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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Antonia and today I'm joined by Laura and Jasmin to talk about metals that are used in technology what exactly we're using and how critical
they are for modern life. So Laura this was a topic that you suggested what's about metals got your attention probably nearly 10 years ago now when I was still doing research at University of Manchester I went to a lot of conferences some of the conferences they were quite broad so some of the sessions weren't necess directly related to my work so I came across a lot of talks that were talking about uses of different Metals in different Technologies like smartphones and solar
panels and all sorts of different things and it just kind of really opened my eyes to how natural resources are used and what they're used for and there is some really wild chemistries out there that you'd never have thought of that end up in materials that end up in our homes it's actually kind of similar to when I was researching in my postgraduate studies about the energy industry and whether or not we have enough material to reach uh Net Zero which is the target for minimizing
adverse effects from climate change and Jasmine you are still working in this kind of field now what about criticality of materials is an interest for you in sustainability one of the areas of my research is something called life cycle assessment which is it's a holistic environmental impact assessment methodology and typically in life cycle assessment you compare different indicators like climate change water scarcity Etc and something that I've found quite common in my research when
I've been looking at low carbon or decarbonization Technologies versus fossil fuels is that the low carbon options have typically like much higher metals and mineral demands versus the fossil fuels so obviously if we're going to be like decarbonizing and using a lot more renewable energy a lot more battery storage whether or not we have the metals and minerals needed to make these things it's going to be like crucially important in terms of whether that we actually successfully transition to a
fully renewable energy system that's a really important Point essentially we kind of want to move away from fossil fuels because they are non-renewable resources but if we are using different materials in a unsustainable way such as metals and minerals then it's not really solving the problem we we still kind of have an unsustainable future I think to sort of start off with let's talk about what kind of materials are important in this field I'm sure most people are like
familiar with stuff like aluminium and steel and iron but there are also lots of different metals and materials used in making wind turbines solar panels batteries Etc yeah there like lots of different metals that are really important for like these different Technologies so for example like C lithium Platinum so for the energy industry there are a few that they don't seem particularly exotic to me they're quite familiar gold nickel and lithium we did a podcast episode on lithium a
few years ago specifically about um electric vehicles and whether there is really enough lithium out there to help support this growing demand for batteries in the vehicles and we never really answered that question but what was interesting was um the way that lithium is extracted from various countries doesn't sound all that sustainable to me no lithium has I'm sure you've been taught in like secondary school chemistry it's a really reactive chemical so like you need to
when you're extracting it so reactive like a bark yeah like a bark from a dog well time there much it's really reactive so obviously you need to make sure it doesn't come in contact with any water cuz then that would be quite bad when you mine it there's like specific processes that you have to use and in like some maybe like lithium mining it's actually a co-product or a product when you're mining other metals so like aluminium or um nickel I know that for aluminium nickel mining you definitely
produce Cobalt as a byproduct so an aspect of like mining for Metals is like whether or not the resource is like the main product that you're trying to extract or just like a CO co-product that would sometimes then be sent to like waste or whether not it's something that we would want to like actually go about recovering but because lithium is such an important metal nowadays because there's like a really big demand for battery storage for like electric vehicles but also for like smartphones
laptops and also like large scale battery storage for grid electricity like they we we're seeing more dedicated lithium mines now one of the reports by the international enery agency said that over the next two decades the demand for lithum for energy is going to be about 90% yeah when I looked at some old statistics from the US Geological Society they look at um sort of overall in the world how much reserves we have and how much is being mined each year in 2018 sorry 2017 48% of the end use for
lithium was towards batteries and last year it was 87% so that already is kind of hitting that total share of the demand so we're going to have to rapidly upscale the sort of mining operations which also means extracting more material out of the earth to get what is going to be mixed in to the minerals and into the solid it's going to be interesting to see how quickly we can do that because we need rapid decarbonization not just eventually yeah I would also add on to
that I think it's more like reason to put more efforts into better ways of trying to recycle l I because currently very little lithium in lithium ion batteries is actually recycled and obviously a lot of it's going into like just going for Waste Disposal so if we could find ways of recovering the lithium then that would really help out in terms of like reducing the additional amount that we need to mine either that or we find a new battery technology that doesn't use
