cerium

Critical Metals Vital to Our Lives in Tight Supply

We begin 2012 similar to how we started 2011 when it comes to rare earth, rare technical metals and rare industrial metals. China has over 90% of production and refining. The US and EU governments are scrambling to legislate, source, produce, open and reopen mines. The West has decided to continue down the road of the idea that the markets will take care of the supply and price of these metals. What is alarming is how easily the West was lulled to sleep by China´s ability to supply the world its metals cheaply and efficiently. The West concentrated on making money trading stocks and futures that dealt with these commodities. China concentrated on building the most extensive mining industry in the history of man. Here in 2012 the Department of Energy in the USA has approved a spending bill that includes $20 Million to focus on the supply issues of these metals.

The metals I am speaking about are so vital to our everyday lives. These metals are found in your mobile phones, computers, LCD and LED TV´s, hybrid cars, solar power, wind power, nuclear power, efficient lighting and medical technologies. Here is a list of metals that have been deemed critical.

  • Indium RIM (Solar, Mobile Phones, LCD)
  • Tellurium RIM (Solar, Computers, Semi-conductors)
  • Gallium RIM (Solar, Mobile Phones, LED´s, Fuel Cells)
  • Hafnium RIM (Processors, Nuclear, Lighting, Plasma Cutting Tools)
  • Tantalum RIM (Capacitors, Medical Implants, Mobile Phones, Nuclear)
  • Tungsten RIM (Nuclear, Armaments, Aviation)
  • Yttrium REE (Lighting, Medical Technology, Magnets in Hybrids)
  • Neodymium REE (Magnets in Wind power, Super Magnets, Hybrid Vehicles)
  • Dysprosium REE (Computers, Nuclear, Hybrid Vehicles)
  • Europium REE (Lighting, LED´s, Lasers
  • Lanthanum REE (Hybrid Vehicles, Magnets, Optics)
  • Cerium REE (LED´s, Catalytic Converters, Magnets)

RIM=Rare Industrial Metal REE=Rare Earth Element

The supplies of these metals could hold back the production of green technologies. According to the latest report by the Department of Energy, ¨Supply challenges for five rare earth metals may affect clean energy technology deployment in the years ahead¨. If Green technology is to become main stream, the costs of these technologies have to reach cost parity with traditional energy sources. As long as there are serious supply issues with these metals the costs can´t reach these levels. The other option is finding alternatives like Graphene and Nanotechnologies.

The US and EU need supply chains of the metals that include both mining and refining of these metals. Relying on sovereign states for critical metals such as these, leave a nation vulnerable to outside influence in both politics and economics. Environmentalists have succeeded in influencing politicians to close mines throughout the West. Politicians have legislated the mining industry into the position it is in today. The Western nations must start now to build its supply chain or continue to be at the mercy of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) nations for its metal needs.

The best the West can do now is provide, enough metals to meet its own demands. China has reached a point where it can now demand that certain industries produce their products there. If a company decides to try to produce the product in another country China will make producing that item cost prohibitive outside of China by raising the prices of the metals.

The demand for the products these metals are used to produce, are showing few signs of slowing down even in a so-called recession. Governments are subsidizing Green technology, people are buying mobile phones across the planet and everybody wants a nice flat screen TV. Will 2012 pass without countries truly taking this opportunity to fix the problem or will they step up and make the hard decisions which can put the countries back in control over their own destiny?

By: Randy Hilarski - The Rare Metals Guy

Electric cars to be hit by supply disruptions

The advancement of electric cars in the short-term could be affected by supply disruptions.

That’s the verdict of a new report from the US Department of Energy entitled 2011 Critical Materials Strategy, which looks at supply challenges for five rare earth metals – dysprosium, neodymium, europium, terbium and yttrium. These metals are used in magnets for wind turbines and electric vehicles or phosphors in energy efficient lighting. Meanwhile, other elements, including indium, lanthanum, cerium and tellurium, were found to be near critical.

According to the report, demand for almost all of the materials has grown more rapidly than demand for commodity metals such as steel – this has come from consumer products including mobile phones, computers and flat panel televisions, as well as clean energy technologies.

However, the report concludes that manufacturers of wind power and electric vehicle technologies are already looking into strategies to respond to potential shortages. It states that manufacturers are currently making decisions on future system designs, trading off performance benefits of elements such as neodymium and dysprosium against potential supply shortages.

As an example, wind turbine manufacturers are looking at gear-driven, hybrid and direct drive systems with varying levels of rare earth metal content while some electric vehicle manufacturers are pursuing rare earth free induction motors or using switched reluctance motors as an alternative to PM motors.

By: Paul Lucas
Source: http://www.thegreencarwebsite.co.uk/blog/index.php/2011/12/27/electric-cars-to-be-hit-by-supply-disruptions/

DOE report finds 5 clean-energy related REEs at risk in short-term

The substantial capex required for the development of a rare earths mine, compounded by major miners’ lack of interest in mining rare earths, may spell trouble in meeting future demand.

