is you want them to have a long durability, but if they're durable, then you can't recycle them. And if you are going to be upscaling, then that means you have to mine the metals. So when we reach that steady state where we have enough infrastructure where there's a certain amount that's going to be recycled, I think that's several decades hence. And I think we also need to be realistic that for some of these sources like wind, we will never be able to make them a dominant source given the level of demand that we have because the amount of material required would really be quite untenable.

With solar, there's I think greater hope that the technology is becoming much less material intensive and you would be able to have much thinner film solar, which would be part of the regular infrastructure on roofing and so on, and then it would be much easier to produce and hopefully also in terms of durability and recyclability trade-offs coming through. But in terms of this issue about where trading one versus the other, it's the same issue I mentioned before. You've got with oil and gas, also, similarly, geological constraints, you have the Arabian Peninsula because of its fossil history, it's got a lot of fossil fuels because that area at one time was, hundreds of millions of years ago, it was a very dense forested system, and all of that organic material ended up compressing over time and it became fossil fuels. So I think that we have to just recognise as a reality of geology.

Jason Mitchell:

There's a view that certain environmental interests create a kind of constraint to us capacity building. We've talked a little bit about this over the last probably 10, 15 minutes, but I guess I'm wondering, is there a paradox that exists where environmental interests end up undermining or at least endangering US environmental security? How do governments balance, I guess, this security of supply versus environmental impact?

Professor Saleem Ali:

There can be. I mean, I think with environmentalism it's a utopian kind of way of thinking of the world. And the reality is many times we have to make tough decisions and you have to sacrifice certain kinds of environmental ideals for the greater good. And so, as a system scientist, what I try to do is provide the decision makers with tools that they can use to evaluate what kind of environmental trade-offs they're going to make. So we have tools like life cycle analysis in industrial ecology where you can measure the different kinds of environmental impacts of the technologies that you're using. And you compare them and you say, "Okay, this is," for example with nuclear, we all know there is a certain trade-off with reference to nuclear waste. But then you explain and you evaluate whether the nuclear waste, it's what we call relatively low entropy waste because all of the waste is in one place. So if there was a problem, it's easier to manage, it's high risk, but low entropy.

And so if you combine the two and you say, "Well, we've had 70 plus years of experience with nuclear energy, we have seen that there have not been any kind of nuclear waste-oriented major incidents. Even with nuclear power plants, we have not had any kind of," if you look at the safety record and compare with other forms of energy, "we have not had the same level of incidents compared to other sources." And you make a decision. So I think that's what we need to be focusing on, whether it's with nuclear or with wind or with solar, we have to give the public an opportunity to look at the risks and then recognise the trade-offs and environmentalism can lead to a situation where you are at an impasse, the precautionary principle, which often the environmental community uses, that's not a scientific principle.

It's a principle for your own level of risk tolerance. And the reality is that precaution, if you take it to an extreme, you can end up with paralysis. You just do not have then the ability to move. So you have to figure out that sweet spot in terms of managing the risk. And so that's what I think system scientists like me try to do and help inform the debate.

Jason Mitchell:

That's super interesting about the precautionary principle. We've invoked it a number of times, particularly with other scientists, and I do agree with you, but I guess staying on this point. With the Trump administration recently invoking emergency powers to boost US critical minerals production, could we see a wave of approvals for projects that are stuck in the permitting process? I guess I am kind of curious, given your experience in systems work as you've just described, how do we foster an environment of sustainability in industry without undermining competitiveness or environmental security?

Professor Saleem Ali:

Yes, I think there are certain forms of environmental regulations which can be very problematic from the point of view of evaluating risks. Like for example, with biodiversity protections, one has to figure out at some level what level of biodiversity protection and risk is worth the context of not having a project being developed. And because it's much more intangible, it's not directly linked to specific kinds of human health impacts. There may be an indirect link, and there's been a lot of research done on the importance of ecosystem services and so on, and you can present that. But many times you can have a situation where someone will say, "Look, we just have to let this area be untouched because of one species." And you have to make the decision as to whether there's a process whereby you can relocate some projects or if you cannot do that, what kind of other mechanisms can you put in place?

