PhD in Environmental Economics: Innovation and cicular economy of mineral resources

The PhD will take place in the interdisciplinary RECALL (Sustainable RECovery of vALuable metaLs in bauxite residue, https://www.cerege.fr/fr/nos-projets/recall ) project, a program funded by the ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) which bring together several academic and non-academic partners: CEREGE, AMSE, ICSM, HYMAG'IN and ALTEO. The aim of the RECALL project is to selectively recover critical metals and to valorize the iron in bauxite residues with the overall goal of reducing the pressure on natural mineral resources.  A shortage of these materials could be a potential bottleneck to the deployment of a number of strategic technologies including electronic and renewable energies that contain a large number of critical metals including Rare Earth Elements (REEs).

To reduce the environmental footprint of the extractions, this interdisciplinary project will develop two sustainable processes as an alternative to traditional pyro- and hydrometallurgy processes and will value the economic impact of this technological change in terms of social welfare in which potential environmental and health impacts will be considered.

Based on the circular economy approach, the goal of the RECALL project is therefore to design a sustainable process of valorization of an industrial waste that will globally outcompete traditional approaches thank to better consideration of social well-being.

The AMSE PhD student will work in interaction with (and benefit from) another PhD fellow (Amidex - Aix-Marseille University foundation) started in June 2020 and working on the extraction of critical metals from bauxite residue at CEREGE.

PhD Missions

This PhD will be at the heart of the economic part of the project.

First, social well-being will be considered, that includes the externalities associated with the process (e.g. environmental and health impacts) and other sources of economic inefficiency (e.g. technological and economic uncertainties) that have an impact on welfare at the aggregate level. The PhD student will have to identify and model social welfare variations using new processes compared to traditional ones. The valuation of expected variations of social well-being associated with the adoption of these new processes will provide crucial information for entrepreneurs, policy makers and citizens.

The second task of the PhD Student will be devoted to the analysis of the economic conditions that will favor the adoption of the new technologies through a prospective analysis. Thus, the maturity of technologies will be studied to determine acceptable risk levels for society linked to technological, economic and environmental changes. PhD student will be in charge to develop retroaction loops between "technological" and "economic" efficiency in a Social Cost Benefit Analysis (SCBA) approach. Beyond the previous two market failures that focus on consumer's and citizen's well-being, it must pay attention to governmental regulatory and fiscal actions. Geopolitical risks could be considered as well.

Because in the case of critical metals, the development of the proposed technologies will probably have a significant impact on relative prices, it will be deal with large-scale project evaluation methods and focus on technological uncertainty to determine a break point (or break interval) when the decision to adopt the new technology can be reversed for private firms or for policy makers. The impacts on the social welfare of different types of risks and uncertainties related to technological, economic, and environmental changes must be explored. To this end, a socioeconomic assessment method based on technology readiness assessment (TRA) using the Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) will be developed. 

Funding category: Contrat doctoral

ANR project RECALL

PHD Country: France