Fast forward to April 2022, when BacTech, a publicly traded Toronto remediation firm, launched plans to use naturally occurring bacteria and a “bioleaching” process to break down some of that mining waste and recover what it claims are billions of dollars in nickel, cobalt, green iron and sulphur that have long been buried in those tailings. Nickel and cobalt are now highly sought-after minerals in the accelerating race to build electric vehicle batteries, and this venture seems to offer a double climate bonus: remediation of a highly degraded landscape, as well as raw materials for transportation technology that weans society of its addiction to fossil fuels.

“The timing is right to mature these technologies off the bench,” says Laurentian University microbiologist Nadia Mykytczuk, interim president and CEO of MIRARCO (Laurentian’s Mining Innovation, Rehabilitation and Applied Research Corporation) and an advisor to BacTech. “The rapid electrification and move to battery electric vehicles is going to drive a lot of innovations, and bioleaching is one of those that will move forward quite quickly now.” A feasibility study has been completed, and a pilot facility, the Centre for Mine Waste Biotechnology, is being built on the Laurentian campus.

Mykytczuk points out that the notion of using microbes to essentially poop out recoverable minerals from tailings waste isn’t new, and has been applied for decades in settings like Chile’s copper mines. Over time, however, the processes have become more sophisticated; the demand for better forms of remediation, more intense. Acid drainage, a corrosive by-product that’s released from tailings ponds, continues to contaminate downstream watersheds. Tailings dam disasters in the past decade or so in countries such as Hungary, South Africa and Brazil have not only shone a harsh light on the grave human and ecological risks associated with accumulated mining waste, but also sparked activist investor groups, like the Church of England, to push for safer practices.

At the same time, the global growth of renewable energy and the push to electrify has revealed the extent to which fossil fuel extraction will be replaced in the coming decades by the dramatic growth in the mining of ores like nickel, copper or rare earth elements used in wind turbines and other clean technologies. Global demand for copper is projected to double by 2035, even as existing copper mines become less and less productive. Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency estimated that the global mining sector needs to build 60 nickel mines, 50 lithium mines and 17 cobalt mines by 2030 to meet global emissions goals.

But if all that new mining activity generates even more emissions, contaminates watersheds and produces mountains of toxic waste, we’ll have merely replaced one form of resource-driven environmental destruction with another. Case in point: the mining of lithium, a critical ingredient in EV batteries, consumes huge quantities of water, pollutes groundwater and poses a danger to flamingo habitats.

Conventional mining is not only energy intensive and ecologically scarring; it is also extraordinarily inefficient. By weight and volume, valuable ores like nickel, gold or cobalt account for a tiny fraction – sometimes even less than 1% – of all the material removed from a mine. (A sustainable-mining scholar in Chile has trenchantly described these epic inefficiencies as akin to using five kilograms of beef from a 500-kilo cow and discarding the rest.) What’s more, the structure and financing of the industry is such that individual mining companies traditionally produce only one or two substances; everything else is seen as waste.

From an emissions perspective, one of the core arguments in favour of biomining and remining (another approach to recovering marketable minerals from tailings) is that huge amounts of energy have already been consumed to extract, crush, separate and process all the material that comes out of a mine. “The total energy required for bioleaching is significantly lower by several orders of magnitude than if you were to build a high-energy smelter,” says Mykytczuk.

To date, biomining remains a tiny fragment of the industry, but the potential has garnered attention from researchers, cleantech start-ups and established mining giants. For example, Teck Resources and Rio Tinto, both global firms, have teamed up with researchers at the University of British Columbia and other organizations to launch a project called M-MAP, or the Mining Microbiome Analytics Platform. The organization is building a genome library of microbes found in tailings ponds around the world, which will allow labs to sequence genetic material to engineer bacteria that is essentially tailor-made to digest minerals in particular tailings ponds.

As a Teck spokesperson explains, “M-MAP is the first integrated online platform which aims to extract the DNA from more than 15,000 mining site samples over the next two years to identify microbes that can be used to replace chemical and other legacy extraction methods for minerals and metals, and to perform safer, more effective remediation of legacy and operational mine sites.”
Bryne Gramlich, vice-president of business development at Allonnia, a Boston bio-engineering firm that is part of the M-MAP consortia, adds that while the project is in its infancy, the mining sector is “aggressively looking at how to accelerate the use of biology” in its reclamation efforts.

