The UK needs to establish independent, sustainable and resilient supply chains to diversify its sourcing of critical minerals and reduce dependence on China for such minerals, said UK Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre chairperson Paul Atherley, who is also chairperson of magnet metal and rare earths miner Pensana.

He was called to give evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee on Critical Minerals, relating to the recently enacted National Security and Investment Act, on December 6.

To boost the UK’s supply of critical minerals, Atherley said the country could leverage its chemical parks to create the resilient supply chains it is looking for, and “leapfrog the Chinese” to create independent and sustainable supply chains in the UK.

“We need to source the material from parts of the world where we have full transparency. We are very fortunate that we have great relationships with some of the great mining continents of the world – Africa, Australia, South America and North America,” he said.

Such sources are “home to enormous resources of the critical minerals that we need to process”, stated Atherley.

In this regard, he posited that the UK partner to mine around the world and use the UK’s chemical parks to create the resilient supply chains the country was looking for.

The wide-ranging questions came from a cross-party Select Committee panel chaired by Darren Jones, who asked Atherley which parts of the UK economy were exposed to critical minerals.

The energy transition the UK was going through is the biggest energy transition in the country’s history, explained Atherley. “In the UK, this is offshore wind and electric vehicles [EVs]. . .  the existing installed electricity generating capacity in this country is 65 GW.”

He added that a significant volume of wind generating capacity is going into the North Sea, worth about 50 GW.

Member of Parliament (MP) Alexander Stafford also asked about the critical minerals Atherley was most worried about, in terms of supply chain concerns, to which Atherley said “absolutely permanent magnets”.

He pointed out that permanent magnets were a critical component of the drivetrain of EVs, and that the only reason the UK had offshore wind that worked so well was because of direct-drive turbines – “a copper coil being rotated inside 7 t of permanent magnets”.

“Without the magnets, we do not have offshore wind turbines [and] EVs. Without the magnets, we have problems in the communications, industrial and medical industries. And as we saw in the US recently, F35 [fighter] jets do not take off without rare earth permanent magnets,” added Atherley.

Meanwhile, MP Ruth Edwards asked about how to attain more transparency in supply chains, stating that the government’s Critical Minerals Strategy found that supply chains were opaque.

To this end, Atherley said sustainable supply chains had to include sustainability considerations under the National Security and Investment Act – something “not hard to do”.

“We should not be importing material into this country, either as an end product or mid-stream product, that does not meet the highest sustainability environmental, social and corporate governance guidelines,” he said.

Further, MP Bim Afolani raised a concern about whether there was a risk the UK could not have access to critical minerals at the right time.

“Absolutely,” said Atherley, who added that such a circumstance happened immediately upon the publication of the Inflation Reduction Act in the US, when France President Emmanuel Macron spoke with US President Joe Biden to protest against what Macron perceived to be the subsidising of the critical minerals strategy or EV strategy in the US at the expense of the European Union.

“We are in a battle right now and right now we are not on the field. We need to get there otherwise someone else will capture these supply chains,” he said.

Furthermore, Edwards questioned whether there were any minerals on the UK’s criticality list susceptible to suffering from a particular lack of resilience and that would be adversely affected by a sudden shock.

In this regard, Atherley said the critical minerals’ mid-stream was of particular importance. “If you wanted to weaponise lithium right now, [more than] 90% of all the lithium hydroxide in the world that goes into all the Gigafactories for all the EVs comes from one country – [China].

“So it does not matter where you mine it, [China] does the midstream processing,” he said.

Pensana has assets in Angola and in the UK and is working to develop a sustainable magnet metal supply chain.