This is a text version of the "DOE and Critical Materials" video presented at the Critical Materials Workshop, held on April 3, 2012 in Arlington, Virginia.

Speaker
David Sandalow, Assistant Secretary, Office of Policy and International Affairs


MR. SANDALOW: Thanks, Leo. Thanks, everybody. Hopefully, there is a slide deck in here somewhere. Yes.

Good to see you all. It's great to be here. Some of you I saw in Japan last week, so we are kind of going from continent to continent talking about critical materials. It is good to see you.

And talk about a tough act to follow, actually, but I think I have a relatively modest assignment this morning, which is just to set you off for the rest of the morning with a brief summary of what we have done with our critical materials strategy at DOE.

But before I get started, I want to first recognize Diana Bauer, who has really done a tremendous job helping to pull this together, along with a bunch of others, has really done tremendous work.

And then, I think I literally have not had a chance to shake his hand, but I see in the audience here Assistant Secretary David Danielson, who I am particularly excited so congratulations to David. (Applause.)

It is no small feat to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate these days. (Laughter.)

And so DOE is very lucky to have David and to have and we are very grateful to the Senate for having moved his nomination. So good to see you, David. Congratulations.

When I arrived with Secretary Chu at the Department a couple of years ago, one of the things we found was that there had been a lot of work in critical materials across the Department, across the different stovepipes within the Department, and a lot of very good work.

And of course Ames, some of you are from is, you know, a historic leader in this area, and for many for decades, and lots of high quality work. But it had not been pulled together and integrated and coordinated with stovepipes pulled together and walls broken down.

And so we saw first that as part of a broad theme of the Secretary to do exactly that across a number of disciplines, that that might be valuable. Second, this appeared to be an issue that was going to be of increasing policy importance, and it was getting increasing attention, partly as a result of geopolitical factors and other things.

And so we set out to do the first Critical Materials Strategy the Department had done. And I will just spend about 10 minutes telling you what we have done in that regard, which we hope lays somewhat of an analytic foundation for the work that will be done at the hub.

So we launched this in March 2010. And we did a request for information, pulled together a team across the Department, lots of different offices working on this, lots of sleepless nights and weekends, and put out something in December 2010, our first Critical Materials Strategy. I'll talk a little bit more about that.

And then, we did it again last year. In spring 2011, we did another public request for information and put out our second Critical Materials Strategy. And, you know, if you haven't looked at it and you are interested in the topic, I commend this to you. It is on our website.

The scope of the project was it was limited. Because of resource constraints, we focused on four clean energy technologies on vehicles, lighting, solar PV, and wind. We didn't focus on every application for every critical material, and we didn't focus on even the entire range of all energy technologies.

And we did the lanthanides and, what, about five other critical materials cobalt, lithium, gallium, tellurium. And I guess in and last year, in response to suggestions that we received, we added manganese and nickel.

And last year actually as well we did some case studies, including a case study on petroleum refining, largely because of the interest in gasoline prices and wanted to do an analysis in that area.

We, as part of this effort, have identified three strategic pillars for the Department's work in this area diversifying global supply chains, developing substitutes, and reduce, reuse, and recycle.

I find in the public dialogue it is the first that really gets most of the attention, interestingly. There is a lot of focus on, you know, are we going to have production capacity here in the United States? And that is important, but developing substitutes and more efficient use is extremely important as well.

And we talked in our report about the material supply chain, kind of emphasizing that it is not just an extraction issue but also processing and components, end use technologies, and recycling and reuse.

So here in our 2011 strategy, here are our main messages, or here is what we did. We provided an updated criticality analysis I'll talk about that set forth several case studies, including the one I mentioned on oil refining, discussed market dynamics. We presented the first ever critical materials R&D plan, pulled together for the Department, and those are the main items.

And here are our main messages, you know, pretty high levels of generality, but this is first, the critical supply challenges for five areas for dysprosium, neodymium, terbium, europium, and yttrium. They may affect energy technologies in the years ahead.

In the past year, DOE and other stakeholders have scaled up work to address these challenges, and we talked about that. And there has been a fair amount of work in that area.

One of the real conclusions that emerges from this is the need to build up workforce capabilities in this area, and I'll say a word about that, and much, much more work is required in the years ahead. And this workshop is a testament to that, or it is what you are doing here is important in that regard.

