What is a Critical Mineral? Preview with Dr. Nedal Nassar

Jesse Reimink: Hey it's PlanetGeo, let's go

Today, we are really excited. We have an excerpt from an interview with Dr. Nedal Nassar, who is a PhD industrial ecologist. Dr. Nassar is the chief of the US Geological Survey’s Material Flow Analysis Section, a leading member of the US National Science and Technology Council. And in 2019, won the very important Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

Dr. Nassar is an expert on critical minerals and how they flow through our societies and tune in next week for the full interview with Dr. Nassar. Remember follow us on social medias we are @planetgeocast. Send us an email planetgeocast@gmail.com. And we have a new website www.planetgeocast.com. Check it out.

You make in the presentations and the papers, I've seen of yours. You make these amazing flowcharts. I don't know if they're waterfall charts or kind of flow charts, but they're beautiful. And they're basically like take one element or one critical mineral in. And you have, the bandwidth is proportional to the, the amount of that material at any given process. So you go from mining to, you know, consumer end products to recycling and some recycling loops back around and gets put in at different stages of the elements life cycle. But they're absolutely beautiful. I was blown away by, I think I saw tantalum one in a receding in one, like these are so cool. So I think Chris, I want to kind of talk about these a little bit, cause they're just really impressive. Can you walk us through constructing that from like pick one element and maybe be like, how do you even begin constructing that

Chris Bolhuis: Ya can you paint, a picture of take an element, an important element maybe, and walk us through that. Is that, is that possible to do?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Sure. So I think what you're referring to are, uh, Called Sankey diagrams. Uh, and they're famous ones. Yeah. It's somebody's name I believe. And I think the most famous one is showing, uh, Napoleon's troops going into Russia and being decimated and coming back. And you see that the volume of the troops just shrinking. So it looked that one up there. They're really, really beautiful, um, maps in terms of doing one for a mineral commodity, let's say tantalum as. So typically we start with a mining, right? So we started with where's this mind who's mining it. So tantalum is typically mined in the great lakes region in central Africa. So

Chris Bolhuis: can I interrupt one second? Can you tell us what tantalum is used for?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. Yes. So tantalum is used most often is most famously used in capacitors, which are using electronics, including your laptops, your cell phones, et cetera.

All right. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. Yep. No, that's good. So tantalum is. In the DRC. So the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, it's pretty fuzzy regarding what's going on there. You may have heard of the Dodd-Frank act that was passed by Congress, uh, over a decade ago. I guess part of it requires that us companies identify where they're getting their, they call them the three TGS. So it tantalum tungsten, tin and gold. Right? So these are the three TG. So tantalum is one of the. Um, and so it's, it's there because of the issue of conflict resources. So you may have heard of the movie blood diamond. Oh, yeah. What are the same issue with, with tantalum? The concern about quote unquote, artisanal mining.

There's a lot of that going on in the DRC, a lot of concerns about child labor, a lot of concerns about, um, instability in the region because of, you know, uh, what's going on there. So a lot of it gets mined in the DRC and then gets shipped off typically through a port in Tanzania. Uh, and it goes off to China. And so. We have folks on the ground from, from our survey, typically during the pandemic, we've traveled to a lot less, as you can imagine, trying to understand what's going on in the industries of those countries. We also send out surveys to thousands of companies to understand, you know, how much they're producing. So we get that information either directly or indirectly from those primary sources.

Jesse Reimink: So, this is not like, you know, a reviewing company, quarterly earnings reports or something like that. You're sending people to go check on the ships that are sending them out. Cause you just don't really know how. Coming out of these, these types of mining activities, is that what I'm kind of getting here?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: It's a combination of sort of all, all the above as, especially for things like tantalum, where we have limited visibility about what's going on. So we do look at company annual reports. We do send out surveys to try to understand, well, you know, can you answer these questions for us about how much you're producing as a company?

And then we do have people that go on, you know, on the ground to try to understand. Going on and really get, get the inside and make sure that the, you know, sort of some ground-truthing, which literally ground-truthing, you know, does this number make sense or not? So once we feel comfortable, we have a production number of mine production number.

Uh, we then try to track, typically this is going to be in a form of a, of a mineral concentrate. We typically try to track, you know, where is it flowing from there? You know, a smelter might be nearby or it might be. And so we typically look at trade statistics to try to understand where the commodity is flowing from, which port, to which port, or please from which country to which country, the problem often with these minor metals is.

The trade codes are not granular enough, right? So they might be lumping several commodities into a basket because volumes are so small or the monetary value is just so little. So nobody cares to spend enough time to say, well, this is tantalum and that's niobium. Right. Um, and oftentimes they, they combine weird things together.

Tantalum is actually, I wish it was combined with BIM. It's typically combined with like vanadium and an elemental boron. It's like w who made this decision?