A report issued Thursday by the U.S. Department of Energy has determined supplies of five rare earths metals-dysprosium, terbium, europium, neodymium and yttrium-are at risk in the short term, potentially impacting clean energy technology deployment in the years ahead.

The 2011 Critical Minerals Strategy examined 16 elements for criticality in wind turbines, electric vehicles, photovoltaic cells and fluorescent lighting. Of those 16 elements, eight are rare earth metals valued for their unique magnetic, optical and catalytic properties.

Five rare earth elements used in magnets for wind turbines and electric vehicles or phosphors for energy-efficient lighting were found to be critical in the short term (present-2015).

Between the short term and the medium term (2015-2025), the importance to clean energy and supply risk shift for some materials.

Other elements-cerium, indium, lanthanum and tellurium-were found to be near-critical.

DOE’s strategy to address critical materials challenges rests on three pillars. To manage supply risk, multiple sources of materials are required. “This means taking steps to facilitate extraction, processing and manufacturing here in the United States, as well as encouraging other nations to expedite alternative supplies,” the report said. “In all cases, extraction, separation and processing should be done in an environmentally sound manner.

“Second, substitutes must be developed,” the report cautioned. “Research leading to material and technology substitutes will improve flexibility and help meet the materials needs of the clean energy economy.”

“Third, recycling, reuse and more efficient use could significantly lower world demand for newly extracted materials,” the DOE advised. “Research into recycling processes coupled with well-designed policies will help make recycling economically viable over time.”

The report also contains three in-depth technology analyses with the following conclusions:

· “Rare earth elements play an important role in petroleum refining, but the sector’s vulnerability to rare earth supply disruptions is limited.”

· “Manufacturers of wind power and electric vehicle technologies are pursuing strategies to respond to possible rare earth shortages. Permanent magnets containing neodymium and dysprosium are used in wind turbine generators and electric vehicle motors. Manufacturers of both technologies are current making decisions on future system design, trading off the performance benefits of neodymium and dysprosium against vulnerability to potential supply shortages.”

 · “As lighting energy efficiency standards are implemented globally, heavy rare earths used in lightning phosphors may be in short supply. In the United States, two sets of lighting energy efficiency standards coming into effect in 2012 will likely lead to an increase in demand for fluorescent lamps containing phosphors made with europium, terbium and yttrium.”

In their analysis, DOE found R&D plays a central role in developing substitutes for rare earth elements. In the past year, the agency has increased its investment in magnet, motor and generator substitutes.

“The demand for key materials has also been driven largely by government regulation and policy,” the report observed.

“Issues surrounding critical materials touch on the missions of many federal agencies,” said the DOE. Since March 2010, an interagency working group on critical materials and their supply chains convened by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has been examining market risks, critical materials in emerging high-growth industries and opportunities for long term-benefit through innovation.

The report also found that, in general, mining and metal processing expertise “has gradually declined in countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, although the need to develop and retain such expertise has received increasing attention in recent years.”

While the number of REO-producing firms located outside of China is small, the proliferation of new rare earth companies “could help ease market concentrations in the years ahead,” the DOE observed. However, “one of the most significant requirements in the rare earth supply chain is the amount of capital needed to commence mining and refining operations…”

“The extraction and, in particular, the processing of rare earth ore is extremely capital intensive, ranging from $100 million to $1 billion of capital expenditure depending on the location and production capacity,” the report noted. “Bringing a greenfield mine to production likely costs in excess of $1 billion.”

“The estimated financial investment needed just to prove the resource (e.g., exploration and drilling) can be up to $50 million,” said the DOE. “The up-front cost of production capacity can range from $15,000 to $40,000 per tonne of annual capacity.’

“Unlike other commodities, rare earth mining generally does not appeal to the major global mining firms because it is a relatively small market (about $3 billion in 2010) and is often less predictable and less transparent than other commodity markets,” the report said.

“Additionally, the processing of rare earth elements into high-purity REOs is fundamentally a chemical process that is often highly specialized to meet the needs of particular customers,” the study noted. “It requires unique mineral processing know-how that is not transferrable to other mining operations. These factors reduce the appeal of rare earths production to the major mining companies, leaving the field mostly to junior miners.”

The report observed that smaller mining companies face a number of challenges, including being less well-capitalized than the majors and may find it difficult to raise money from traditional market. Certain macroeconomic conditions, particularly tight credit and volatile equity markets, can contribute to these difficulties.

“Successful public flotations require fairly advanced operations with proven resources, a bankable feasibility study and often customer contracts or off-take agreements in place that ensure some level of revenue,” the agency said. The DOE noted that Molycorp and Lynas Corporation have the largest capitalizations, “reflecting in part their expansion of large established mines.”

By: Dorothy Kosich
Source: http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/view/mineweb/en/page72102?oid=142195&sn=Detail&pid=102055

PwC warns on rare earth metals shortage as China tightens supplies

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) sounded an alarm on the impending supply shortage of rare earth metals, which could seriously hit the automotive, chemicals and renewable energy industries.

