Shift to clean energy raises new security fears
With plans to cut emissions, U.S. will have to track production of minerals used in batteries, solar panels and wind turbines
WASHINGTON — For decades, a civil war in Northern Africa or a terrorist attack in the Middle East would send shudders through a U.S. economy dependent on the daily flow of millions of barrels of oil from abroad.
But as clean energy technology gains ground, a new energy security concern is taking center stage. Where once national security officials watched oil supplies, they are now tracking the production of minerals such as cobalt, indium and neodymium used in the manufacturing of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines.
With mining networks stretching across Africa, Asia and South America, China has come to dominate the extraction and processing of those
materials over the past two decades. And with President Joe Biden and most of the world’s leaders pressing to shift from fossil fuels to clean technologies to combat climate change, the security of that supply chain is coming under increasing scrutiny.
“It’s something we need to give serious thought to. We’re going to be creating lots of new dependencies and, unlike oil, we haven’t given thought on how to manage and mitigate the risk,” said Mark Finley, a former CIA analyst and now a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “The U.S. and its allies have spent 50 years thinking about energy security around oil and what to do about it, creating policies, protocols and treaties. There’s nothing like that for other forms of energy.”
The issue is starting to gain attention in Washington, as Democrats and Republicans question how the United States plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions while also maintaining energy
security.
In recent years, energy security had become less of a national concern as the hydraulic fracturing boom opened oil and natural gas deposits long thought too difficult and costly to extract. But with Biden looking to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels, Congress is beginning to take steps to strengthen the nation’s hold over the clean energy supply chain.
Last summer, Democrats and Republicans came together to include language in a COVID-19 relief bill that would speed the surveying of critical mineral deposits such as lithium within the United States, as well as the permitting of mining projects to extract them. The Biden administration is working with allies such as Australia and India to diversify the supply chain of critical minerals, while directing researchers to develop synthetic alternatives to minerals such as cobalt and neodymium.
The administration is also seeking to increase recycling of materials from spent batteries and other sources.
At a Senate hearing last Tuesday, Kelly Speakesbackman,
the principal deputy assistant energy secretary, said that to meet forecast demand for electric vehicles, the United States will need more than 100 battery factories by 2035, with enough mineral mining and processing operations to supply them.
“The United States currently manufactures only 9 percent of global battery cells,” she said. “Growing the domestic electric vehicle industry will require a secure and resilient domestic supply chain, from minerals to markets.”
And it’s not just batteries. Wind turbines and solar panels also require a hodgepodge of critical minerals and rare earth elements to produce. And while deposits of those materials are spread across the globe, mining and processing is limited to a relatively small number of countries.
The United States used to mine and process those materials, but when environmental regulations began tightening in the 1980s, those operations largely moved offshore, said Jane Nakano, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington.
“We do have rare earth
mining in California, but almost all of it has to be shipped to China to be separated,” she said. “The process is very environmentally damaging, so China has been hosting that segment of the clean energy supply chain for the last couple decades.”
The Chinese have expanded mining operations to the point that more than 50 percent of the raw materials that go into making solar panels and wind turbines are now mined in China, according to Nakano’s research. Close to twothirds of the world’s cobalt production, critical to the manufacturing of lithiumion batteries, comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, largely funded by Chinese investment.
That is a sharp contrast from the current energy system, where the world’s largest oil producer, the United States, accounts for only 19 percent of the world’s supply, according to the Department of Energy.
“The U.S. has not been as quick to get a national program together on how to address this,” Finley said. “The Chinese government were early movers and recognized
the fact that the manufacturing of wind turbines and solar panels would be a trade advantage.”
The question facing American leaders now is what to do about it.
Creating an independent supply chain in the United States would likely take decades and be prohibitively expensive, struggling to compete with China on price, Nakano said.
An alternate strategy for the United States is to work with its allies abroad to diversify the supply chain, particularly in countries such as India and Australia, which are not only rich in the minerals needed but also share a wariness about Chinese expansion. Likewise, Japan and South Korea both have established mineral processing industries that could compete with operations in China.
“It’s a matter of aligning the pieces,” Nakano said. “The order is to make sure no one single country, especially not one that’s a geopolitical rival, has this leverage over our economic security.”