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Don't ignore your health concerns. Our expert team is ready to help. The Green Party here in Ireland secured its best ever general election result off the back of promises to bring in a new dawn of clean energy and leave behind the days of fossil fuel reliance. Well, the clean green energy revolution may not be so clean after all.

Ian patron's new book, The Rare Metals War, subtitled The Dark Side of Clean Energy and Digital Technologies, charts the dirty side of renewables.

And John Petrona joins me on the line. Good morning and welcome.

Good morning. Thank you for inviting me.

Now, there are a number of these rare metals, which it turns out are not that rare, but they're found in very dilute quantities in various parts of the world. What are these metals? Sure.

You said it. It's rare and not very rare at the same time.

But we call these metals where because they can be 1000, 2000, 3000 times more diluted in the earth's crust than base metals. And we talk about certain metals which are quite unknown to us, such as tungsten, gallium, indium, rare earths, which is a specific class of rare metals, but also cobalt and other metals such as antimony, for example.

So certain of them are called rare metals.

Now, to give us an example, if, for example, you have a tonne of iron ore, how much iron do you get from one tonne of iron ore? And how does that compare to one tonne of the earth, which contains a rare metal? Sure.

In the earth's crust, you've got about five percent of ihram in the Earth's crust if you get one tonne of pure, pure iron.

I will. I will. I will start from that.

You'll get about 1000 times less neodymium, which is a rare metal Zanda, the IRA. So if you get to one tonne of pure Irun, you'll get one CGY of neodymium. So you can see that it's quite jabuti comparing to base metal.

Now, how difficult is it to extract these rare metals and how is it done? I mean, does it involve open cast mining, underground mining or where is it found?

It's mostly open cast mining. You can find these rare metals everywhere on earth. You can even find some possible mining areas in the oceans. But the thing is, it's very dark, dirty to extract them because you need to extract and purify. We can because Wil's of the Earth's crust of the rocks in order to come up at the end with a simple kaiji of these rare metals. And it's so dirty that actually we prefer in the West to let poor countries, developing countries get the dirty joke, do the dirty job instead of us.

So the production of these rare metals happens to be very much concentrated in specific areas of the world, in countries which which accept the environmental consequences of the mining. And we think about cobalt for the Democratic Republic of Congo. We think about mostly China for most of these rare metals. And this is in China where I have been on the field to actually see how these metals are getting extracted and refined. And let me let me tell you, it's extremely dirty and very impressive to see how dirty it is to extract and protect these rare metals in China.

Now, is it very labor intensive? And therefore, is the availability of cheap labour a factor in all of this? Definitely, yes.

This is what we call social dumping. And China obviously has good advantages in actually offering cheap metals because the price of the labor is cheaper than in the West. And also the environmental regulations in China are not as well respected as they should be. And this is what we call environmental dumping. And this is also a way for China to offer rare metals as a much cheaper price. And we in the West are so happy to to get to these metals from China at a very good price, which enables us to actually sell better products at a better price, especially mobile phones, for example.

How dominant is China's place in this market? How much of the global market for these rare metals does China control?

Roughly, China produces, I would say forty persons of rare metals. And for some of these rare metals, China can produce even 95 percent of the world production. You should talk, for example, about certain rare earths, which are a class of rare metals. Certain rare earths are produced. 90 percent of the production is just being done by Beijing. So we talk about at least the leadership and even some. Accorsi monopoly over the production of these rare earths.

Don't forget that these rare earths are called the next oil. So how dependent are we up on Beijing supplies for strategic commodities which are absolutely necessary for our modern lives?

Has there been any commodity war in this area? For example, you know, the way Russia would threaten to shut off the supply of gas to Western Europe if there was a conflict. So has there been any attempt to shut down supply of these rare metals to to any country by China? Definitely, yes.

It happened already in 2010 amid tensions between Japan and China for the control of certain islands in the southern China Sea. And at the time, suddenly, for six months, the supplies of rare earths from China to Japan and the United States were cut off. It was an embargo. And suddenly the world woke up and realized that we were dependent upon these supplies recently in 2019. And we trade tensions between the United States and China. The official media in China threatened the United States to actually cut again the exports of these rare earths.