The rapid electrification and move to battery electric vehicles is going to drive a lot of innovations, and bioleaching is one of those that will move forward quite quickly now.

-Nadia Mykytczuk, interim president and CEO of MIRARCO

The critical question, of course, is whether the introduction of specially engineered microbes in tailings ponds, such as those enabled by M-MAP’s genome library, could further exacerbate environmental damage downstream of such facilities. “In order to get any type of technology like this approved and indeed used,” says Anita Parbhakar-Fox, an associate professor at Australia’s University of Queensland who runs a mine-waste-transformation research group, “a rigorous environmental impact assessment, including demonstration testing, risk evaluation and impact modelling, would be undertaken to ensure a decision on whether to use the technology was made based on a full evaluation of the socio-environmental risks.”

But Radhakrishnan Mahadevan, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Toronto and a Canada Research Chair specializing in bio-engineering applications, says there are existing techniques for ensuring that such microbes don’t have what he describes as “exogenous impacts,” such as increasing the risk of antibiotic resistance. “You can engineer the environment in such a way that the microbes do what you want them to do.”

The potential for using new technologies to upcycle mining waste has attracted other remining start-ups. Phoenix Tailings, a four-year-old Boston firm with venture capital backing, has developed a set of chemical processes to extract value from tailings, including rare earth elements, cobalt and nickel. According to co-founder Anthony Balladon, the firm’s business strategy with mine waste sites is to recover two types of materials: large volumes of inert bulk substances that can be used like aggregates in concrete production, and smaller volumes of valuable ores. To make the math work, he says, “we need both components.”

He points out that some waste sites are quite old and date to a time when there was little market for the metals that are now driving the electrification economy. “You often find that you have a tailings pile or tailings pond somewhere in Canada, Australia or the U.S. that has a higher grade of cobalt or copper or rare earths than what is currently considered the kind of grade for operating a new mine,” he says. “You have to find the right sites.”

Phoenix, Balladon notes, has tapped into an eager source of capital looking for sustainable solutions to mining waste and a way of averting tailings dam disasters. But global investor appetite for EV-related metals is voracious and also a major driver of these technologies. “It’s a very exciting time,” he says, noting that governments in Canada, the U.S. and Australia are all looking to invest in these approaches.

You often find that you have a tailings pile or tailings pond somewhere in Canada, Australia or the U.S. that has a higher grade of cobalt or copper or rare earths than what is currently considered the kind of grade for operating a new mine.

-Anthony Balladon, co-founder, Phoenix Tailings

Parbhakar-Fox agrees. “In Australia in the past three to five years, we have seen a great deal of state and federal government investment into the development of mineral processing methodologies, particularly to recover critical metals in order to grow this sector in Australia,” she says. “The University of Queensland is involved in a project to bioleach and recover [rare earth elements] from Mary Kathleen mine tailings, potentially containing AU$4 billion worth, as well as cobalt from the Old Tailings Dam and Savage River mine tailings [in western Tasmania].” BacTech sees even larger economic windfall from recovering copper and cobalt from the tailings in Sudbury – it estimates that there’s $27 billion in nickel alone sitting in those ponds.

Researchers say these processes also promise a climate benefit beyond energy savings. “The bioleaching process itself is carbon capturing,” says Mykytczuk. “We are capturing atmospheric CO2, and the bacteria fix that to their biomass [so] you can actually have an offset from your carbon cost in the bioleaching process. It’s a benefit on the carbon side of things.”

There is, of course, plenty of reason to be skeptical, not just about the science, which is nascent and not yet deployed at commercial scale, but also about the promise of alchemizing all that slag into valuable ore and billions of dollars in profits.

Yet advocates point out that emerging research and the climate imperative should be encouraging us to think differently about the largely unseen by-products of an extractive industry that hasn’t changed its ways in generations.

“Mining tailings and other mine wastes are multifaceted when it comes to the potential positive outcomes,” says Parbhakar-Fox. “Provided the mine waste has been well characterized and the right technologies are used to extract and recover the most value, there are positive outcomes for companies, the environment, the future, and for our governments to grow circular economy businesses. These are exciting times if we dare to dream and think outside the box.”

