Practical examples of how companies throughout the electric vehicle battery supply chain engage and address risks and adverse impacts on people and the environment brought about by increased demand for battery metals. 

Ten years after the Paris Agreement, the rapid innovation and deployment of clean technologies required to meet climate goals have led to a significant surge in demand for certain minerals and metals. The pressure to meet expanding demand, coupled with the fact that extraction and processing of these metals that are essential for current transition technologies frequently occurs in regions with weak governance, has led to higher risks of human rights abuses, environmental pollution, and biodiversity destruction. How can we achieve the climate goals without causing more damage along the way? 

This presentation will cover practical examples of how companies throughout the battery supply chain are understanding and engaging with their role and responsibility to identify, prevent, mitigate and remediate harmful impacts that arise from the extraction, processing and manufacturing of electric vehicle batteries. Examples will cover topics from managing risks associated with artisanal- and small-scale mining to collaborative industry efforts on mineral traceability.

Scotland’s geology is prospective for several of the “critical raw materials” needed to enable a just transition and sustain the growth of a circular economy. Aberdeen Minerals is investigating deposits of nickel, copper and cobalt in Aberdeenshire, where the application of modern models and technology is yielding exploration success. This talk will share some perspectives on the outlook for battery metals exploration and production in Scotland as a more environmentally sensitive alternative to overseas supply chains.

Tectonic doesn’t just describe the scale of the shifts in mineral supply chains — it also describes their inherently geographic nature. After decades of detachment, trade is increasingly coupled with security. Given the dozens of materials necessary for essential military and commercial production, what does a truly secure mineral supply ecosystem look like? If trade fractures into US-led and Chinese-led blocs, what does the competition for neutral countries look like? And what would Britain’s role in a Western mineral supply environment look like?

The current state-of-the-art in lithium-ion battery technology will be presented with particular regard to the sustainability of materials and the use of critical elements. More sustainable current alternatives will be highlighted, before a look at the possibilities offered by post-lithium chemistries such as sodium-ion. The potential benefits of battery recycling will be discussed.

The Great Lakes region (Eastern DRC, Southwestern Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi) holds strategic importance due to its wealth of mineral resources critical to modern technology, such as tin (Sn), tantalum (Ta) and tungsten (W), collectively known as the 3Ts (or conflict minerals). The mineralisation is hosted in early Neoproterozoic pegmatites (cassiterite, columbite-tantalite) and quartz veins (cassiterite, wolframite), and their alluvial and eluvial weathering products. The pegmatites and quartz veins are linked to S-type granites that were emplaced in Paleo- and Mesoproterozoic metasedimentary and -volcanic rocks. Many of the pegmatites that were historically, or are currently mined for Sn and Ta, also host significant lithium in minerals such as spodumene, amblygonite-montebrasite or eucryptite, and have recently become important targets for lithium exploration.

In this seminar, I will present new insights on the formation and geological characteristics of lithium pegmatites in the region, focusing on examples from Musha-Ntunga (Rwanda) and Manono-Kitotolo (DRC) - the latter representing the largest known spodumene pegmatite system in the world. This giant deposit, with a lateral extent of at least 13.5 km and a thickness of around 300 meters, was historically mined for cassiterite and now holds an estimated resource of 842 million tonnes at 1.61 wt% Li₂O. Drill core samples reveal several high-grade zones exceeding 2% Li₂O, possibly corresponding to the core zones of individual pegmatite sheets.

Drawing on recent fieldwork and petrographic studies of drill cores that offer a full cross-section of the pegmatite system, I will explore potential emplacement mechanisms and the impact of weathering for exploration purposes. Lastly, I will reflect on the geopolitical implications of mining and lithium exploration in this region amidst growing global competition for critical resources.

The mining industry is rambling in the foothills of a mountain range of metal demand. Electric vehicles, wind turbines and the grid that connects them will all require large quantities of metals such as cobalt, nickel, rare earths and lithium. However, in financial and volume terms, the lynchpin of the energy transition will be copper. Demand for the red metal is expected to grow steadily, at a rate of 1 million tonnes per annum (Mtpa), to ~50 Mpta in 2050.

Meeting this demand will require the expansion of existing mines and the discovery of new ones. Demand growth is expected to be so rapid that to keep pace the industry will need to add the equivalent of the world’s largest copper mine, Escondida, every 15 months. Escondida was discovered in 1981, and there have been few comparable discoveries since.

This challenge comes at a time when the industry is already facing formidable headwinds. Ore grades are declining, costs are rising faster than metal prices, the average permitting time for developing a new mine is measured in decades, and junior explorers cannot raise funds for greenfield exploration. On top of this, explorers in the most prospective districts struggle to compile and retain tenement packages that are large enough to justify lengthy and expensive exploration campaigns.

There are three obvious ways in which explorers may address these challenges: (i) going to politically risky jurisdictions, (ii) applying new technologies, and (iii) looking deeper. However, each of these approaches brings with it a new set of problems and risks. This talk examines how explorers can modify their operational and behavioural approach to best improve their chances of making a discovery.

1. Persist for longer in larger tenement packages. Capture the knowledge acquired in an exploration program and ‘reinvest’ it in the tenement package where it will have the biggest impact. Even if a team focuses on one deposit style, frequently ‘hopping’ from one basin to the next will diminish the knowledge compounding effect.

2. Syndicate opportunity and risk. Follow the example of the oil industry by pooling resources to tackle high-risk-high-reward ‘frontier basins’. Through this approach, companies can take a holistic view of a basin and share knowledge. The burden of exploration costs is also shared, meaning that more advanced datasets, such as reflection seismic, can be collected.

3. Make the best use of research and understand what research is. Companies should place less emphasis on solving specific problems and instead ensure a sustained research effort that tackles their biggest challenge(s). Too much of companies’ research budget is dedicated to finding those elusive ‘silver bullet’ technologies. Companies must engage fully with the research initiatives to maximise their value and turn research into action.

4. Get predictive. The potential for big discoveries is at depth, not at surface. Buried or blind deposits may not have a footprint that is detectable at surface because of cover, a leached weathering profile, or factors inherent to the deposit style. Direct detection of orebodies (i.e. empirical targeting) using geochemistry or geophysics is therefore likely to fail. The solution, particularly for sediment-hosted deposit styles, is basin modelling.

5. More specialised teams. Many companies mould geoscientists into a caricature of “the modern generative geologist”. She or he is a jack of all trades but a master of none. To make new discoveries, companies must grapple with increasingly complex datasets and workflows. These require individuals with very specific skills such as seismic interpretation, sedimentology and fluid flow modelling. Notably, the trend towards specialisation began in the oil & gas industry several decades ago. Today there are no generalists left in petroleum exploration.

Mining is the most conservative of industries, but demand for the metals needed for the energy transition is already causing it great upheaval. Mineral exploration is on the cusp of remarkable technological and organisational changes that will drastically change the way it operates, and, hopefully, improve discovery rates.

This talk will focus on the trials and tribulations of nickel mining in New Caledonia, placed in a local context of deepening political and economic tensions on the one hand, and a global context of increased demand for nickel which is partly driven by the need for raw materials for low-carbon energy technologies on the other. It will explore an approach to mining in the territory that has come to be known in New Caledonia as ‘doctrine nickel’ (nickel doctrine). The doctrine set out to maximise local benefits from the mining activities, but – as I will discuss – cracks started to appear once it was exposed to the merciless forces of extractive capitalism. At a time when extractive industries use climate action and the need to develop low carbon energy systems as justification for intensifying extraction, we will ask, what does this mean for places such as New Caledonia?