So we a brief summary. We did a pretty comprehensive supply analysis, and I have a slide on it here. But those of you who are interested in this and haven't looked at it, we went we looked not just at Mountain Pass mine and the Lynas mine in Australia, but also about 20 or 25 mines around the world or production sites and did an assessment of with the best available information we could find of what we anticipate coming out element by element in those mines, particularly for the rare earths.

And then, we did demand projections as well, looking at different actually, the scenarios, different possibilities for the growth in the use of the technologies as well as the material intensity, and, based on that, adopting a methodology that the National Academy has used, and which you are going to hear more about.

We did a criticality analysis with supply risk there along the X-axis, and importance to clean energy on the Y-axis. And here are our conclusions that, you know, neodymium and dysprosium, largely from magnets, are uses are the most critical. And europium, yttrium, and terbium, important for phosphors, obviously, are critical as well.

One of the things I often get asked, talking about this issue about lithium I'm sure some of you had this experience as well. People think lithium is in critical supply shortage and as a result of public awareness of lithium ion batteries. And we assess lithium to be near critical, but not nearly as critical as some of the others.

An important point from our standpoint within the U.S. government, this is our work is part of an interagency effort organized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which has four workgroups critical materials criterion prioritization, federal R&D prioritization, globalization of supply chains, and depth and transparency of information.

We looked in here at government policies around the world, and we have a chapter which summarizes government policies in each of these countries. And we talked about cooperation among countries and the potential benefits accelerating global innovation, improving transparency, and advancing environmentally sound mining and processing.

There have been a number of international workshops. Secretary Chu already mentioned it I guess I did, too but we had there have been a number of these, including the one last week in Japan. On the education and training front, here we assess the different disciplines, and we listed the different disciplines that we think are important here. And this is it is such a key point, that we need to develop expertise across the range of a number of different specialties in order to move forward in this area.

When we were preparing this slide, we said, "Every slide needs a picture, and we don't have one." We said, "Well, here, our team" we're a bunch of professionals we decided to put our own picture in. But this is a point that I think can't be emphasized enough the importance of funding and of developing specialties, and that is going to involve research funding in this area.

So our R&D so far aligns with our three strategic pillars diversification of supplies, substitutes, and recycling.

And the next step that we identified in our Critical Materials Strategy in December includes implementing the integrated research plan, and what you are doing here is a key part of that.

Then, our international work, strengthening information-gathering, continuing to work closely with our partners, and we will update that strategy periodically.

So that is the basics of our Critical Materials Strategy. And with that, I am happy to answer any questions, or turn it over to Leo.

DR. CHRISTODOULOU: Thank you, David.

MR. SANDALOW: Thank you very much. (Applause.)

DR. CHRISTODOULOU: I do have

MR. SANDALOW: I would like to say, I am quite genuinely sorry that I need to leave, but good luck in your work today. Look forward to a report.

DR. CHRISTODOULOU: Thank you. Thanks, David.

I would like to actually apologize, because I meant to spend a little bit more time introducing my DOE team, but I David is leaving. I would like to most of you actually probably don't know this, but a driving force and driving light behind this workshop for us has been Chetna Khosla, who is my AAAS fellow and who has been relentlessly and passionately running this.

So thank you for making all of this happen.

The other people I would like to recognize is of course my new boss, Dave Danielson. I'm a little too late for that. Congratulations, once again.

Dr. Eric Rohlfing from our Office of Science, Dr. Linda Horton from Office of Science, and Dr. Colin McCormick from the Office of the Undersecretary. As you know, Arun is very, very passionately interested in this subject as well.

And on the panel up here, Elizabeth Eide from the National Academies, Diana Bauer from DOE, and Mark Johnson, who is from ARPA-E.

As you can see, the reason for taking the time to introduce everybody is to give you a sense that this is a whole of DOE effort, and we are committed to breaking down the barriers that exist in the stovepipes and truly making an interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary team across the whole community, both at DOE and across USG and across the United States Government.

So I urge you, as we move on forward in these discussions, that you keep that in mind, that we think we want a new model for collaboration in this area. As I said, I believe that this is one of the great challenges of our time.

And with that little break, I would like to introduce Elizabeth Eide from National Academies. (Applause.)