No battery without cobalt, no electric car without lithium, no smartphone without rare earths. At the same time, competition for these raw materials is growing worldwide. Many supply chains are controlled by just a few countries, while Germany and Europe are heavily dependent on imports. Anyone who holds a modern device in their hand is therefore always holding a piece of raw materials policy. This is set to change. The Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) is receiving almost 20 million euros from the federal government to conduct research on eight projects aimed at making Germany more independent in its supply of raw materials.
What the researchers in Saxony are actually doing
Five projects are based at the HIF in Freiberg. They are pursuing very different approaches. It is not simply a matter of finding new deposits. The researchers are also developing digital tools, energy-efficient processing methods and new methods to extract raw materials with less energy, less water and higher yields.
The DigIT project is developing digital tools that can be used to quickly evaluate geological data from old mines. This sounds technical, but in simple terms it means that researchers can find out more quickly where worthwhile raw material deposits are located. The NahGOLD project, on the other hand, focuses on gold and metals such as zinc, bismuth and tellurium, which often occur together. Until now, the high zinc content in such ores was a technical problem that made it difficult to extract the other metals. New processes aim to change this.
Three other projects are working on how raw materials can be processed in a more energy-efficient and resource-saving way. They combine methods from materials science with machine learning, i.e. computers that learn independently from data.
