MATERIALS HANDLING
PhD candidate Pablo Petri at Uppsala University expecting results from scanning a batch of 4m drill core from Bergby
SOURCING SUSTAINABILITY
Mikael Bergqvist explores strategies for securing essential raw materials vital to the shift towards sustainable energy storage and production
B
uilding energy storage for sustainable energy sources is ongoing, with battery production plants starting or
being constructed throughout Europe and elsewhere. Still, the needed raw materials are in scarce supply, and mining and processing is often done in regions where working conditions are both dangerous and hard. Reliance on imported critical raw material from regions where the regime suddenly might change its policy on exports versus domestic consumption is like gambling and might jeopardise entire projects. Examples on how Europe and the
USA are tackling these challenges are the Critical Raw Materials Act from the European Commission, and the Infl ation Reduction Act issued by the White House. Both aim to reduce dependency on remote sources to strengthen local
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sourcing of critical raw materials. Let us go through an example on
how this might work out in practice, from examples in the Nordic countries, and how novel technology can be put to use to make the process more eff ective. Lithium-ion batteries are the most
common types for energy storage, of which there are a number of varieties, many containing cobalt as well as lithium as part of their cathodes, and of course being connected to energy production or consumption with copper wires. So where does one fi nd these metals?
COBALT Cobalt has been used as an ingredient in ‘cobalt blue’ glass and ceramics since thousands of years. One of the larger European cobalt mines was in Norway; The Australian-Norwegian company Kuniko decided to have a closer look at
the areas surrounding the old mine, with modern equipment and current expertise to explore how much remains and how it can be retrieved eff iciently and with a minimum of environmental impact? One of the state-of-the-art methods
used was the Orexplore Geocore X10 analyser, revealing not only the elements but also structures, essential for the understanding of the formation of the actual ore body. Harry Guest, exploration geologist at
Kuniko, explains what we see in Figures 1 and 2: “The photographed piece of core comes from a key zone of high-grade cobalt mineralisation. Observations suggested that the mineralisation had a complex 3D structure, and understanding this structure is of critical importance for planning further exploration on the project. Orexplore’s core scanning gave us a 3D visualisation of the target mineralisation, allowing us to clearly see how the mineralisation had been tightly folded throughout the volume of the drillcore. This helped to confi rm that intense folding plays a critical role in creating high-grade cobalt zones, and the orientation of these folds has a strong infl uence on the overall geometry of the target. By taking the information gained from this exercise, we are able
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