So they didn't do it recently. But the Chinese threatened to to to start against such an embargo. And this is very important for the United States to get this reverse because these rare earths are necessary for actually defense industries, defense technology. So there is a matter of national security here for the United States.

Now, obviously, the Americans are very concerned about defense technologies, and many of us will be saying, well, what's that got to do with me? But tell me about the commodities sorry, the products that we all use that depend on rare metals.

I would say first, our phones, our mobile phones are dependent upon these rare metals. Phones today have up to 60 metals inside them, and some of them are very rare. Think about Indium, for example, in terms of rare metal. And this is what makes your screen a touch screen. This is why you can actually just directly type an estimate on your screen syncs to your to your fingers. The Indian makes this screen tactile.

With an Indian, you wouldn't have such a modern life with such phones. It's a simple example that shows you that they are everywhere, but we don't think about it, about them. These rare metals are also, you know, included in some clean technologies. You will need, for example, neodymium, which is the rare earths for making actually the rotor of the wind turbine work, especially offshore wind turbines. You will need rare metals for making most of the electric cars around on the roads.

You will need a Silicio Mittal, which is not rare but considered as critical because there is a lack of a risk of supply shortages for solar panels. So you cannot do a clean energy transition. You cannot do clean technologies without having actually to mining the ground for these specific resources.

Is there any alternative to buying from China and from other suppliers? I mean, is there a way of producing these which might add maybe a dollar or a euro or two to the price of production of a mobile phone?

But that's a price that environmentally we would be willing to pay to do it properly, cleanly.

There are many ways to actually not being dependent upon Chinese dirty supplies. We could obviously open new negotiations with other mining countries, pay a better price, maybe twice the price of the rare metals in order to have them extracted and refined in clean conditions and proper conditions. We could also recycles rare metals we use. What do we do after a mobile phone is out of use? Do we just throw it away or do we take from the phone the very rare metals and recycles them that cost a big price, a big amount of price?

Do we replace them by substitutes? We find and substitute to a rare metal which is less more costly but more efficient. So all these options are on the table and they've been on the table for the last ten years. Everyone has been talking about these various options. The reality is that we really don't want actually to, you know, not depend on China because China offers these metals at a very interesting price. And we don't want to get away from this very interesting and low prices so that the race for lower cost is the main reason why we are still dependent upon China.

And I don't see this situation changing very fast, but. As the mining sector is a very, very long term process sector, if you want to open a mining takes 50 years. So it's going to take time before we really try to we succeed in not being dependent upon Chinese supplies. And if we succeed to have various options of supplies on the table.

Do we know, though, what it would add to the cost, say, of an electric car to do this in a sustainable way? What would it add to the cost of a mobile phone? Because it may well be a price that people are prepared to pay.

That's a very good question, actually, for a mobile phone. It's, I would say two euros, not that much. I mean, if you want to clean ta ta ta ta ta ta mine and extract the rare metals in clean conditions that would end up making your phone two euros more expensive.

The question is, you know, it's not that you and I as consumers don't want to pay two euros for phone, which is already 1000 euros.

The question is, what are the industry rules in Western countries ready to pay 50 percent more for twice the price for a metal, for actually making a product, for making a battery, for making a transistor or for making, you know, part of a phone. And this is where actually the competition is so hard that we cannot have the industry ready for paying a better price or more expensive price. This is where it's difficult to even pay, you know, to to change the situation as it is today for.

I guess I haven't looked precisely at that. But for an electric car, having clean metals would be would probably make the car much more expensive. I mean, a couple of hundred of euros, I guess, or maybe a couple of thousands of euros more expensive. But I don't know exactly which price it would be. Obviously, the very question is how much are we ready to pay to actually run a transition, an energy transition, which is at the same time affordable for everyone, but also fair for everyone.

And this is a question that we haven't addressed very much right now until these days.

I reckon, though, security of supply might be the most important concern going forward.

No one would like to be completely dependent on one or two major countries as suppliers because at that kind of dependence would not sit well, particularly with defence industries. Anyway, the book is fascinating. The Rare Metals War.

It's called subtitled The Dark Side of Clean Energy and Digital Technologies and its author, John Petrona. Thank you very much for joining us on the line this morning.

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