a metal like lithium that is hard to recycle and kind of not that common well I think lithium actually is quite abundant in the Earth it's just the difficult to extract exactly when I was doing my studies I looked at lithium batteries and actually the chemistry of the battery determined how easy it was to recycle or should I say how economical it was to recycle there was a popular cheaper chemistry lithium manganese oxide which people preferred because it was cheaper to make because
of the manganese but because of that uh compound people actually were less inclined to recycle it compared to lithium Cobalt so even the design of what you're going to use matters so I find it crazy that you would make something that you then can't recover the resources from because you've already put all the effort into getting it out the ground right so why wouldn't you want to retain it entropy my my thought is everything tends towards entropy everything turns to a mess how
much more effort it is to try and tidy that up compared to just getting it fresh but surely getting it it fresh is still an effort sort of against entropy because it's distributed kind of randomly through parts of the Earth yeah I don't know I just I think um there are some companies that have started to get into the circular economy Vibe I don't know about any Electronics ones to do but you you clothing manufacturers that do they take back their products at the
end and then remake it into something I think that should be the same for electronics there is stuff for electronics it just depends on the type of electronics so for Batteries it's still very limited Just Because the actual technology to extract the lithium still very early stages but there's like Technologies for like recycling other types Electronics like circuit boards there were challenges with that as well so one of the reasons that electronics are becoming more and more efficient and
smaller is because they're using more a greater diversity of elements from the periodic table which makes them more complicated which then makes it more difficult to separate things out again yeah easier to mix things up than it is to pull them apart I guess apparently I just think it needs more effort to design those processes I think companies have been so fixated on making a product and designing stuff to make something that they've not thought about designing
a process to recycle something yeah and I guess this not to go too much into sort of policy and and legislation but that is something that uh is discussed in sort of like the European Parliament about the producer responsibility how much of it is down to the end user to make it back to recycling or is it down to the maker and designer to make sure it can be recycled or reused or returned back to them to actually make a brand new one um I think there are there are
some good projects where people have found you know incentivizing people to return stuff like smartphones you know that takeback scheme you if you trade in your old phone you get some money off your new phone that actually helps get people to not just hoard uh the valuable metals that are in uh electronics but like Jasmine said I think batteries are like lithium iron batteries in particular are still harder to recycle compared to like which used to be more standard was lead acid and you kind of
crack it open pour out the acid and you have left over lead that sounds so unpleasant yeah really Pleasant in industry but you guys also mentioned gold as well I know so little about the energy industry is gold a particularly important um chemical element for energy because Gold's a precious metal there's just always demand so when you add in more demand it just like it really just increases the price so I think in terms of like gold scarcity it's really more from an
economic perspective because like gold is literally a marker of like how things are are going economically so when the price of gold goes up you know things are like really going downhill again I dug around for some statistics about gold and for use in technology and electronics it's about 15% of the share like 50% was jewelry and then the other large proportion was for currency in Banks so people literally being able to trade or being able to say we have this
much money in Reserve at the bank so I mean gold is like a really good like semiconductor but we couldn't possibly afford to use it Hest time so that's why we don't but in like applications where it's really important you can and justify the the cost in it but interestingly gold and aluminium were some more recycled materials so you one of your complaints La was why do people not recycle these things more is because it's not an established sort of value and the supply chain being available for
it all right so gold because it's of value to other Industries like banking is more desirable yeah so so if you made everything out of gold yeah would also add in that uh not too sure about aluminium but gold is definitely easier to recycle cuz it's not a very reactive metal so if you just melt it that's all you really need to do is aluminium easy to recycle cuz it's got such a it's like really difficult to make isn't it into pure aluminium if you do have like good sources of scrap
aluminium it's really easy to recycle cuz you just need to m melt it but in terms of like if you have aluminium mixed in with other things like for example you've got some Tim foil that it's got like food on it you need to like scrape the food off before you can recycle the the aluminium would it not just burn off it depends on like other things like whether or not that's something that is in the recycling facility or whether not you need to like remove impurities before they go in