According to a survey of executives from 69 manufacturing companies released by PwC, 14 of the 17 rare earth metals that include cerium, dysprosium, fluorspar and beryllium are set to become even scarcer within the next five years.

Demand for rare earth metals is currently expected to outstrip supply by 30-50,000 tonnes in 2012.

This shortage is likely to result in a decline in production rate of devices and products such as mobile phones, TVs, military equipment and wind turbines that require rare earth metal made components.

The majority of the companies that participated in the survey are major global players with annual revenues of over US$10 billion, said PwC.

The survey has found that 71 per cent of executives from European consumers of rare earth metal see the shortage as a risk to their businesses.

PwC went as far as calling the situation a “ticking time bomb”.

“Put simply, many businesses now recognise that we are living beyond the planet’s means,” said global sustainability leader at PwC Malcolm Preston.

It was reported earlier this week that China, the world’s largest producer of rare earth metals that accounts for 94 percent of global output, exported 65 percent less metals in the first nine months of the year compared to the same period of 2010.

Total exports for the period reached 11,000 tonnes, just 40 percent of the export quota for 2011, while demand for the metals outside of China is estimated at around 40,000 tonnes.

China keeps reducing its export quotas to redirect supplies to the domestic markets, prompting users of rare earth metals to move their manufacturing operations to China.

The country’s largest rare earths producer Baotou Steel Rare-Earth Hi-Tech has recently decided to suspend production in order to push the prices higher after China decided to impose new environmental restrictions on the industry.

Broker Fairfax said yesterday there were reports of a “buyers-strike” in the market as consumers including automakers and oil refineries refused to buy metals from China and sought cheaper alternatives.

However, vice chairman of Baotou Li Zhong has said at a conference that the government restrictions make it unrealistic for the prices to drop.

The situation has already caused the US to urgently seek domestic supplies of rare earth metals.

“With the need for new business models, a key challenge for business is how to draw the line between collaboration and competitive advantage,” said Preston.

“This is where strategic decision making meets sustainability. Getting this right will define the winners and losers of the future.”

By: Sergei Balashov
Source: http://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/36671/pwc-warns-on-rare-earth-metals-shortage-as-china-tightens-supplies-36671.html

Prices of Rare Earth Metals Declining Sharply

HONG KONG — After nearly three years of soaring prices for rare earth metals, with the cost of some rising nearly thirtyfold, the market is rapidly coming back down.

International prices for some light rare earths, like cerium and lanthanum, used in the polishing of flat-screen televisions and the refining of oil, respectively, have fallen as much as two-thirds since August and are still dropping. Prices have declined by roughly one-third since then for highly magnetic rare earths, like neodymium, needed for products like smartphones, computers and large wind turbines.

Big companies in the United States, Europe and Japan that use rare earths in their manufacturing have been moving operations to China, drawing down inventories, switching to alternative materials or even curtailing production to avoid paying the extremely high prices that prevailed outside China over the summer, executives said at an annual conference in Hong Kong on Wednesday.

As demand for rare earths wilted outside China, speculators dumped inventories, feeding the downward plunge. Cerium peaked at $170 a kilogram, or $77 a pound, in August but now sells for $45 to $60 a kilogram. Prices are negotiated by buyers and sellers directly with one another and reported by market information companies like Asian Metal, based in Pittsburgh.

That is still far above cerium’s price of $6 a pound three years ago, before China, the world’s dominant producer, sharply cut its export quotas.

“We all learned a hard lesson in July and August, how high these prices can go before customers begin yelling,” said Mark Smith, the chief executive and president of Molycorp, the only American producer of rare earths.

He added that rare earth mining outside China remained very profitable even with the price decline, which has brought the market back to the level of last spring.

The sharp decline in demand and prices outside China could create yet another shortage next year, said Constantine Karayannopoulos, the chief executive of Neo Material Technologies, a Canadian company that has its factories in China.

That is because Chinese exporters are unlikely to use all of their export quotas this year — since demand is down — and the Chinese Commerce Ministry has historically penalized exporters that do not use all of their quotas by giving them smaller quotas the next year.

China mines 94 percent of the rare earth metals in the world. Through 2008, it supplied almost all of the global annual demand outside of China of 50,000 to 55,000 tons. But it cut export quotas to a little more than 30,000 tons last year and again this year and imposed steep export taxes, producing a shortage in the rest of the world.

Together with a two-month Chinese embargo on shipments to Japan during a territorial dispute a year ago, the trade restrictions and shortage resulted in prices outside China reaching as much as 15 times the level within China last winter. That created a big incentive for companies that use rare earths in their products to move factories to China or find alternatives.

Executives spoke at a conference in Hong Kong sponsored by two London companies, Roskill Information Services and Metal Events, that have aimed to stay neutral on the trade and geopolitical issues roiling the industry.

