Earth Protect Blog

By Bruce Finley

The Denver Post

Gaze for a moment at your smartphone. The circuitry contains a hard-toget metal called tantalum. The jingling speaker requires neodymium. For that jangly-lit screen, you need yttrium. The battery is made with lithium.

How to obtain enough of these so-called “critical minerals” to meet rising global demand is the challenge.

At a $240 million lab the federal government plans to build in Colorado, scientists will conduct research leading to maps that show where critical minerals can be found in underground rocks and old mining waste piles.

The U.S. Geological Survey research to be done in this state-of-the-art lab — on the Colorado School of Mines campus in Golden — also will span a range of other challenges from anticipating landslides as wildfires intensify to making sense of rocks plucked from Mars. And USGS scientists can team with university and fellow federal scientists from the growing concentration of facilities along the Front Range including labs run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Energy and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The new lab will be “a substantial building block” in this expanding federal complex, “a magnet for scientists in all fields,” said Chris Moses, the Denverbased USGS director for geology, geophysics and geochemistry science.

No date has been set to break ground, and completion isn’t expected for five years. An architectural rendering shows four flatroofed buildings made of concrete and glass.

Federal infrastructure funding of $167 million has been committed, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who oversees the USGS, announced on a visit last week. The other $72 million hasn’t been found yet, USGS officials said.

But research around critical minerals rapidly is emerging as a top priority because modern technology — especially the renewable energy technology needed for an economic shift — requires a deeper understanding.

“For the clean energy transition, we’re going to need a lot of different types of minerals we didn’t need 10 or 15 years ago,” and the maps showing where the minerals may be found will have to include surrounding natural features, including underground water so that extraction can be done with minimal damage, Moses said.

Unlike the massive veins of gold and silver that historically drew miners to the West, critical minerals are scattered widely in relatively tiny quantities. “They’re very difficult to extract. They are hidden, locked up in rock,” he said.

“If we can understand the mineral structure of the rocks, we can understand better where we might find them in high concentrations.”

This week, White House officials announced separate large investments aimed at securing a “made in America” supply chain for critical minerals, combined with necessary protection for workers and the environment. Government reports last year recommended, as a matter of national security, ramping up domestic mining, production, processing and recycling of critical minerals.

President Joe Biden met with industry and state officials in announcing development of a mine at Mountain Pass, Calif.

Global shifting to a clean energy economy — running on electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels — is expected to raise demand for scores of critical minerals. The United States for more than a decade has relied largely on foreign sources for processed versions of critical minerals. China controls the processing and refining for much of the cobalt, lithium and other minerals. In the past, China has threatened to wield so-called “rare earth elements” strategically.

In Colorado, the new USGS lab is planned for a site next to an existing facility on the campus where federal geologists for decades have monitored earthquakes around the planet.

It will replace a deteriorating USGS lab at the Denver Federal Center, the largest concentration of federal agency offices outside Washington D.C., where officials said that, when it rains outside, it also rains inside.