because aluminium is still a reactive metal I see but the good news is 55 % of the volume of new aluminium was from recycled aluminium so it just goes to show there is some circularity in certain things yeah very random from in fact I think it was maybe during Napoleon's times it was when they first discovered how to produce aluminium it was actually worth more than gold so like all the aristocrats and people instead of gold cery they had aluminium cery but then they discovered how to
make aluminium cheap you could say that about lots of other technology like um producing high quality steel that was really difficult way back when and then a process was created that suddenly made it really accessible yeah now now it's the basis of a lot of our buildings I mean it's the essential to building exactly and that means it gets used more right so I assume this is similar to use in the energy industry you guys mentioned that shifting to more renewable Technologies means more use of
more chemical elements right yeah and again it's the same in electronics when I was looking into this I went down so many rabbit holes there is so many different parts of the periodic table used to make materials for electronic components uh so I had to focus it down somehow and I did come out with what I think is quite a good example of explaining how Material Science kind of develops was a discovery made by IBM a couple of decades ago to improve data density storage and hard disk drives
apparently the storage medium is um I think it's platinum and it holds you know zeros and ones that are created by the magnetic charge whether um magnetic charge magnetic poles whether they point one way or another right apparently they used to lie horizontally on this Platinum medium and they found that by putting a really thin layer of ruthenium like three atoms thick of ruthenium that made the magnetic charge then flips it was upright so they could all stack them
closer together so it led to increased data densities wow yeah which then led to lots of people wanting to buy ruthenium for the same purpose and it put this squeeze on the market it's the price of ruthenium shot up and it's since gone back down how did they find that out I don't think they would tell you because it's a company so it'll be a secret but knowing what I know having spoken to lots of other material scientists about their inventions sometimes it's a bit of well we think
these elements might work let's do a bit of trial and error other times it's by complete accident yeah I wonder what it is about ruthenium that helped it it's it's not a transition metal it's only the bottom row which I cannot remember it's like L lanides and the lanides I don't I'm not sure I would be able to find anything out because it was created by IBM but it must affect how the electrons like to sit in the Platinum layer um honestly if you if you try and ask me to explain it's about
spin states of electrons and all sorts and it gets into physics and we need a physicist to explain it properly I think this is something where I was just like yeah I think I can understand as far as it's probably something to do with electrons exactly and I think beyond that is not for me I draw the line at certain physics but I think what's interesting is it's just three atoms of ruthenium right and that has this profound effect this very slight change to the material has this really profound
effect in the properties of the material and that happens quite a lot in Material Science for electronics in particular it would seem they often talk about having like .1% doping of a particular element into say um silicon and then it creates like this incredible change in how it conducts electrons it's similar in Alloys as well where putting in that slightly different shaped or size atom amongst otherwise homogenous layer kind of makes it stronger than if it was just
all the same so sort of like carbon steel or stainless steel there are thousands of gr of Steel yeah and something else that got me about ruthenium as well we're talking about whether it's critical for technology and I think one component of that is well where does it come from and how secure is that Supply according to a report from Birmingham University about technology critical materials for the UK 93% of all production of rothenium comes from one country South Africa which I
was quite surprised at it's one of the the most concentrated sources of a particular element looking at their map and I just thought so we're all relying on this one nation for this single element it's not just using hard drives it's using lots of other things as well South Africa is also the biggest resource of platinum another important metal it is in like cletic inverters and also any other times when you want a platinum metal metal grou metal hydrogen fuel
cells yeah again very essential for the modern world yep same seem to be true for ruthenia as well I guess it's probably could say a similar story about just about anything on the periodic table I think um apparently ruthenium is used exclusively in China it would seem as a catalyst to make a precursor to nylon oh someone did tell me that they have done a deal with South Africa to get a lot of their resources in exchange for helping them build infrastructure I
have no idea how true that is it's third hand information but if they want the ruthenium then there you go and the Platinum that was um an interesting thing when I was looking into the criticality is like is it just about the volume or is it about the supply chain and how robust it is when I was looking at just the UK and how much metal they would need for decarbonization certain Metals you'd be like Ah that's just a drop in the ocean and other ones even just the UK would swing the balance so
much and so is it about how much is actually available versus how much is available on the market yeah I'd say It's a combination of both I mean technically there's no standard definition for like what is a critical material or metal different countries have different criteria and different countries have different lists of what metals and minerals they consider critical so for example in I think it's in Japan uh zinc is considered critical but in Australia it's not and I think
