Resnick Institute Workshop on Critical Materials for Sustainable Energy
April 14th and 15th, California institute of Technology
The goal of this workshop was to bring together a key group of people for a facilitated discussion to answer the question "How should we focus research and development efforts to best mitigate the effects of material criticality on achieving a sustainable energy future?"
The workshop took place over the course of two days, and included four half-day closed-door working sessions, with additional plenary/keynote talks that were open to the Caltech community. The working sessions are outlined below, and were structured to address resource scarcity from the perspectives of both supply (process innovations in production and extraction) and demand (materials innovations that substitute away from critical elements).
The expectation was that all participants were well versed in the issues related to materials resources, either from an industrial, policy, or research perspective. We provided a "suggested reading list" before the workshop to make sure that everyone was starting with relevant information.
Registration was by invitation only.
Workshop Report
The workshop report is a white paper summarizing the discussion and providing a roadmap for R&D efforts involving potentially critical materials.
Keynote Speakers
- Steven Duclos, General Electric
- Jack Lifton, Tech Metals Research
- Diana Bauer, U.S. Deptartment of Energy
- Dr. Yasushi Watanabe, Japanese Institute for Geo-resources and Environment
- Professor Chunhua Yan, State Key Lab of Rare Earth Materials, Peking University
Abridged Suggested Reading List
To make sure everyone was on the same page coming into the workshop, we compiled a set of recent publications relating to critical materials to read in advance and use as a starting point for discussions.
General overview:
Supply of REEs:
- The Principal Rare Earth Elements Deposits of the United States—A Summary of Domestic Deposits and a Global Perspective
- China’s Rare-Earth Industry