Many Chinese companies have halted production this autumn in a bid to stem the decline in prices, several executives said. The Chinese Commerce Ministry has also blocked companies from exporting at prices that it deems too low, setting a minimum price for cerium exports, for example, of $70 a kilogram.

Chinese exporters are on track to use only 20,000 to 25,000 tons of their quotas this year, setting the stage for lower quotas next year, Mr. Karayannopoulos said.

By comparison, industry estimates now put annual demand outside China at a little under 40,000 tons, in part because of conservation efforts regarding rare earths.

Automakers are finding ways to use less neodymium in the magnets of many cars’ small electric motors. Oil companies are finding ways to use less lanthanum in refining, and industries like electronics and wind turbine manufacturing are finding ways to use less dysprosium.

By: KEITH BRADSHER
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/business/global/prices-of-rare-earth-metals-declining-sharply.html?_r=1

LED Applications Growing, Will Only Lead to More REE Demand

An end product’s supply chain can be far reaching, with parts or all of the upstream and downstream producers sometimes getting hit at different times by economic forces.

This appears to be happening in China’s domestic LED market, which has seen a marked fall-off in demand, according to the China Strategic Monitor. That’s hit pricing during the second half of this year.

“Investment plans are being curtailed both in the upstream and downstream compared to those presented last year,” according to the report. “Despite this there are many companies still attracted to the market and many pharmaceutical companies and even wineries in South China are moving into LED lighting products. Based on this trend the industry is likely to realize large-scale production capacity over the next 2 or 3 years and pricing for products should fall a further 20-30%.”

Industry watchers reckon 10% of LED-driven businesses in China could go bankrupt this year. And one chief executive, speaking at the recent China Industrial Development Forum for the Low Carbon Economy, said 90% of all China’s LED businesses are running at a loss.

Interesting. The country’s Guangdong province said earlier this month that it had exported US$3.81 billion worth of lighting products between January and August – that’s a 21% increase over the same time period last year.

“Customs authorities indicated that the main export market is still Europe and America with the two taking up 63.2% of the total,” a report said. “Though exports to Hong Kong, Japan and other ASEAN countries are up 60% on last year.”

The massive rise in LED exports is ascribed to the increasing trend of upgrading to energy-efficient lighting combined with the higher production values and quality in China, according to the report.

Still, various companies producing LED products complain that the industry is hit with high selling, raw material and R&D costs. So, while a company reports a 32% jump in LED sales in the third quarter of 2011when compared to 2Q10, the senior executives also talk about the need to implement structural changes, improve execution, reduce overhead costs and initiate job cuts.

Now, the LED industry uses a wide range of phosphor materials to convert light emission from LED chips into a different wavelength. So, combining a blue LED with one or more phosphors can create a white LED. Many of the phosphors used in LEDs contain rare-earth elements, the most common one being the yttrium aluminum garnet, which is doped with cerium.  Another phosphor, called TAG, contains terbium, while silicate and nitride phosphors are commonly doped with cerium or europium.

 Here’s a small example of how LED products are being used: Kingsun Optoelectronic Co has just installed more than 10,000 street lights containing one million high-efficiency white LEDs along 75 miles of roads in Shenzhen. Kingsun anticipates a 60-percent reduction in energy consumption compared to the high-pressure sodium fixtures that have been replaced in the upgrade.

And while LEDs are now widely recognized as emerging light sources for general illumination, it turns out that LED lighting can also be used in a broad range of life-science applications such as skin-related therapies, blood irradiation, pain management, hypertension reduction and photodynamic therapy, which, when combined with drugs, is finding its way into cancer research.

In other words, the LED industry is only now just starting to be exploited, meaning demand will grow across all sectors. Translation – more rare earths will be needed in producing these products as research advances are made and commercial producers become more lean and efficient.

Source: http://www.raremetalblog.com/
By: Brian Truscott

China’s Rare Earths Monopoly - Peril or Opportunity?

September 30, 2011 (Source: Market Oracle) — The prosperity of China’s “authoritarian capitalism” is increasingly rewriting the ground-rules worldwide on the capitalist principles that have dominated the West’s economy for nearly two centuries.

Nowhere is this shadow war more between the two systems more pronounced than in the global arena of production of rare earths elements (REEs), where China currently holds a de facto monopoly, raising concerns from Washington through London to Tokyo about what China might do with its hand across the throat of high-end western technology.

In the capitalist West, as so convincingly dissected by Karl Marx, such a commanding position is a supreme and unique opportunity to squeeze the markets to maximize profits.

Except China apparently has a different agenda, poking yet another hole in Marx’s ironclad dictums about capitalism and monopolies, further refined by Lenin’s screeds after his Bolsheviks inadvertently acceded to power in 1917 in the debacle of Russia’s disastrous involvement in World War One. Far from squeezing its degenerate capitalist customers for maximum profit (and it’s relevant here to call Lenin’s dictum that if you want to hang a capitalist, he’ll sell you the rope to do it), Beijing has apparently adopted a “soft landing” approach on rare earths production, gradually constricting supplies whilst inveigling Western (and particularly Japanese) high tech companies to relocate production lines to China to ensure continued access to the essential commodities.