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Coal never really cleaned up its act, however. The mineral, used for generating electricity (thermal) or making steel (metallurgical), remains one of the planet’s worst polluters; together, the burning of fossil fuels like oil and coal are driving climate change and killed an estimated 8.7 million people in 2018, according to Environmental Research.

Yet coal continues to hold energy-addicted nations in its thrall, with China producing 3.7 billion tonnes in 2019, the U.S. 640 million tonnes and Canada 57 million tonnes annually. But despite being an environmental pariah, coal may yet yield a silver lining that could help pave the way to the net-zero carbon-emissions future.

Coal combustion creates a variety of solid waste by-products, such as fly ash, which contain low amounts of rare-earth elements, a group of 17 elements bearing exotic names like dysprosium, neodymium, europium, terbium and thulium. These metals, with their high electrical conductivity and heat resistance, are crucial to the world’s transition from fossil fuel to advanced replacement green technologies. Electric vehicles and wind turbines, for example, use permanent magnets containing the element neodymium, currently the most important end use for rare earths.

For economically depressed coal regions, tapping America’s three billion tonnes of waste coal for rare earth could potentially usher them into the new green economy. Last year, U.S. President Joe Biden issued an executive order to secure crucial supply chains for manufactured goods, including high-tech devices requiring rare earth, such as cellphones, electric vehicles and batteries that store wind- and solar-generated energy. Canada and the U.S. have signed a Joint Action Plan for Critical Minerals to support clean energy deployment.

Spurring the race for new sources of rare earth is the need to strengthen supply chains, with Adamas Intelligence’s Rare Earth Magnet Market Outlook to 2030 forecasting severe shortages in eight years. Currently, China produces about 90% of the world’s rare earth and permanent magnets, leaving the West vulnerable to sanctions and the disruption of clean-energy technology development.

The “rare earth” moniker may imply scarcity, but these elements are easily found in the earth’s mantle. However, they aren’t concentrated in the earth the way other minerals are and have a large mining footprint. They’re also expensive to extract and purify because of the energy required and historically have generated enormous amounts of solid waste and air and water pollution.

The possibility of recycling coal for rare earth also raises concerns, says Lisa Evans, the Boston-based senior counsel for Earthjustice and a specialist in hazardous waste law. “How do you extract [rare earth] in a way that doesn’t create more of an environmental hazard, that doesn’t endanger workers and that doesn’t leave toxic waste for the community? All these questions have to be answered,” Evans says.

Pursuing such answers is mineral-processing engineer and assistant professor Maria Holuszko, co-founder of the Urban Mining Innovation Centre at the University of British Columbia. Holuszko is one of the few researchers in Canada working to identify rare-earth sources in existing coal waste in tailings ponds and on mine sites. She is also developing extraction methods.

Rare-earth recovery from coal waste is complex and includes the use of acids. “We try to minimize the impact on the environment, but generally these processes are energy intensive, using solvent extraction technologies that are not environmentally friendly,” says Holuszko.

In the U.S., the University of Kentucky, supported by the federal National Energy Technology Laboratory, is surging ahead with a similar pilot project to extract rare earth from coal waste. Last year, the university reported that pilot-scale testing of coal and its by-products netted rare-earth oxide concentrates up to 98% pure. Similar pilot projects are being federally funded by the U.S. Department of Energy in Wyoming, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Dakota and other states in the hopes that out-of-work coal workers may eventually find “good-paying jobs” in the clean economy, as one senator put it.

Potential upcycled rare-earth sources may also exist at other mineral mining sites, says Charles Dumaresq, vice-president of science and environmental management at the Mining Association of Canada (MAC). These include places where uranium and bauxite, used to produce alumina, have been mined. Even oil-waste tailings ponds in Fort McMurray may hold rare earth, says Dumaresq.

Brendan Marshall, MAC’s vice-president of economic and northern affairs, says economic factors further impede a rare-earth gold rush from waste materials like coal. There is no existing market for rare earth in Canada, nor is there a pre-existing North American supply chain for extraction or separation or a manufacturing base for products like permanent magnets. “Resolving those key challenges is the biggest factor around Canada’s success in bringing mineral extraction of these products online,” Marshall says.

The growing global urgency for rare earth may make it more efficient to source these metals from deposits in the earth, rather than relying upon mineral waste recycling, and two facilities — one American, one Canadian — are looking to capitalize on virgin deposits.

