The earth wind has an imminent problem of rare metals

Wind power at sea seems to be about to take off in the United States. This is good news for the climate, but each technology has a cost. As a new study points out, an increase in offshore wind energy could also result in an increase in our appetite for a rare earth metal that is being exploited with a heavy environmental toll.

In fact, the expansion of offshore wind capacity in the United States, according to the recent Department of Energy report, may require some 17,000 tonnes of neodymium, a rare earth metal by 2050, according to the paper. recently published in Nature Sustainability. This demand, equivalent to that of about 20 million hybrid and electric cars, is important and may pose supply problems for the industry if we do not start developing alternative technologies and making rare earth magnets more reusable.

"This is a window of opportunity for the moment," Tomar Fishman, lecturer at the IDC Herzliya School of Sustainability and lead author of the study, told Earther on Thursday. "There is still time to do things right."

Although the US offshore wind industry is currently very small (it includes exactly five turbines off the Rhode Island coast), there are signs that it could begin to grow considerably. A number of east coast states have committed to ambitious offshore wind energy targets. In December, the Trump administration sold record offshore wind leases, highlighting its strong interest for new projects.

As the US offshore wind industry develops, its appetite for rare earth metals is likely to grow at the same rate. In fact, the large turbines deployed offshore to exploit the strong sea breezes increasingly use the so-called "direct drive" technology, which switches rotary gearboxes typical of smaller earth turbines with a generator consisting of a ring of magnets made of neodymium, iron and boron. . These are similar to the rare earth magnets present in your smartphone, with the exception of super-sized ones: when a phone can use a few grams of rare earths, the turbines can use about a ton of them.

"Which is obviously a lot," said Fishman.

In their article, Fishman and his co-author Thomas Graedel defined the neodymium needed to deploy a fleet of these direct-drive wind turbines, according to the DOE's Wind Vision Report 2015, which calls for the construction of 80 gigawatts of energy. offshore wind turbine by 2050. The researchers found that the demand of the rare earth industry would increase from about 1,200 tons per year in 2020 to nearly 3,000 tons per year in the middle of the century.

However, these are not miraculous figures: global neodymium production is around 30,000 tons per year, according to Reuters in 2018. But the United States is not the only country to boost its wind capacity at sea, nor in Europe. Sea Wind is the only clean technology industry to rely on these metals. Fishman suggested that the United States invest in restarting its closed rare earths extraction industry to avoid unexpected supply shortages related to the growth of the sector.

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This could also help to prevent violations of the environment and human rights. Today's rare earths production is mainly concentrated in China, where lax monitoring raises concerns about the high levels of pollution resulting from the mismanagement of toxic waste produced during mining and processing, as well as the exploitation of child labor.

We should also invest in alternative technologies, said Fishman. On this front, the DOE has been busy. This week, researchers from the Department's Critical Materials Institute presented the first results of an effort to replace neodymium rare earth magnets with other recipes at the American's annual spring meeting. Chemical Society. CMI's Thomas Lograsso, who leads the effort, told Earther by phone that a promising approach seemed to be replacing neodymium with cerium, a more abundant rare earth metal associated with cobalt.

Lograsso said the replacement magnets were probably in "years rather than decades" of some commercial applications, while stressing that there was no panacea and that different applications would require different solutions. At the moment, if you are looking for an extremely powerful magnet for, for example, rotating a giant turbine, the neodymium-iron-boron recipe remains your best choice.

"Ideally, we would like to find the next powerful magnet that absolutely replaces neodymium-iron-boron, but … it's a daunting challenge," Lograsso said.

Fishman said the wind industry could also use to standardize the production of rare earth magnets so that long-lived components can be replaced with old turbines by new ones.

"In theory, it would be good to design this so that you can remove those magnets and put them in the next turbine," Fishman said. "To build them modularly, reusable."

The study also points out that even as the world moves away from dirty extractive fuels, we will continue to depend on extractive industries to build the high-tech energy infrastructure of tomorrow. Planning for the upcoming challenges for rare metals, magnets in lithium and cobalt turbines in electric vehicle batteries, should help minimize the environmental and human impacts of these industries as they become more and more crucial.