REEs are found in everyday products, from laptops to iPods to flat screen televisions and hybrid cars, which use more than 20 pounds of REEs per car. Other RRE uses include phosphors in television displays, PDAs, lasers, green engine technology, fiber optics, magnets, catalytic converters, fluorescent lamps, rechargeable batteries, magnetic refrigeration, wind turbines, and, of most interest to the Pentagon, strategic military weaponry, including cruise missiles.

Technology transfer is the essential overlooked component in China’s economic rise, and Beijing played Western greed on the subject like a Stradivarius, promising future access to China’s massive market in return, an opium dream that rarely occurred for most companies. You want unimpeded access to Chinese RREs? Fine – relocate a portion on your production lines here, or…

Which brings us back to today’s topic.

Rare earths and investment – where to go?

China is riding a profitable wave, which depending on what figures you read, produces 95-97 percent of current global supply, and unprocessed raw earth earths ores are currently going for more than $100,000 a ton, or $50 a pound, which some of the exotica fetching far more (niobium prices has increase an astounding 1,000 percent over the last year). Rare earth elements like dysprosium, terbium and europium come mainly from southern China.

According to a United States Energy Department report, dysprosium, crucial for clean energy products rose to $132 a pound in 2010 from $6.50 a pound in 2003.

The soaring prices however have also invigorated many countries and producers to begin looking in their own back yards, for both new deposits and former mining sites that were shuttered when production cost made them uneconomic before prices went through the ceiling.

However, a number of unknown factors play into developing alternative sources to current Chinese RRE production. These include first prospecting possible sites, secondly, their purity and third, initial production costs, where modest Chinese labor costs are a clear factor.

The 17 RRE elements on the Periodic Table are actually not rare, with the two least abundant of the group 200 times more abundant than gold. They are, however, hard to find in large enough concentrations to support costs of extraction, and are frequently found in conjunction with radioactive thorium, leading to significant waste problems.

At hearings last week before U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Molycorp, Inc. President and Chief Executive Officer Mark A. Smith stated that his company was positioned to fulfill American rare earth needs, currently estimated at 15,000-18,000 tons per year, by the end of 2012 if it can ramp up production at its Mountain Pass, California facility.

Which brings us back to foreign producers. A year ago Molycorp announced that it was reopening its former RRE mine in Mountain Pass, Calif., which years ago used to be the world’s main mine for rare earth elements, filing with the SEC for an initial public offering to help raise the nearly $500 million needed to reopen and expand the mine. Low prices caused by Chinese competition caused the Mountain Pass mine to be shuttered in 2002.

Mountain Pass was discovered in 1949 by uranium prospectors who noticed radioactivity and its output dominated rare earth element production through the 1980s; Mountain Pass Europium made the world’s first color televisions possible.

Molycorp plans to increase its capacity to mine and refine neodymium for rare earth magnets, which are extremely lightweight and are used in many high-tech applications and intends to resume production of lower-value rare earth elements like cerium, used in industrial processes like polishing glass and water filtration.

In one of those historic economic ironies, China was able to increase its RRE production in the 1980s by initially hiring American advisers who formerly worked at Mountain Pass.

The record-high REE prices are also underwriting exploration activities worldwide by more than six dozen other companies in the United States, Canada, South Africa, Malaysia and Central Asia to open new RRE mines, but with each start-up typically raising $10 million to $30 million, not all will succeed. That said, the future is bright, as almost two-thirds of the world’s supply of REEs exists outside of China and accordingly, China’s current monopoly of REE production will not last.

So where do investors look to cash in on the RRE boom?

First, do your homework.

Exhibit A is Moylcorp, which would seem to be in unassailable position as regards U.S. production, but which nevertheless on 20 September after JPMorgan Chase & Co. lowered its rating of the company, citing declines in rare-earth prices, causing its stock to plummet 22 percent in New York Stock Exchange composite trading, despite being the best-performing U.S. IPO in 2010 after beginning trading in July, more than tripling after rare-earth prices soared as China cut export quotas.

Is there money to be made in RREs?

Undoubtedly – but the homework for the canny investor needs to extend beyond spreadsheets to geopolitics, mining lore, chemistry and Wall Street puffery. That said, it seems likely that whatever U.S.-based company can cover the Pentagon’s RRE requirements is likely to see more than a minor boost in its bottom line.

Gentlemen, place your bets – but do your homework first.

Higher Prices for Numerous Rare Earth-Based Consumer Products

Consumers can expect significantly higher prices for a variety of consumer goods that use rare earth metals as at least one raw material, according to Michael Silver, president and chairman of the board of American Elements, a global manufacturer of engineered and advanced materials including rare earth metals and chemicals.