also in the UK Inc is not considered critical so it really depends like yeah obviously like with lots of countries decarbonizing is going to put an increased strain on availability and res sources for these different metals and materials so like not even like the ones that we've been talking about like the renum Cobalt lithium but also stuff like copper which is fairly common but like copper is the metal that is used to transmit electricity so when you have a
new power plant you need to use copper cables to hook it up you also use copper in like overhead railway lines so sometimes uh if your train is being delayed and they're saying it's because someone's been trying to steal the metal from the tracks it's usually because someone's been trying to steal the Copper from the tracks so yeah it's going to depend on a lot on like demand and whether or not there's just like enough to meet de demand in from what I've read people are like fairly
confident that there should be enough it's just we're going to have to like go to like different ways of mining so a lot of like the rarer Metals they're more co-products or byproducts from when you're mining other metal so more efforts to like recover those waste Metals but also we're going to see more efforts put into like Recycling metals because we can't just send everything to to to like landfill or to a waste facility when it's very valuable no but then I think there's even the
talk of landfill mining which is finding stuff from a landfill to then treat you know like those cables that were found from the train line they just came for a landfill right they weren't just stolen off TR live train track talking about what defines a critical metal and it depends on where you are and what you're doing and I think for some applications there can be so many different ways to have the same end result that it almost doesn't really matter which element
you're using for example um smartphones use a ridiculous number of elements some of them uh and one of them that's mentioned by a few sources is Yum it's very wellknown element of course and this is used to create a particular type of color in your LED display and I think it is often combined with europium and then when a current is passed through it it emits a red light so it gives a red color but from what I can tell there are like a dozen different ways to do this and you don't
necessarily need to use each trium uh whether one is more efficient than another I don't know I feel like we could do an entire episode just on how to make LEDs glow different colors cu the chemistry out there is vast but I presume It's relatively simple to substitute eat trium for something else um and according to the American Chemical Society they have Define it as a relatively risky Supply product in the future um it's quite low risk on their scale though there are other more
critical minerals I guess well speaking of um other materials our previous episode was on nanop particles and we did discuss how you could make different colored particles including replacing LEDs with Quantum dots so there you go but still using some rather unusual metals like indium true that's a good point actually it's not just the composition it's how big it is as well has a massive effect um an Indian seeing as you mentioned it funnily enough I really like this
example it's uh it's used to make your touchscreen responsive so it makes it actually useful rather than just being a display it basically um indium tin oxide allows a current to flow and it creates contacts so when you press it together current flow is right but this technology has been around like decades I think since the 1970s wow yeah yeah I remember using touch screens when I was a lot younger and they weren't as responsive as they are now so technology is definitely improved yes the
difference between what they called resistive where you could use a like anything that created some sort of physical contact versus now where it's capactive that it has to be certain materials which can pass through a current and I think the resistive ones had very different chemistry which I don't know enough about because I haven't researched it yet no I think we could spend a lot of time researching all the exetic materials um and how they work yeah and the thickness of this
layer it's it's a bit thicker than the ruthenium example it's more than a few atoms but it's still quite tiny it's 100 times thinner than a human hair according to one research paper that I read wow because of it's use in smartphones that aren't necessarily recycled and you've mentioned hoarding of smartphones I definitely have done this in the past and me too but because of increased use in things like smartphones again demand is going up so it's becoming um more of a
critical mineral I think it's also used in solar panels I believe to make the um the electrodes either side of the layer that produces the current not in the most commonly used material So currently most solar panels are made of crystalline silicon and they'll have like silver or gold contacts as well as copper the newer the new I say newo inverted commas the developing technology is thin film it's still way too expensive for most people to use so it's in very Niche applications
basically but yeah indium gum the anage of the indium tin oxide is it's one of the few materials that is both conductive and optically transparent so it let light pass through which is why it's used in your smartphone and I guess why they're looking at it for solar panels chemistry is wild it does so many things yeah materials scientist and materials chemist seems to be finding more and more or different things all the time different applications and different properties and different ways of