Jesse Reimink: Wow. Okay. So we're tracking the, or around, and then consumer goods. The consumer end of it is, is, I mean, how you like putting a finger on that amount?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: We do a lot of sleuthing, right? So we're trying to put a puzzle together and try to piece it together and say, okay, you know, we have this market report that says this much, we have information regarding these industries and what they consume. And we can try to do sort of an intensity metric to say, okay, well, we know this many vehicles are being produced in the United States.

We know the average content of, of a vehicle is this. And we can sort of parse it out to say, well, this is the expected amount that might be an in, in, in said product. Um, and once we have that number, then the question is, okay, the product is now in use and we use what is called a lifetime model to say, okay, your cell phone or your, your vehicle is going to be used for a certain number of years. And then we expect it to come out of use. And so, again, it's a black box because nobody's reporting a lot of this information. So what we need to do is provide a lifetime distribution to say, okay, your vehicle typically lasts 15 years. Plus, or minus maybe five years. And so we build our model to say, it's like a little system, right?

So it entered this, this year. We expected to come out in 2030. So that's coming out of use and then we need to figure out, so if we're looking at the snapshot in time today, we may or may not get statistics regarding what is actually being recycled. And so if we do, then we can look at the difference and say, okay, well, this is how much was recycled. This is how much we expected to come out of use. So the difference is missing, right? It's either they're not using it or, or they're discarded it.

Chris Bolhuis: So like you take the, the amount that we have and then use, I think with tantalum and I think it was like, we lose 7% ish in production. Right, right. Is that about right?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yes.

Chris Bolhuis: And then where's that next step where we, where we lose it. Is it recycling?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Yeah. So it really is. So you could have a little bit of dissipation during use, right? So not really for tantalum, um, for other commodities. So you can imagine if you're, uh, using titanium for your pigments. Right? So your, uh, for a paint, for example, you're, you're losing it as you're using for most things.

Yeah. Most of the losses are not going to. There, there are going to occur after use to what we call end of life loss. So after you use them, it may be discarded either it's collected or not collected. If it is collected, you go through some sort of recycling system that then brings it back.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. So like that would be your cell phone sitting in your drawer, right? End of life use it's it's taken out because nothing happened to it. Right?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: Exactly. So it's no longer being used, but it's also not in the recycling system and not, not being utilized. Okay. And

Chris Bolhuis: what kind of numbers are we talking about?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: I think for tantalum, the overall recycling rate is less than 20%, like 18% of, of tantalum that's coming out of use as being recycled.

Chris Bolhuis: Wow. Wow. Well, that's, that's a shockingly known low now. Would you agree

Dr. Nedal Nassar: with that? Like, yeah. And it's actually probably one of the better ones. Um, I think for, for some of the base metals, you may be getting up to 50, 60%. That's that's amazing. But again, for some of these really, really small commodities, like every flat panel display, for example, contains indium, right?

So you don't need very much of it, but you need it for, uh, what's called indium tin oxide. It's a conductor. And virtually none of the Indians as recycled post-consumer use, we do recycle quite a bit of it during the manufacturing stage. Right? So when we're, when we're building the flat panel displays, we do a really good job of collecting that scrap in the manufacturing, scrap and recycling it. But after use, it's not recycled

Chris Bolhuis: 'cause they end up where in a landfill

Dr. Nedal Nassar: pretty much. Yeah. Wow. Or if, if the, if the panels get recycled, they're not going to get recycled for, for the Indian. They'll get recycled for, again, the things that matter, monetarily copper and the precious metal. Okay.

Chris Bolhuis: So should there be a recycling program for this kind of thing with flat pan or flat panel screens? Like, should there be something for this.

Dr. Nedal Nassar: I think it would make a lot of sense. You can imagine closing if we go back to the original discussion about risk and the components of risk. So we have our likelihood of disruption, our exposure. This would close the exposure because essentially if it's already here, right, if we already brought the products into the United States, if we're recycling them, then we can.

We're not exposed to that foreign supply disruption. So we have the materials that we need here. Assuming, you know, they're in the right quantities and the right grades and in the right forms, et cetera. But again, I think a lot of times they cannot. Is what, what drives the show? Now? I think the big movement today is for electric vehicles, right?

That's what everybody wants to talk about. And the big thing for electric vehicles, because it makes it a significant component of the vehicle cost is the battery. And so there, you do see a lot of companies stepping up and saying, Hey, we're going to set up battery recycling plants because we can see 10, 15 years from now when the battery is, are ready to be recycled, we're going to have large volumes.

So you see a lot of company. Stepping up and saying, we're going to set up a recycling plant either somewhere in north America or Europe.

Chris Bolhuis: So it's an infrastructure thing, isn't it?

Dr. Nedal Nassar: It is. It's, it's absolutely an infrastructure thing. It's, it's a logistical logistics thing. In addition to, of course, there's always going to be technical issues, but often times when, when we get the material, we often have ways to solve the technical issues of how do you actually get, get the material that you want out.

Jesse Reimink: Hey, that's a wrap for the preview. Join us next week for the full interview with Dr. . Olivia Leon is our social media intern. You can follow us and see all of that content and our social medias at planet geo cast on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Send us an email play at geo cast at g-mail dot com.

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