“The U.S. consumer has no idea the number of simple everyday products that will be impacted by the huge jump over the last year in rare earth prices,” says Silver. “Over the past two decades rare earths have become essential to the state of the art version of hundreds of household goods.”

According to Silver, computers, cell phones and other electronics will see manufacturing costs rise as neodymium is in computer hard drives, cerium is in the monitor screens and other rare earths play a part in the electronics. Products that rely on small electric motors often contain Neodymium magnets which have increased many fold in price.

Possibly the biggest impact will be felt in the cost of the family car.

“Rare Earths are ubiquitous in automobiles, he says. “Cerium is in the window glass to prevent yellowing and used as a glass polish in production. Yttrium is in spark plugs. Neodymium is in the electric motors that run everything from seat adjustments to windshield wipers. Lanthanum is in the batteries for electric and hybrid vehicles.”

He predicts higher prices will ripple through not just cars but all forms of transportation. The applications effecting automobiles will equally raise costs for other forms of transportation such as flight and rail.

Silver cites light bulbs as an example that consumers do not realize are affected by rare earth prices as Cerium is in bulb glass and Europium acts as the phosphor in fluorescent lights.

He predicts dental care costs will rise. Silver reports amalgam used to fill cavities is now based on a rare earth compound to get the new all white fillings to show up on an X-Ray the way the old metal fillings did.

Neodymium is used in modern welding goggles to remove glare. “Neodymium is a very magical material with many unrelated capabilities. When dispersed in glass, it prevents the wave length associated with yellow-green light from passing through, which is the wave length that causes eye damage,” Silver says.

Silver says the consumer will ultimately feel the pinch in cable television costs as well. Fiber optic cables run on EDFA technology which stands for ‘Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplification’, a technology reliant on the availability of Erbium which has skyrocketed in price. Existing infrastructures will not be impacted. New and replacement lines will.

American consumers may even be impacted at tax time. Silver says, “Our entire military equipment budget will increase due to higher rare earth costs and that will translate into higher government demand for revenue.” Rare earths are essential in the production of bullet proof vests (yttrium), night vision goggles (gadolinium) and F-35 and F-22 Fighter Jets, Bradley Armored Vehicle and AIM-9x Sidewinder missiles (neodymium).

American Elements is the world’s manufacturer of engineered & advanced materials with corporate offices and primary research & laboratory facilities in the United States and manufacturing & warehousing in the United States, China, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

September 27, 2011
(Source: PRNewswire)
By Rob Wynne

Rare earth elements vital to electronics industry

What do ics, lasers, optical fibres, capacitors, displays and headphones have in common? Answer: they are all electronic products that depend on one or more of the rare earth elements. And that list is far from complete.

 There are 17 rare earth elements, all vital to the electronics industry in some form. Yet, despite their name, some rare earth element

s are relatively plentiful: cerium is, apparently, as abundant as copper. They are regarded as ‘rare’ because deposits of these elements are generally not exploitable commercially.

Though typically used in relatively small quantities per product, a major worry has emerged recently about the guaranteed continuation of their supply – some 97% of rare earths are currently supplied by China.

Over the last few years, China has been reducing its exports of rare earths and recently cut back more drastically, by around 70%

. And an ominous note was sounded when China completely halted supplies to Japan after a row about Japan’s arrest of a Chinese boat captain. He was released and supplies resumed. Squabbles aside, the prediction is that, within a few years, China will need its entire output of rare earths to satisfy its own domestic demand.

So action is being taken to avoid the drastic scenario of the supply of rare earths simply coming to a halt (see below). If it did, it is astonishing how many electronic products we use every day would become either much more difficult – even impossible – to make or much more expensive.

Take one of the most widely used rare earths – neodymium. It was first used to generate the light in green laser pointers, but then it was found that, when mixed with iron and boron, neodymium makes magnets that are weight for weight 12 times stronger than conventional iron magnets. Result: neodymium magnets are used in in-ear headphones, microphones, loudspeakers and hard disk drives, as well as electric motors for hybrid cars and generators.

Where low mass is important, they are vital: for example, in laptops, they provide finer control in the motors that spin the hard disk and the arm that writes and reads data to and from it, allowing much more information to be stored in the same area.

In its Critical Materials Strategy, the US Department of Energy (DoE) estimates new uses of neodymium, in products like wind tu

rbines and electric cars, could make up 40% of demand in an already overstretched market, which is why any shortages would be critical.

Most of the rare earths vital to electronics are less well known: erbium is one example, a crucial ingredient in optical fibres. For long distance optical fibre transmission, amplification is vital and is achieved with the help of erbium. Embedded within short sections of the optical fibre, excitable ions of erbium are pushed into a high energy state by irradiating them with a laser. Light signals travelling down the fibre stimulate the erbium ions to release their stored energy as more light of precisely the correct wavelength, amplifying the signals.

Tellurium is an element that could see a huge increase in demand because in 2009, solar cells made from thin films of cadmium telluride became the first to outdo silicon panels in terms of the cost of generating a Watt of electricity. Until now, there has been little interest in tellurium, but if it leads to significantly cheaper solar power, demand will rocket and that is why the DoE anticipates potential shortages by 2025.