But there needs to be some willingness to also have the regulations be realistic with the needs of society. And I think that has been kind of, the pendulum swung too much one way with reference to the level of impasse you get. And in the United States, of course, we have a very litigious culture in terms of any kind of environmental issue, both for the government as well as for industry. So anytime you have regulations passed by the EPA, the EPA has to have a whole retinue of lawyers because industry is going to sue the EPA saying you're not actually complying with the intent of Congress. And on the other hand, you have EPA that is also going to be pushing back and suing industry for violations. And so you end up in this legal morass, which is much more acute in the United States than it is in many other parts of the world.

Jason Mitchell:

I was going to jump on that point. I mean, we've talked about just now how the commodities world is a world of haves and have nots in terms of deposits, but it kind of feels like a real pinch point lies in the refining, the smelting and processing capabilities. And China has made an incredibly smart strategic play over the last decade plus to dominate the smelting and refining supply at more than I think 90% market share. Critics would say that China was partly able to do that by bypassing a lot of environmental and labour safeguards. It sort of drove this idea that China imported pollution and exported deflation to the world in areas like solar panel production. What's your reading on this and how do you reconcile the two approaches?

Professor Saleem Ali:

Yeah, I think China went through a similar cycle that the United States did. I mean, we all hear about the history of the environmental movement in the US where you had the Cuyahoga River was catching fire because of all the pollutants near Cleveland and you had a massive pollution issue that led to public outcry and that led to changes in the regulatory system. In China, they went through a similar kind of process for sure. The cities became, the air was so dangerous, you were having so many days where children couldn't go to school and so on. And so there was a realisation, "We have to clean up." And that has happened in the last decade or so. They have even had civil society groups in China. In fact, one of the winners of the Goldman Prize that's given in San Francisco for environmental activism was a Chinese activist, Ma Jun, who started an organisation that was aimed at identifying polluters in China and then getting data from public sources for all of the violations that companies had committed and then having an opportunity for the public to sue those companies.

So they actually did go through that process as well, but clearly they have an autocratic system. So it is after a certain point, they're able to cut the cord and say, "Look, this is where the decision has to be made." And in the case of the US, we have a deliberative democracy. And the virtue of that is that if things go wrong, we have a better pathway for self-correction. But that also means that it is inherently less efficient. So there's always going to be a trade-off between efficiency and what we may consider a much more involved pluralistic process for decision-making.

Jason Mitchell:

I was going to add that I think you were referencing the environmental Kuznets Curve in the China case, which I'm familiar with, but I want to jump lanes a little bit here to talk about Ukraine and Greenland. So first, to what degree is Trump's strategy around Ukraine, which is essentially to claim a good part of its lithium, graphite, cobalt and rare metals deposits, kind of a 19th century throwback? I ask is because some have pointed to the Guano Islands Act of 1856 is a historical parallel which helped the US seize unclaimed Pacific Islands that were rich in the fertiliser guano. And second, a recent essay of yours titled Greenland's Mineral Heritage in the Trump Era talks about a scramble for polar resources. What has your experience leading a US National Science Foundation project in Greenland revealed about its strategic resource potential?

Professor Saleem Ali:

Yeah, so we've always had this desire to have certain level of control over resources in the US and other countries have done the same. Much of the colonial era in the 19th century was around resources. It wasn't just minerals, it was whether it's sugar cane in the case of the Caribbean, or vanilla in the case of Madagascar or other places.

So you've always had this sense of we need to be able to have control over supply of natural resources, and the great powers have competed for that. And you mentioned in the case of the Guano Islands, it was for phosphates, for fertilisers, for food production, where Guano is a very valuable resource for that. And with the case of Greenland, there is a long history of actually having engagement on minerals. You've had a history during the early part of the 20th century of cryolite being mined in Greenland. Cryolite was a mineral that was used for aluminium production and it was sort of the secret sauce that was required to allow for aluminium to be extracted from bauxite ore. And in fact, I've written a whole book around that too. It's called Soil to Foil, which is the story of how aluminium that's otherwise such a valuable resource and available all over the world was so difficult to extract.

