Meet the CCG Team #3 Dr Karla Cervantes Barrón

Dr Karla Cervantes Barrón is a Senior Research Associate with the Resource Efficiency Collective at the University of Cambridge. Karla was born in Mexico City and studied Chemical Engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).  She obtained an MSc in Environmental Systems Engineering from University College London. Karla has worked in CCG since the beginning. At CCG she is involved in a variety of themes, including leading or overseeing several projects on energy and material efficiency as well as co-leading CCG’s Critical Minerals work with Dr Vivien Foster from Imperial College London.  

Tell us a little about your early career.

At school I always liked science and maths so studying Chemical Engineering was a way to marry all those things together. I really liked how applicable engineering was in so many industries and jobs.  Towards the end of the degree, I started focusing more on environmental engineering.  After graduating, I worked as an environmental coordinator for a year in Mexico City for a company that was linked to Danone, the dairy manufacturer, but the position was in the drinking water section. I was hired as an environmental coordinator, overseeing environmental projects, analysing operations data including tracking water use or energy in each plant.

I left that job to pursue a master’s at UCL in Environmental Systems Engineering. There I got interested in the development aspect of environmental engineering, because I did my dissertation on battery recycling of solar home systems in sub-Saharan Africa.  Then I came to Cambridge for my PhD and started looking at systems thinking related to climate change involving energy and materials, but also policies and country conditions. My PhD included visiting Uganda. I joined CCG straight out of my PhD because it was very closely related to my interests and work at that point.

Critical Minerals are only one aspect of your work; tell us about the range of things you’re involved in.

I’ve been working for CCG, since it started in 2021. At the beginning, I was working on the starter data kits for energy and participating in automating the creation of some of the documents for such kits that we made open access. My subsequent work has focused on researching materials needed for low carbon systems working with Prof Jonathan Cullen in Cambridge. There’s a lot of work around this topic, but for CCG I mostly focused on material demand at the start. The work is as part of CCG’s team working on Sector Interactions, which is led by Prof Jim Hall at Oxford and Prof Jonathan Cullen at Cambridge.

In our side of the work, we’ve developed an open-source model called Mat-dp which stands for material demand projections. Mat-dp helps us figure out what amounts and what type of materials are required as we transition to low-carbon energy and transport systems.

I’ve also done work in other countries looking at resource efficiency in industry. The first country I ever did was Lao PDR where I worked with researchers there and collaborated with an institution called the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) in a Southern Partner Fund (SPF) project. We wrote a report on this work and launched it at one of our CCG COP27 side events.  Currently, there’s an SPF project that we’re finishing in Vietnam which is related to material flows in the packaging industry. The project is in collaboration with the Institute that belongs to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (ISPONRE) and members of the National Economics University (NEU) in Vietnam.  It’s been really cool, because they work on Vietnam’s circular economy policies directly and our work is informing that.

I also currently oversee two Flexible Research Fund (FRF) projects. Through all these country collaborations and with having been in CCG for so long, there have been some ideas that I’ve been able to take forward, and proposals that I’ve helped develop that became FRF projects. The first project I’m overseeing now is on cooling in Lao PDR and it has involved surveys to identify what equipment is used and sold, for example. The second one is also in Lao on energy efficiency in industry also including surveys in factories and households.

It all sounds very busy and impressive. What would you say was the catalyst to start to focus on critical minerals?

I’ve been personally interested in the mineral side of things for a while now.  I remember reading a book around 2016 called The Elements of Power (David S Abraham) which was focused on rare earths, and that sparked some curiosity in me about materials that are used in very small quantities, but which are very important for technologies.

So, I’ve been following the conversation ever since and it became really clear that for low-carbon technologies, there’s a big requirement for certain materials. Obviously, they have become critical for some countries in terms of facilitating their economies and technological growth.  I “officially” started working on this for CCG when we presented a policy brief for a first Chatham House event last year. The critical minerals that we focus on are the ones that have to do with low-carbon systems.

What have been the milestones for you on critical minerals so far?

A key milestone was being able to work on material supply, because we’d been doing demand for a bit longer.  Another milestone was being able to turn the critical minerals research into what is now a multidisciplinary collaboration. This collaboration focuses on mineral value addition in African countries and has involved work on mineral value chains, trade, energy and transport requirements, and environmental, social and governance aspects. The collaboration is not without its challenges, but I think we’re learning a lot from each other, and we’re getting to exchange information and discuss different modelling and non-modelling approaches.

Our most recent highlight was the event that we did on 23 September this year at Chatham House where we presented our findings to date.  It was great to have a chance to bring people together mainly in this case from Africa or people who work in African contexts. We had positive responses about the work in which we had combined a lot of insights and that feels great after all our efforts.

Has that combining of so many things pushed you forward in terms of understanding what the situation is or what needs to happen next?

Yes, we have some clarity now on what types of country collaboration might be needed, new views on policies and legislation, views on data requirements, and many other useful insights which we’re going to capture in an academic paper soon.

And do you have any thoughts about where the thinking about critical minerals needs to go next?

Especially for Africa, there are still a lot of insights that can be drawn out. We have an interesting modelling approach and an interesting way to also bring in more qualitative data. I think there are relevant questions on how battery chemistries may make some of the minerals we’re currently interested in, less important to focus on. But that depends on whether certain investments are made, and the industry is used to this kind of change.