Hafnium is another rare earth proving itself vital to the semiconductor industry; hafnium oxide is a highly effective electrical ins

ulator. It outperforms the standard transistor material, silicon dioxide, in reducing leakage current, while switching 20% faster. It has been a major factor in enabling the industry to move to ever smaller process nodes.

Also central to semiconductors is tantalum, key to billions of capacitors used worldwide in products like smartphones and tablet computers. In its pure form, this metal forms one of two conducting plates on which charge is stored. As an oxide, it is an excellent insulator, preventing current leakage between the plates, and is also self healing, reforming to plug any current leakage.

One of the most widely used rare earths is indium, which we all spend a lot of time looking at. The alloy indium tin oxide (ITO) provides the rare combination of both electrical conductivity and optical transparency, which makes it perfect for flat screen displays and tvs,

where it forms the see through front electrode controlling each pixel. A layer of ITO on a smartphone’s screen gives it the touch sensitive conductivity to which we have been accustomed in the last few years. Mixed with other metals, indium becomes a light collector and can be used to create new kinds of solar cells, together with copper and selenium.

Another rare earth valuable for its magnetic properties is dysprosium. When mixed with terbium and iron, it creates the alloy Terfenol D, which changes shape in response to a magnetic field; a property known as magnetostriction. Dysprosium can also handle heat

; while magnets made from a pure neodymium-iron-boron alloy lose magnetisation at more than 300°C, adding a small amount of dysprosium solves the problem. This make the element invaluable in magnets used in devices such as turbines and hard disk drives.

Other rare earths include: technetium, used in medical imaging; lanthanum and, the main components of a ‘mischmetal’ (an alloy of rare earth elements) used to create the negative electrode in nickel metal hydride batteries – and cerium also helps to polish disk drives and monitor screens; yttrium, important in microwave communication, and yttrium iron garnets act as resonators in frequency meters; and europium and terbium.

The last have been used for decades to produce images in colour tvs, thanks to their phosphorescent properties – terbium for yellow-green and europium for blue and red. More recently, energy saving compact fluorescent light bulbs have used them to generate the same warm light as the incandescent tungsten bulbs they replaced.

Is there a single reason why the rare earths have proved so valuable for such a range of technologies? The answer is no – it is more a result of each element’s particular physical characteristics, notably the electron configuration of the atoms, according to one of the world’s leading experts, Karl Gschneidner, a senior metallurgist at the DoE’s Ames Laboratory.

“Some of the properties are quite similar; basically, their chemical properties. That is why they are difficult to separate from each other in their ores and that is why they are mixed together in the ores. But many of the physical properties vary quite a bit from one another, especially those which depend upon the 4f electron (a particular electron shell in the configuration of the atom), that is the magnetic, optical and electronic properties. Even some of the physical properties, which are not directly connected to the 4f electrons, vary considerably. For example the melting points vary from 798°C for cerium to 1663°C for lutetium.”

What makes the rare earths so special is the way they can react with other elements to get results that neither could achieve alone, especially in the areas of magnets and phosphors, as Robert Jaffe, a Professor of Physics at MIT, explains.

“The result is high field strength, high coercivity, light weight magnets, clearly valuable in tiny devices where magnetically stored information has to be moved around, like hard disk read/write operations. The magnetic properties of pure metals and relatively simple alloys have been thoroughly explored and there is nothing as good as rare earth magnets. Two paradigms for magnetic material are NeBFe (neodymium-boron-iron) and SmCo (samarium-cobalt), with the former most popular now.

“In phosphors, europium, terbium and others absorb high frequency light and then re emit the light in regions of the spectrum that are very useful in manipulation of colour, hence their use in flat panel displays and compact fluorescent lights.”

Another example is neodymium oxide, which can be added to crt glass to enhance picture brightness by absorbing yellow light waves. Neodymium has a strong absorption band centred at 580nm, which helps clarify the eye’s discrimination between reds and greens.

Given how vital they are for the electronics industry and other technologies – by one estimate, £3trillion worth of industries depend on them – it is remarkable that the world has been so complacent about sourcing rare earths, allowing a single country to virtually monopolise the supply. But that is now changing.

For example, the Mountain Pass mine in California is being reactivated by Molycorp Minerals in a $781million project, having been mothballed in 2002. Others include the Nolans and Mount Weld Projects in Australia, a site at Hoidas Lake in Canada, Lai Chau in Vietnam and others in Russia and Malaysia.

In Elk Creek, Nebraska, Canadian company Quantum Rare Earth Development is drilling to look for supplies and has called on President Obama to move aggressively to create a stockpile of rare earths.

Another associated problem is the lack of people with rare earth expertise, as Gschneidner says.

“There is a serious lack of technically trained personnel to bring the entire rare earth industry – from mining to OEMs – up to full speed in the next few years. Before the disruption of the US rare earth industry, about 25,000 people were employed in all aspects. Today, there are only about 1500.”