And it was this cryolite mine in Greenland, which allowed us to then make aluminium in World War I particularly and World War II for the aircraft industry. And that mine was a strategic asset and the US had a military base at the time that was situated in Greenland, and there was a collaboration with Denmark as well in that regard. And then we had a history of uranium mining in Greenland for many years. And so mineral extraction is not new to Greenland in that way. What has happened is that Greenland in the last several years has gained greater autonomy from Denmark. And so it's now a self-governed entity under the Kingdom of Denmark. And so that means the Greenland indigenous community has much more control over decision-making.

And I think President Trump is now seeing an opportunity because of that kind of indigenous self-governance that's happened to say, "Well wait a minute, this may allow us to maybe see if there's potential that they might ally more with the US on resource issues." So let's see. There's been an election in Greenland recently, and a more pro-business party has surprisingly come to power and they are very conscious of not losing their sovereignty, but they may decide to make some strategic alliances more so with the US.

Jason Mitchell:

Interesting. I want to jump to another Forbes article that you'd written. Your most recent one is Making a Ukraine Minerals Deal More Sustainable, where you make the case for why Ukraine-US mineral deal could be a win-win for both sides. And as I've read with estimates as high as 111 billion of mineral resources valued at more than $15 trillion, what distinctions do we need to consider in understanding Ukraine's resource availability versus technologically extractable reserves?

Professor Saleem Ali:

Yeah, so with reference to Ukraine, I think we need to be realistic around what kind of metals are economically viable to extract. And in the article, I made the point that some of these estimates that are provided are actually for what we call geological resources rather than economically viable reserves. There's a big difference between a resource and a reserve in economic geology. We have a lot of resources of different metals everywhere. Like I was giving the example of aluminium, it's one of the most ubiquitous minerals as a metal in the Earth's crust. It's the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust, but that doesn't mean you can go around and just your soil in your backyard has lots of aluminium, but you can't just dig it and extract aluminium from it because you need a certain kind of ore to be able to economically extract it.

You don't want the aluminium to be costing a thousand dollars a kilogramme. And so that's why we have to be clear about what is economically viable. In the case of Ukraine, we have not had any independent assessment of what is the economically viable reserve for most of these rare earth type of metals that are often being mentioned. There is very good data on titanium, for example, which Ukraine has been mining, and titanium is an important metal. It's used in aviation, it's used as it's a light and strong metal also. But some of this was a little bit misplaced in terms of the scale and scope. Where I do agree with that there's an opportunity for mineral diplomacy is that it can be part of the equation of a larger deal. And that is true not just for Ukraine, it's true of the Democratic Republic of Congo, it's true of Indonesia, of many of these larger mineral rich countries where if there's a conflict, there's some other kind of issue that needs to be addressed, you can have that as part of the bargaining mechanism.

And for Ukraine, what would've been viable is to have some kind of economic exploration of minerals, having independent estimates done of the reserves and see what is possible to extract, and the US could cooperate on that. We have some very good places like the Colorado School of Mines and others that have expertise in those areas. And so that kind of science diplomacy with Ukraine I think would be very productive. But I think we should not raise the expectations that this is suddenly going to be a bonanza because we did that with Afghanistan. You remember there were all these wild estimates of trillions of dollars of minerals in Afghanistan and often misquoting USGS also some of the journalists who covered Afghanistan in the mid-2000s. So we have to think about this carefully and analyse it with due process.

Jason Mitchell:

I was going to say that's really interesting, the connection with Ukraine and Afghanistan. Where's the over exuberance misplaced? Where do the experts get it wrong in terms of assessing the potential value of resources?

Professor Saleem Ali:

Well, rare earths is this exotic term that journalists love, which is the fact that it's rare is made it into it. Essentially the rare earth metals chemically are what we call the lanthanides at the bottom of the periodic table. Those are what we call the rare earths. And those metals are important and they're critical in very small amounts for certain technologies. You need neodymium, for example, for wind turbine magnets and highly efficient magnets, they require them. But we have to be conscious of the fact that the total volume of the rare earth industry currently annually is less than $5 billion.