Canada has 7% of the globe’s resources of rare earth and is 10th in the world in reserves. China is first and the U.S. is eighth in the world in reserves.

To some, this signals opportunity. In 2020, the Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC) announced the creation of the Rare Earth Processing Facility in Saskatoon, sparking enquiries from around the world. The new plant will separate rare earth from virgin ore mined from northern regions of the province and create value-added midstream processing concentrating these metals, says SRC CEO Mike Crabtree.

Phase 1, opening in 2023, is a hydrometallurgy plant that extracts rare earth from ore. The Phase 2 plant, which will be finished in 2024, will use the solvent extraction process to produce separated rare-earth oxides. Compared to China’s notoriously polluting extraction methods, which have spewed thousands of millions of litres of contaminated water into the environment, Crabtree says his Canadian facility will be one of the first of its kind to recycle all its water.

How do you extract [rare earth] in a way that doesn’t create more of an environmental hazard, that doesn’t endanger workers and that doesn’t leave toxic waste for the community?

Lisa Evans, senior counsel for Earthjustice

One potential rare-earth source is monazite mined from the Alces Lake area in northern Saskatchewan. Crabtree says that one tonne of monazite, containing neodymium, used to make rare-earth magnets, yields upwards of 80% rare earth. In comparison, a tonne of coal ash might contain a few kilograms, he says.

The facility’s midstream processing plant, which Crabtree anticipates will be expanded in the future, lays a solid foundation for a thriving Canadian rare-earth export sector. After being processed into magnet metals, a tonne of monazite ore is worth 40 to 50 times its original value, he says.

Mining for rare earth in Canada’s north may elicit strong opposition, however, with Indigenous groups. Last year, Greenland’s Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA) party successfully ran on a platform to scuttle a rare-earth mining initiative that would have produced uranium as a by-product, sparking fears of radioactive contamination.

Rare-earth mining may also provide jobs and investment opportunities for First Nations.

In Canada’s Northwest Territories, for example, Yellowknives Dene First Nation, which owns Det’on Cho Nahanni Construction Corp., is running the Nechalacho rare-earth mining project.

With the West in the nascent stages of this green technology transition, ethical and socially responsible operations and obligations are still being worked out. In the U.S., the Mountain Pass rare-earth mine and processing facility near Las Vegas, Nevada, revived in 2017 and now producing about 15% of global supplies, is still developing its life-cycle assessment framework, which calculates the environmental impacts of operations.

Mountain Pass was a global supplier of rare earth in the 20th century but shut down in 2002 because of competition from China, as well as environmental restrictions. Revived, it is now expanding and optimizing its processing capabilities, including producing separated rare-earth products. Mountain Pass now claims to be the most environmentally sustainable rare-earth production site in the world, says Matt Sloustcher, senior vice-president of communications for MP Materials, which owns Mountain Pass. “This research is a strong indication that the cultivation of a U.S. supply chain, commensurate with Western environmental values and standards, will help ensure that the world’s supply of rare earth is produced responsibly and with increasingly low environmental impact.”

Rare-earth elements are among the manufacturing metals of the future. However, the future, as they say, is now, with an accelerating climate crisis emphasizing the need for a rapid transition to a green economy. Whether through virgin mining, upcycled mining waste or recycled rare-earth metals from discarded retail products like cellphones, the transition to ensure the world arrives at net-zero carbon emissions will arrive not a moment too soon.

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based author, magazine editor, writer and documentary filmmaker.

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But this boast is worth more consideration than usual. Canada Nickel’s bold plan could have serious implications far beyond its operations in Timmins. Just weeks before Canada Nickel launched NetZero Metals, the European Union unveiled its pandemic recovery plan. It’s one of the grandest gestures in the history of a political body known mostly for stuffy bureaucratic pronouncements – more than €1.8 trillion in grants and loans, equivalent to nearly 5% of the EU’s GDP. And it leans heavily into a global energy transition whose standard bearer, Germany, was a lead partner in selling the other 26 member nations on the plan. Fully 30% of the package will be spent on initiatives aimed at “climate concerns,” with a similar focus for the other trillion dollars in the EU’s upcoming budget (which covers EU initiatives from 2021 to 2027, not just the pandemic recovery). France – the other lead partner in the EU deal – has since announced that it will spend €30 billion of its domestic recovery package on clean energy initiatives as well.

