Chapter 1: What are critical minerals and why are they important?
There's hydrogen and helium and lithium, beryllium... It's a good way to remember your elements for a pub quiz, but maybe it's time for Kiwi kids to have a new ditty from the periodic table of New Zealand's own list of 37 critical minerals, given the song and dance being made of them and the latest revelations.
Titanium, vanadium and chromium and manganese...
I'm Sharon Brett-Kelley. Today on The Detail, the secretive talks around a US-New Zealand critical minerals deal and the journalist who was told to destroy sensitive information. First, why the big global fuss over critical minerals? Well, here's my newsroom colleague, geologist turned political reporter, Fox Meyer.
They're funky little rocks that make electronics work better. I mean, I guess we're going to piss off a lot of geologists here because, you know, they're minerals, not rocks is the classic thing. And then actually these are elements, not minerals. You know, elements build minerals, minerals build rocks like Legos.
But, you know, to use the Lego metaphor a bit further, it's like when you're building a Lego set, there might be one or two pieces that you need to do a very specific job to bring the whole thing together. You only need one or two of them, but you need exactly those ones. And that's sort of what the critical minerals are here. You don't need a lot of them.
But they're absolutely essential to get very specific things to work well. And those things are medical devices or autonomous weapon systems or batteries. Heaps of things in the modern age that are increasingly important.
Where do we find all these critical minerals?
Well, you can find them pretty much up and down the country. They tend to be on the west coasts of both islands. But for example, you've got Tungsten north of Wanaka. You've got Antimony in Reefton and Dunedin. Copper in Fjordland and something called Molybdenum in Golden Bay. Golden Bay, of course, gets its name from gold mining.
And almost all of these things are found close by to gold deposits. They travel through the rock in the same way. So anywhere you can find gold, you've probably got a pretty good shot at finding a critical mineral.
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Chapter 2: Where can critical minerals be found in New Zealand?
The missing step in this that I think is really important for us all to remember is processing and refining. It's one thing to go out and take a scoop of sand and find a method to like pull out the specific grains of sand that you want. We're actually pretty good at that. People have been doing that for a long time.
What's tricky is then taking those grains of sand and turning them into something usable or refining them down into the pure form of what we need to be able to build electronics with it. That capability is in short supply globally. China is very good at this. A lot of other countries are playing catch up. We are playing catch up with that.
If you do all the sorting really well, you still just have a very valuable sandbox. You know, you don't have a battery. Turning that into a battery is a whole other ballgame. And it's something that is going to take a lot of time and money and investment to get up and running.
Let's look at New Zealand's own critical minerals list. There's 37 on it. We've talked about gold, but also coal is on it. And that's not a mineral. And neither is gold, as you've said. But the coal, why?
Well, it might be because putting it on that list gives it some sort of legislative boon. You know, maybe you can say, well, I'm trying to open a new mine here for a critical mineral. Aggregate is also on here, which is extremely important for making stuff like concrete.
But I think this is where we get into a bit of distinction between things that are very important to mine for economic or industrial reasons and things that are very important to mine specifically for this very targeted electronic sector, which is what these critical minerals are. I'm not trying to make an argument about which one of these is more important.
I'm just saying that lumping them together is where we end up in confusing situations like this. Gold, at least, as I said earlier, is useful because when you're mining gold, odds are you are also accidentally mining a critical mineral. And if you can add in a step in your processing of that gold to also strip out the critical mineral, that's just money that's being left on the table, essentially.
And I think that's what people are trying to do here.
From actor Daniel Radcliffe's version of The Elements, a few in that short clip are on New Zealand's critical minerals list, like platinum and magnesium. The list was drawn up last year alongside a goal to double the value of our minerals exports to $3 billion by 2035. And that's where a potential NZ-US deal comes in.
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Chapter 3: How are critical minerals extracted and processed?
What do you mean by that?
Well, that's very much something that I guess the officials have to explain. I think because these documents speak about negotiations between two governments, the New Zealand government doesn't want to be putting information out there that may concern the other governments that they're negotiating with, that may undermine some of those negotiations.
When you saw that information, did you think, oh my God, this is quite incredible?
I think it was when MB got in touch with me and said that, look, we have to withhold some of this information because of these particular concerns. I was struck by the fact that it got through the net, that it did get to me, because this sort of stuff should really be going through multiple processes.
People should be picking up on this sort of information, especially if officials are genuine when they say that it could prejudice the security, defence or international relationships of New Zealand.
And will that information ever get out?
Well, we'll see. I've done some further requests to the ministry to try and get some more information. It may come out after the final framework. If there is a final framework is released, they may believe that they're then in a position to release it. So we'll have to see down the track.
So we may not get a final framework. Are you saying that this deal might not happen?
Well, the negotiations or the discussions are still underway. When the Prime Minister was speaking about it back in early February, he said that it wasn't a fait accompli, that a deal wasn't a sure thing, that they needed to continue to speak with the US side about how that may look.
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