So when we are coming up with these astronomical estimates for trillions of dollars of research, who is going to use them for even if you upscale that? So that's what I mean is the exuberance is partly due to the fact that there hasn't been the analysis done of the reserve. But the second is just looking at the total market value of how much is going to be needed and utilised for, especially when they use the term rare earth. With titanium, with aluminium, with other metals, with base metals, it could be much more because the volume and use is much more, but it is much more this exoticizing of the term rare earth, which I find problematic. And all the think tanks in DC have jumped on it and the journalists love it, but it's sometimes quite disconnected from the actually economic imperatives.

Jason Mitchell:

That's really interesting. I was going to ask, what does that old adage that exists in energy markets, this idea that the cure to high prices is high prices, what does that mean in metals markets in the context of environmental security? Do higher prices serve, and you'd think this intuitively, as a signal for innovation and a big driver for greater investment in mining capacity? Or do they end up doing the reverse? Do they end up actually being an obstacle for the energy transition? They sort of price themselves out of the market because of their scarcity?

Professor Saleem Ali:

Yeah, I mean I think the higher prices can certainly lead to greater interest in investing in projects. The problem with the mining investments is what we discussed earlier is that there's such a time lag, that the development is going to take so long and that in the meantime you could have a substitution of a metal and that could lead to a change. And that's something that happened to some degree with lithium and cobalt because you've had a lot of demand for cobalt for electric car batteries as well as for lithium. And so there was an exuberance around that. A lot of the prices went high, you had greater level of investment. But then there was this slight shift in technologies. We had moved towards the lithium ion phosphate batteries more so that didn't require as much cobalt, granted that they were not as useful for certain kinds of cars because the lithium ion phosphate batteries do not work as well in cold climates.

And so they work very well in India and they work well in parts of coastal China, but they're not going to work very well in Minnesota. And so you have to think about then, maybe also there's this disconnect about the market not understanding what's going to be the ultimate consumer outcome of the use of the materials. And similarly with lithium, you have conversations about sodium ion batteries and so on, and that has created changes in the way lithium prices have fluctuated as well. So there is this potential that the high prices would lead to greater investment, but because of this time delay and because of the substitution effect, it's a more complex interaction.

Jason Mitchell:

Interesting. In a recent TED Talk, you talked about the complexities of geopolitical tensions between the US and China, for instance, which are complicated by domestic conflicts around socio-environmental risks, which we've talked about earlier. What's interesting is you've suggested that a solution is in a sense this planetary mechanism or in effect a mineral trust as you called it. Is this still feasible when international organisations initiatives, the Bretton Woods institutions are currently being challenged at the moment? Could something like this exist in a, I guess a neo-mercantilist world where companies appear increasingly willing to weaponize their resources?

Professor Saleem Ali:

So the idea of a minerals trust is largely focused on this notion that certain kinds of materials are essential for humanity for the greater good of our civilization. It's a similar kind of concept to how we think about a common heritage of humankind for certain kinds of medicines almost. You might think about, "We need these, these are essential medicines," or something like that. And we have used this concept for common heritage of humankind for International Seabed Authority regulation of minerals, but that is not under sovereign state control. It's in international waters. So if you have the Law of the Sea Convention allows for the International Seabed Authority to issue licences for exploration and ultimately for exploitation of minerals, but with due process and environmental controls because those minerals are a common, what they refer to legally as a common heritage of humankind.

So what the mineral trust argues is that even in conditions where you have sovereign states that control natural resources, and in fact there is a doctrine which goes back to the 1960s that states that that nations have control over their natural resources and have a sovereign right to extract and decide what they do with them. So the mineral trust says, "Yes, that doctrine is fine, but for specific minerals which we need for the green transition," because this is about the sustainability of the planet, "we need to be able to make some concessions on that state sovereignty whereby countries cannot constrain the supply of those minerals." And so they would sell those minerals. It would still be a market mechanism. We are not trying to subvert the market. They would still sell the minerals into this trust, and the trust would then make sure that those minerals which are needed by these green technology firms are able to have access for that. And so the trust would have both the supply and the demand sectors as trustees. And that decision making would be made through that.