combining chemical elements together to make new things which could help get over the whole um the critical elements idea if you can find another element that works just as well or a different chemistry in size of particular thing you're creating I think we talk about Quantum dots in the um nanop particles episode yeah I don't have followup for that one sorry to change topic a bit so we've talked about mining sort of on the earth something that people have talked about
is mining on the moon so we've T SP spoken about space tourism before but what are your thoughts on mining the moon for more resource well there's already a company who are looking into mining on the moon so like the moon in theory does have a lot of like metals and minerals that are that we have on Earth but like something that the moon might have more in abundance of something called helium 3 it's a particular type of isotope of helium and it's particularly useful because um you
can cool it down to like really low low temperatures uh which makes it an ideal coolant for um Quantom computers and obviously as we become more advanced and like have more data to process um we're going to be having more quantum computers so more quantum computers we need more helium 3 um we're running out of it on Earth so we need to go to the Moon is there a way we can artificially make helium 3 probably but mining on a moon sounds cooler oh I don't know it can probably be
produced in a nuclear reaction though that's what I thought yeah I think that's pretty cool I like the question that just appeared from the audience about how expensive is it to mine on the moon that was exactly my thought surely it's easier and cheaper to just do it on Earth yeah even if it's a difficult to access resource right this is what it says from Cosmos magazine it's a very expensive to take materials to the moon the SLS for example just a rocket cost
24 billion the launch cost 2 billion current rates to get 1 kg material to the Moon cost around 1.5 million and that doesn't include trying to get stuff back to back from the moon so it's going to be very expensive yeah so Millions maybe even billions of pounds but at least helium 3 is going to be pretty light yeah you get a lot of it you compress it you have to figure out how to get it back though yeah and compressing it well then it's not so light is it no I think they're just
appealing to rich people that have too much money and as you say Jasmine mining on the moon is cool yes cool yeah there's like another figure floating around that um Luna resources could top one cadrillion in value so yeah potentially uh big money if you're a billionaire looking to invest your money in other ways I suppose it's that novelty isn't it that draws people to it and the fact that if you kind of start it first you might have the best advantage to monopolize yeah for sure
but you still have to get a business plan that actually works and doesn't end in bankruptcy I feel like we should maybe do a follow-up episode on the composition of the Moon and if you did mine all the Apparently useful resources from it how much would is Master crease and then what would that mean for life on Earth oh my gosh yeah if it changes the tidal patterns on Earth we could all die well that's just a new way a new way for us to uh become extinct just add it to the list climate
change mining on a moon yeah there are other metals and minerals it's just helium through is a one that people are actually interested in there's just not enough available it's a cool for quantum computers but then so by obtaining this helium 3 we're enabling a new technology which presumably will put more of a pressure on the natural resources from Earth right so it's just kind of compounding this problem that I think Antonio mentioned right near the start of replacing fossil fuels with
Renewables still relying on a finite resource yeah we're just shifting the problem we're not really solving anything NOP but to play Devil's Advocate the need to decarbonize is very steep so is it worth kicking the can down the road for a different problem later on my dog agrees with that apparently yeah very very viously a questions like what happens if the helium 3 leaks when coming down to the Earth um in terms of like we don't get enough helium three from the Moon
there'll be a very big loss and profits to whoever is mining on the moon but the we is going to have any negative impacts on the environment probably not no it's an gas is it and it's in space in space Also if it's like leaking in the atmosphere in the approach to the atmosphere it's probably just going to disintegrate the atmosphere is actually very good at protecting us from asteroids and stuff cuz it just burns anything that enters into the atmosphere but if there's a significant leak when
it's coming down this is my um my undergrad in um physics playing in here I did some astronomy modules it would throw the Dory of your rocket ship of course how difficult does that make the landing then you won't land exactly where you're supposed to land but hopefully if you're meent to be landing on water you still land on water and not on Solid ground but maybe it completely the wrong trajectory or you land in enemy territory oo and they get all your helium three for their own Quantum
Computing needs yes I think we've gone quite far off topic so this seems like a good place to leave it but I think we've learned and discussed a bit about how critical materials are in decarb ization due to their volume and taking up the share of the current production but also how useful it is in electronics like our smartphones quantum computers just getting more data stored into the same volume so making smaller storage uh date storage all useful for our Modern Life
so thank you for listening and we hope to see you in the next episode The Views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they did not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate US leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to continue to have Frank discussions about science and engineering please get in touch [Music]