Stéphane Bourg is director of the French Observatory of Mineral Resources for industrial sectors, created in November 2022 under the aegis of the Geological and Mining Research Bureau in order to become the French center of expertise in strategic metals.
Faced with the boom in demand for batteries, can Europe counterbalance Asia?
It’s very complicated. To make a cathode, the key element of the battery, you need active materials, the famous alloy of nickel, cobalt, manganese and lithium oxides that everyone is talking about. This comes in powder form and comes almost exclusively from China.
But aren’t strategic metals initially only found in China?
Europe depends on the countries that have the resources, such as cobalt which is mainly in the Democratic Republic of Congo [RDC]. But it also depends on the countries that master refining. Regarding cobalt, it is extracted in the DRC, mainly by Chinese companies. Subsequently, the concentration, the first step in the transformation of the ore, takes place in the DRC. But, immediately afterwards, the concentrate goes to China to be refined.
Since when has this situation prevailed?
Forty years ago, the system was reversed. Rare earths, used in permanent magnets for example, were mined in China. The concentrates arrived in La Rochelle, in the Solvay factory, which made purified rare earths. Subsequently, China built its own refining plants and the mining countries, many of them African, let their resources be taken by others. The DRC now realizes that this system is not viable, and reflections are underway to regain possession of the resources and equip themselves with a local processing industry.
Will the exploitation of European deposits of lithium and manganese offer part of the remedy?
We are dependent on China not only for raw materials, but also for semi-finished products. Active battery materials are also sold by weight on the Alibaba e-commerce platform. In Europe, manganese is not identified as being critical. In the north of the continent, cobalt is found in nickel ores, except that the orders of magnitude do not correspond to the needs. Lithium is now mainly produced in Australia from hard rock, as Imerys wants to do in central France. There are also some in South America, in the brine lakes of the high plateaus of the Andes. In reality, capacities exist in Europe, at the right level for our market, and France has good potential.
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