The trust would not control the money. The money would still go to the countries, the suppliers, but it would control the actual stockpile of the minerals themselves so that there isn't this panic that we had in 2012 that you were alluding to where China suddenly constrained the supply. There would be much more assurance around supply of the minerals, and you are absolutely right that we are moving away from multilateralism, but at the same time, this is a win-win for countries who want to make sure that they have buyers and also for those countries that are going to be buying that there's going to be supply. So in many ways it is a win-win and it's something that has been explored some years ago under the UN Conference on Trade and Development, but it was done without the environmental imperative. It was done for one metal, for tin, and it was done in the context of just making sure that certain developing countries are able to get access to markets.

So what we are proposing in this, and is there is some interest in the idea also from the UN Economic Commission for Europe, they've talked about a mineral bank similar to the idea of a trust, and I'm currently actually working on a paper with colleagues from across the world where we will flesh out this idea in more detail. And so stay tuned. We are also engaging with various governments, particularly the Canadian government, which is going to be chairing the G7 this year, the group of seven large economies, liberal economies I should say, and then potentially also with the G20 down the road, if relations improve particularly with Russia. So that's the plan. I think it is a way to prevent this race to the bottom, the issue where every country is trying to start its own mine and you have environmentally bad outcomes and economically also problematic outcomes.

Jason Mitchell:

Yeah, it's super interesting. I mean, I want to stay a little bit on these challenges to multilateralism in today's environment. There have been a number of multilateral initiatives and alliances aimed at diversifying and securing global critical mineral supply chains. I'm thinking of the Mineral Security Partnership, which was launched just in 2022 and includes the US, EU, Australia, Canada, Japan, I think South Korea and others. But how have they fared? And again, I guess I'm interested, given the tone and tolerance around multilateralism certainly seems to be tested currently. Will they survive?

Professor Saleem Ali:

Yes. I mean the Mineral Security Partnership, and some of these were just friendshoring clubs. You try to have your own group of countries that are aligned with you politically give you some kind of assurance around mineral supply. But they were not multilateral in the sense of when we are talking about the United Nations system or other kinds of mechanisms like the IGF, the Inter-Governmental Forum on mining and metals. And so with the mineral trust also, we may start off with a group of countries that have voluntary interest in joining and also on the other end, the technology companies which will be using the minerals. I think the vision should be down the road that this should become much more at the scale of the international system with potentially organisations like the World Bank and others being much more engaged in this. So that's how I would hope that the idea would evolve because that would prevent this just very narrow view of it.

The Mineral Security Partnership was a good starting point, but it was still very much focused on this small group of politically aligned countries rather than looking at where are the minerals most ecologically and economically efficient to extract and making sure that we have assurance of supply from those sources where they are much more efficient to extract. And just like the US government is very focused on efficiency economically, they should be focused on economic efficiency at the level of where the minerals are extracted and also the environmental aspects. The energy usage for example, you want to be able to extract and process those minerals in places where you have clean, reliable energy. That's why in Canada you've got all these smelters because you have hydropower from Quebec, which is clean and reliable. Or in Iceland where you've got an aluminium smelter because you've got great geothermal energy as well as hydropower, and in Norway as well, similarly. So you want to be able to leverage those places where you have that capacity as well.

Jason Mitchell:

Yeah, there are a lot of critical mineral reserves located in the global south. How do you see resource-rich developing countries ensure that they can benefit in an equitable way from the extraction of these minerals without falling victim to resource dependency or adaptation? I guess I'm thinking of that notion of dependency theory and international relations. What role do you see international organisations playing and fostering and cultivating fair and sustainable development in these regions?

Professor Saleem Ali:

Yes, that was another motivation for this idea of the Mineral Trust was to ensure that the global south is able to really benefit from this mineral bonanza and that it's done in a responsible way. And so for example, a country like Burundi has a very high-grade rare earth deposit, but it has not been able to really have an extraction agreement because of political instability as well as also the South African company that was involved has not been able to find the right mix in terms of what the government wants. And if you have an international multilateral arrangement, there's much more likelihood that there would be the ability to actually support this kind of extraction. And then you could also have more leverage with countries where the governments are potentially not following international norms to say, "Look, this could be connected to other aspects of your involvement in the multilateral system."

