Luisa Moreno, president and director of the Canadian rare earth mining company Defense Metals, rattles off the ages of some of her colleagues.
Their chief metallurgist, who consults for the company, is 81. A petrologist and geologist, who serves as a part-time expert advisor, is in his late 80s. One of their directors, a mineralogist specializing in rare earths, is 80-something.
“This is a major, major problem,” said Moreno.
That problem, specifically, is an acute shortage of skills and new talent in the critical minerals industry, which supplies lithium for batteries, rare earths for permanent magnets, and copper for electric vehicles and battery storage. And Defense Metals is no anomaly: another rare earths company she was chatting with recently has an average employee age of 75, she said.
“I think that skills is a missing element,” Peter Handley, who works for the European Commission on issues related to energy-intensive industries, said at a recent webinar on critical minerals. “We need to have resources, we need to have the refining, we need to have everything from exploration through to the recycling and reuse of things.”
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