What about the ethical side of extraction? What do you think about the sourcing of critical minerals?

This aspect is definitely one that needs to be taken care of and there are a lot of international initiatives around this, including improved practices and transparency, what kind of technologies could help alleviate the environmental burden or how to address social aspects. At the same time, the amounts of minerals that are required for low-carbon technologies, are much lower than the amounts of materials mined for fossil fuels and there are some great stats on that. So overall we would be looking at an overall decrease in mining but changing the locations in which mining will happen.

The other key thing is that, at some point, we might be able to implement other measures like recycling.  Obviously, that would need to be evaluated properly so that we know that the contribution is positive rather than creating more emissions, but that is an alternative to having to source everything from mines. There is also the option to reduce demand which can help alleviate the need for resources in the first place. As you can see, there are many options to consider.

Finally, some might argue that in focussing on batteries and metals, we are replacing one finite resource (fossil fuel) with another finite resource which is are minerals. How do you respond to that?

I would make this point: when we use fossil fuels as our source of energy, it’s not just about the energy and materials used to build the power plant; you always need materials that are burnt to be able to generate the energy. With renewables, there may be a large material outlay initially (with the electricity technologies, batteries and/or storage) but then you use wind or solar and that “fuel” is renewable (some would say almost infinite) so that is a very significant improvement.

Some of Karla’s publications include:

Academic papers and databases

Cervantes Barron, Karla, Cullen Jonathan M, Using open-source tools to project bulk and critical material demand and their implications for low-carbon systems: introducing Mat-dp model tools; 2024; Resources, Conservation & Recycling, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S

Cervantes Barron, Karla. (2023). Mat-dp/mat-dp-database: Published version of the dataset (v1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8304711

Cervantes Barron, Karla, Cullen Jonathan M, Mat-dp: An open-source Python model for analysing material demand projections and their environmental implications, which result from building low-carbon systems; 2022; Journal of Open Source Software https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.04460

Cervantes Barron, Karla, Cullen Jonathan M, Bulk and critical material demand for selected ‘Starter Kit’ energy system models – dataset; 2022; Zenodo https://zenodo.org/record/6985000

Cervantes Barron, Karla, Haaker, Maaike E, Cullen Jonathan M, Material requirements for future low-carbon electricity projections in Africa; 2022; Energy Strategy Reviews https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X22000876

Allington, Lucy; Cannone, Carla; Pappis, Ioannis; Cervantes Barron, Karla; et al; 2022, Data in Brief, Selected ‘Starter kit’ energy system modelling data for selected countries in Africa, East Asia, and South America (#CCG, 2021); Available on: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352340922002323

Cannone, Carla; Allington, Lucy; Cervantes Barron, Karla; Charbonnier, Flora; Zachau Walker, Miriam; Halloran, Claire; Yeganyan, Rudolf; Tan, Naomi; Cullen, Jonathan M.; Harrison, John; To, Long Seng; Howells, Mark; 2023, MethodsX; Designing a zero-order energy transition model: a guide for creating a Starter Data Kit; Available on: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2215016123001218

Allington, Lucy; Cannone, Carla, Pappis, Ioannis, Cervantes Barron, Karla, et al, 2021, Selected ‘Starter Kit’ energy system modelling data for Algeria (#CCG) and 69 other Global South countries, Research square, Preprint and open-access database.

Reports and Policy Briefs

IRENA (2023), Geopolitics of the energy transition: Critical materials, International Renewable Energy Agency, Abu Dhabi. (Contributed to report review and publication survey.)

Cervantes Barron, Karla, Dhir, Shobhan, & Cullen, Jonathan M. (2023). The geopolitics of critical materials and minerals and implications for the low-carbon transition (Version 1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7548640

Cervantes Barron, Karla, et al. (2022). Resource efficiency in Lao PDR industry: guidelines for a sustainable industrial development (Version 3). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7536637

Cervantes Barron, Karla; Debnath, Ramit; Cullen, Jonathan M., (2022) How can Lao PDR become the Low-Carbon “Battery of Asia”? COP 27 CCG Policy Brief series. https://climatecompatiblegrowth.com/wp-content/uploads/How-can-Lao-PDR-become-the-Low-Carbon-Battery-of-Asia_COP27-Policy-Brief.pdf

Jim Watson, Sam Fankhauser, Karla Cervantes Barron, 2022, Potential Implications of High Fossil Fuel Prices for Low- and Middle-Income Countries. Policy Brief. https://climatecompatiblegrowth.com/ccg-briefing-high-fossil-fuel-prices-for-lmics/

Cullen J.M., Ebenezer, N., Dalkmann, H., Haq, G., Cervantes Barron, K., et al. SUM4ALL and Climate Compatible Growth, An equitable transition towards road passenger transport decarbonisation, 03 November 2021. https://www.sum4all.org/data/files/electromobility_in_the_global_south_an_equitable_transition_toward_road_passenger_transport_decarbonization.pdf

Cervantes Barron, Karla, Haaker, Maaike E, Cullen Jonathan M, 2021, Future low-carbon electricity in Africa: how much material is needed?, COP 26 Policy Briefs, Climate Compatible Growth. Available on: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1160025/v1