So I think the global south could really benefit from such an arrangement and it would prevent rank exploitation. We've all heard about the situation in Congo with the cobalt mines and child labour and all the issues that were highlighted and Cobalt Red that was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. And there are genuine concerns about those issues for sure. And so I think a multilateral system would also prevent that. We don't have any international agreement on minerals. We have treaties on climate change, we have treaties on biodiversity, we have nothing on minerals. And I find it quite astonishing that even the climate change treaty, all these targets were set and there was no analysis really done in terms of what would be the material needs to meet those targets. And that's been one of my roles with the international resource panel at the UN is to make sure there's a constant reality check on the material needs for those kinds of targets.

Jason Mitchell:

So I want to finish up with a few more technical questions. You mentioned Cobalt and Congo. The problems with cobalt and Congo have been a long time dirty secret of the battery industry. Fast-forward a few years and the industry pivoted to sodium ion and lithium iron phosphate. I mean, we've seen a number of estimates being cut in terms of those forecasts, but I guess when you think about these dirty secrets, these kinds of issues where substitutions for critical minerals can drive a better outcome, how do you think about that? Are there a lot of opportunities?

Professor Saleem Ali:

There are some opportunities, but I always say I'm trained as a chemist and we are confined by the periodic table. There's a reason why lithium has advantages over other metals. It's the lightest metal on the periodic table. And so when you have a small atom, it's going to have very different properties than a larger atom. And so the energy density that you get from lithium and you have the advantages, there will be some trade-offs when you use sodium. So you can substitute, but then you will just need to calibrate as to what kind of other advantages you are willing to forego. I often say the lead acid battery has had tremendous staying power. The technology is like 200 years old, but we still have lead acid batteries and they're very effective because of certain fundamental chemical properties that come from having lead in those batteries.

So I think we have to be open to substitutes and we should certainly encourage innovation, but we need to recognise that there will be limits to innovation. And we've seen that, whether it's with computing power or with other aspects. You could have some major leaps in technology like quantum computing, but that will have its own material needs and we'll have to think about what those are. So absolutely innovate, but keep in mind that there's going to be some plateauing of innovation and there will be some trade-offs inherently with substitution.

Jason Mitchell:

Second, recycling doesn't seem to be very appreciated. It's a core part of the transition. And that said, and I've heard Michael Lieberich talk out in his podcast that he said that with a 95% proven recycling rate and a ten-year life, over 50% of battery minerals mined today could still be in use in 130 years, add 5% performance improvement per cycle, and they'll be delivering services effectively forever. How do you think about the potential about the innovation and economic curve behind recycling, particularly in this area?

Professor Saleem Ali:

Yeah, absolutely. Once we have enough stock of those minerals, then it'll be much easier to recycle them. The key is to make sure we have the stock. Right now with electric cars, the demand is growing much faster than the recycling stock is going to be available. So for that, you will have to mine, but eventually, and in fact, even some of these companies who are talking about deep sea mining, they have said that they eventually want to go into the recycling business. The business plan suggests that they're going to mine as much as they can and then eventually that metal is going to be tracked and then recycled, and they're going to make, especially the electrodes are very easily recyclable. Lithium sometimes can be more challenging at times, but it's also now they have developed tools to do that.

So that's absolutely the way we should be going towards a circular economy, especially for batteries which are very modular and you can track them. You know where they are. The lead acid battery is almost a hundred percent recycled. I mean, they're taken and they're modular, so it's very easy. You go to, anytime your battery runs dry, you take it to the car repair shop and they're going to take it back to the recycling arena. So I think that is absolutely an achievable goal, but it may be several decades, hence before we have enough stock.

Jason Mitchell:

Good. I'm glad you mentioned deep sea mining because that was next on the list. I mean, it's been talked about for decades, but it seems to have been building momentum in recent years. Do you think that deregulation off of the Trump administration could unlock deep sea mining?

Professor Saleem Ali:

Deep sea mining, there are different locations and forms of this. You could have deep sea mining in US territorial waters, which the US can decide what to do with that. There's an agency called Bureau of Ocean Energy Management that regulates that. And depending on how they decide to move with those regulations, it could be done in US territorial waters. Norway has allowed for exploration and its territorial waters that's been very contentious and there's some political wrangling over it currently. But then you have the international waters, which is what a lot of the activism is against, is deep sea mining through the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and it's under the International Seabed Authority, which is headquartered in Jamaica. But where the mining is being proposed is in the Central Pacific in an area called the Clarion-Clipperton zone, which is far from any inhabited islands, and it's very much in the middle of the ocean and in very deep waters.

