This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate office collaboration.
In the summer of 2023, Vasileios Tsianos, vice-president of business development in Neo performance materialsbegan to receive calls from government representatives on both sides of the Atlantic. In the world of manufacturing industrial materials, the NEO is best known for making magnets of rare earths, used in everything, from domestic devices to electric vehicles. But these calls did not concern rare earths. They were about something much rarer: metal gallium.
Neo recycle a A few dozen tonnes High purity gallium per year, mainly the manufacturing scrap of semiconductive fleas, in a factory in Ontario, Canada. In North America, it is the only producer on the industrial scale of metal, which is used not only in fleas, but also on clean energy technologies and military equipment.
China, the world’s leading producer, had by far announcement New export controls on gallium, Apparently in response Stressing that the United States government was considering restrictions on the sale of advanced semiconductor fleas in China.
All of a sudden, people wanted to speak to Neo. “We talked to almost everyone” interested in producing gallium outside of China, Tsianos told Grist.
Since Tsianos began to receive these calls, tensions on the 31st element of the periodic table – as well as the 32nd, German, also used in a multitude of advanced technologies – have deteriorated. In December, in China Standing outright exports of the two metals to the United States following the decision of the Biden administration more restrict exports of American fleas.
Today, several companies operating in the United States and Canada are planning to extend the production of rare metals to help meet American demand. While producers of Canadian critical minerals can be swept away in a new geopolitical tat-tat if Trump should pass with his threatens to impose pricesProducers of American metals could see the support of the new administration, which called to prioritize federal funding for critical mineral projects in a Day 1 Executive Decree. Beyond the United States and Canada, industry observers say that the ban on exports from China feeds global interest By making more diversified critical mineral supply chains so that no country has a standhold on vital materials for a high -tech and clean energy future.
“This last series of export bans puts a lot of wind in the sails of the efforts of the critical mineral supply chain, not only in the United States but in the world”, ” Seaver Wang From the Breakthrough Institute, a research center focused on technological solutions to environmental problems, told Grist.
Gallium and Germanium are not exactly familiar names. But they are in products essential to modern life and in a society without fossil fuel. With its impressive electrical properties, gallium is used in Semiconductive chips Who make their way in everything, from mobile phones to power converters in electric vehicles with LED lighting screens. Metal is also used in the manufacture of rare earth magnets for electric vehicles and wind turbines, in solar cells with thin layers, and sometimes, in the solar photovoltaic cells of commercially popular silicon, where it can help increase performance and extend the lifespan.