“With nickel as a preferred metal to power the clean energy revolution,” said Canada Nickel CEO Mark Selby at the launch of NetZero Metals, “our commitment to net-zero carbon production is the right step to take for the environment, for consumers, and for our investors.” You have to assume he was looking past Ottawa and not even glancing in Washington’s direction when he said it. Canada Nickel’s bet is that the EU’s green-saturated recovery is the future of the global economy and the best target for even an established heavy industry like mining. Manufacturing electric vehicles and renewable energy equipment, after all, requires an awful lot of nickel and cobalt.

Now, to paraphrase the great philosopher Ferris Bueller, Canadians aren’t European, nor do we plan on being European, so who gives a crap if they’re green industrialists? Canada’s largest trading partner, by a margin so wide as to be irreducible from the perspective of any particular government’s policy agenda, is the United States. (The current numbers are about 75% of all exports and 51% of all imports; no other nation has more than a 13% share of either end of Canada’s trade.) This is as true for nickel and iron as it is for softwood lumber, auto parts and pro hockey players.

But as one of those exported hockey stars once so famously put it, the way to win – in business as in hockey – is to focus not on where the puck is but on where it is going. And that’s where Canada Nickel’s net-zero bet comes in. If Canada’s heavy industries want to steer clear of a rust-belt scenario, they need to move now to where this century’s best economic opportunities are emerging – and those are increasingly found in the fast-growing cleantech sector. What’s more, Canada’s federal government has a net-zero pledge of its own. The deadline is a distant mid-century, to be sure, but Canada stands now at the bottom of that long ramp alongside numerous EU countries, leading U.S. jurisdictions like California and New York, and pace-setting companies like Google and Microsoft.

And more than that, Canada has a powerful set of assets to bring to the worldwide net-zero movement – its world-class mix of abundant natural resources and low-emissions electricity grids. Nationwide, 81% of Canada’s electricity is derived from non-emitting sources, with hydro powerhouses like British Columbia and Quebec already boasting virtually emissions-free grids. Hydro-Québec, for example, now actively courts data-centre clients on the merits of its clean power. And the choice of Montreal for the world’s first emissions-free aluminum production facility (Elysis, a joint venture of Rio Tinto and Alcan, catalyzed by Apple’s demand for zero-carbon aluminum) was a direct result of its climate-friendly virtues.

“The race for clean materials is certainly one that Canada could play a role in and could be important for Canada,” says Sarah Petrevan, policy director at Clean Energy Canada. Beyond the mineral wealth touted by Canada Nickel, she says, Canadian exports like aluminum, steel, concrete and fertilizer could all be valuable in markets like the EU where a smaller carbon footprint will increasingly impart competitive advantage.

And Canada Nickel is far from alone in its ambitious gaze to that low-carbon horizon. In British Columbia, Lafarge has launched plans for the nation’s lowest-carbon cement plant, bringing in carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology and fuel from non-recyclable waste. In Alberta, oil sands producer Cenovus Energy has a net-zero pledge of its own, and numerous companies are making big investments in everything from CCS to hydrogen fuel to shrink-the-oil-patch’s footprint. In northern Ontario, Goldcorp has opened the world’s first emissions-free gold mine, converting all on-site equipment to electric power. The list goes on, and many eyes in such firms are looking to export markets as climate plans grow stronger.

Beyond direct trade, though, Petrevan argues that the EU’s green recovery is the right “level of ambition.” If Canada’s climate goals – its 2030 Paris pledge as well as the net-zero target – are at all serious, then Canadian aspirations need to catch up with European plans. “The EU is the gold standard by which Canada should be judged,” Petrevan says.

Canada’s own pandemic recovery plans, then, represent a golden opportunity to bring our climate policies in line, finally, with our lofty goals. Government procurement rules, for example, don’t yet oblige the government to purchase the kinds of low-carbon materials Canada needs to be producing more of to hit its climate targets – and encourage the growth of companies like Canada Nickel.

“We’ve got everything we need to succeed,” says Chris Bataille, a researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris who has worked on decarbonization policy in Canada and internationally for more than a decade. “We’ve just got to reorient our efforts.”

Chris Turner’s most recent book is The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands.

With the support of the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Canada.

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