And that's the kind of mining that is currently being talked about a lot in the media. And my own view with this is we use the same tools that we do to evaluate other kinds of tradeoffs. You can do a life cycle analysis and see what's the environmental harm that might come from mining in the deep sea versus on land, and you figure out for maybe certain deposits, it makes sense to mine in the deep sea. So what they're focused on is what we call these polymetallic nodules. And these are very highly concentrated metal deposits that have been deposited over thousands of years. And because they're naturally concentrated, you don't have as much waste generation when you process them. So you don't have these large tailings, dam issues that you have with terrestrial mines, but you do have concerns on biodiversity. That's why I was saying biodiversity is the most challenging and intangible issue around environmental aspects because you have marine biologists who spent their entire careers studying these ecosystems, and they're passionate about what will happen to some of the microbes and the other organisms that live in the deep sea, and those are reasonable concerns.

But then you have to compare them with, well, what if you're mining nickel in the Coral Triangle in Indonesia, which is terrestrial nickel mining, but has also many different environmental harms. And so the issue is then, and that's one of the reasons why having some kind of international governance mechanism around minerals would be so useful because then you could have some kind of an evaluation of those kinds of trade-offs and you could figure out, "Okay, we are going to mine for this much in the terrestrial areas, and then maybe if we are going to have a threshold after which it could be very pollution intensive, then maybe the minerals from the deep sea can supplement that based on the demand that we have."

And that would prevent planetary level harm, and you would be able to find a more optimal outcome. So I think deep sea mining may have a place in the future, but only if we are willing to offset it with reduction on terrestrial mining. You don't want to just have a complete free-for-all where you have extraction everywhere and you end up with a worse outcome for both the land and the sea.

Jason Mitchell:

Got it. So last question. Blockchain was supposed to be the game changer for traceability in both the hard and soft commodity space. We've been hearing about it for many, many years. Is it actually happening and where are the impediments?

Professor Saleem Ali:

Well with blockchains, mainly the application was to ensure that you are able to have a tracking of where the metal is coming from, and then the point of origin becomes enshrined in terms of environmental and social performance and so on. So if you have potentially metals coming from a conflict zone, then you could be able to prevent some corruption in the process. What the blockchain does, it's very difficult to tamper. So once you put the data into the blockchain that this metal was mined in Nevada and then it's going through all these different steps and it reaches its final use, then it's unlikely it's going to be tampered along the way. Same is true of gemstones. It was proposed by De Beers for diamonds that you could actually track. "Okay, this is the serial number, this is the photograph of the diamond. It was mined in Botswana, and here it's been put in the blockchain and all of that's being tracked."

But blockchain is garbage in-garbage out. If you don't have good mechanisms for making sure that the point of origin is accurate, then it's useless down the road. So some of this is gimmicky when people talk about blockchain because you only need it if you do not have supply security verification from where the source is coming from. The second dimension of blockchain and minerals is the amount of metals needed for the computing infrastructure for blockchain, and that is another huge area of research that has been, it's still ongoing. And in fact, we are working also on a paper around what is the material needs for artificial intelligence, because all of that infrastructure, the chips, the various servers, the same is true of the blockchain infrastructure, require enormous amounts of materials as well as energy. Energy is better studied, but the materials are very understudied. So that's a separate area also, which deserves more attention.

Jason Mitchell:

Excellent. Great. So it's been fascinating to talk about what the energy transition means in the context of environmental security, how multilateral initiatives and increasingly national efforts are working to reshape supply and demand dynamics, and why it's critical we continue to rethink ways to diversify and secure global critical mineral supply chains. So I'd like to really thank you for your time and insights. I'm Jason Mitchell, head of Responsible Investment Research at Mad Group here today with Professor Saleem Ali at the University of Delaware. Many thanks for joining us on a sustainable future, and I hope you'll join us on our next podcast episode. Saleem, thank you so much for this. It has been fantastic.

Professor Saleem Ali:

Thank you, Jason.