Despite these moves, it could be years before they enhance supplies significantly. For the longer term, there are prospects of better sources emerging. Just a couple of months ago, Japanese scientists from the University of Tokyo announced they had found the minerals in the floor of the Pacific Ocean in such high density that a single square kilometre of ocean floor could provide 20% of current annual world consumption. Two regions near Hawaii and Tahiti might contain as much as 100billion tonnes.

The team was led to the sea floor because they reasoned that many rock samples on land containing metallic elements were originally laid down as ocean sediments. “It seems natural to find rare earth element rich mud on the sea floor,” they said.

A final extraordinary fact about rare earths is that, despite their importance, we have hardly bothered to recycle them at all. In an age when metals like aluminium, copper, lead and tin have recycling rates of between 25% and 75%, it is estimated that only 1% of rare earths are recycled. Japan alone is estimated to have 300,000 tons of rare earths in unused electronic goods. If we do not correct that quickly, over the next few years at least, rare earths could live up to their name with a vengeance.

Author
David Boothroyd
Source: http://www.newelectronics.co.uk

Critical Minerals, Elements, Metals, Materials

In this article I am going to take a look at three reports covering what the US and Europe consider critical or strategic minerals and materials.

In its first Critical Materials Strategy, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) focused on materials used in four clean energy technologies:

  • wind turbines: permanent magnets
  • electric vehicles:€“ permanent magnets & advanced batteries
  • solar cells: thin film semi conductors
  • energy efficient lighting: phosphors

The DOE says they selected these particular components for two reasons:

  1. Deployment of the clean energy technologies that use them is projected to increase, perhaps significantly, in the short, medium and long term
  2. Each uses significant quantities of rare earth metals or other key materials

In its report the DOE provided data for nine rare earth elements: yttrium, lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, samarium, europium, terbium and dysprosium as well as indium, gallium, tellurium, cobalt and lithium.

Five of the rare earth metals, dysprosium, neodymium, terbium, europium and yttrium€“ as well as indium, were assessed as most critical in the short term. The DOE defines “€œcriticality”€ as a measure that combines importance to the clean energy economy and risk of supply disruption.

Securing Materials for Emerging Technologies

A Report by the APS Panel on Public Affairs and the Materials Research Society coined the term “€œenergy-critical element”€ (ECE) to describe a class of chemical elements that currently appear critical to one or more new, energy related technologies.

“Energy-related systems are typically materials intensive. As new technologies are widely deployed, significant quantities of the elements required to manufacture them will be needed. However, many of these unfamiliar elements are not presently mined, refined, or traded in large quantities, and, as a result, their availability might be constrained by many complex factors. A shortage of these energy-critical elements (ECEs) could significantly inhibit the adoption of otherwise game-changing energy technologies. This, in turn, would limit the competitiveness of U.S. industries and the domestic scientific enterprise and, eventually, diminish the quality of life in the United States.”

According to the APS and MRS report several factors can contribute to limiting the domestic availability of an ECE:

The element may not be abundant in the earth’€™s crust or might not be concentrated by geological processes

An element might only occur in a few economic deposits worldwide, production might be dominated by and, therefore, subject to manipulation by one or more countries – the United States already relies on other countries for more than 90% of most of the ECEs identified in the report

Many ECEs have, up to this point, been produced in relatively small quantities as by-products of primary metals mining and refining. Joint production complicates attempts to ramp up output by a large factor.

Because they are relatively scarce, extraction of ECEs often involves processing large amounts of material, sometimes in ways that do unacceptable environmental damage

The time required for production and utilization to adapt to fluctuations in price and availability of ECEs is long, making planning and investment difficult

This report was limited to elements that have the potential for major impact on energy systems and for which a significantly increased demand might strain supply, causing price increases or unavailability, thereby discouraging the use of some new technologies.

The focus of the report was on energy technologies with the potential for large-scale deployment so the elements they listed are energy critical:

  • Gallium, germanium, indium, selenium, silver, and tellurium employed in advanced photovoltaic solar cells, especially thin film photovoltaics.
  • Dysprosium, neodymium, praseodymium, samarium and cobalt€“ used in high-strength permanent magnets for many energy related applications, such as wind turbines and hybrid automobiles.
  • Gadolinium (most REEs made this list) for its unusual paramagnetic qualities and europium and terbium for their role in managing the color of fluorescent lighting. Yttrium, another REE, is an important ingredient in energy-efficient solid-state lighting.
  • Lithium and lanthanum, used in high performance batteries.
  • Helium, required in cryogenics, energy research, advanced nuclear reactor designs, and manufacturing in the energy sector.
  •  Platinum, palladium, and other PGEs, used as catalysts in fuel cells that may find wide applications in transportation. Cerium, a REE, is also used as an auto-emissions catalyst.
  • Rhenium, used in high performance alloys for advanced turbines.

 The third report I looked at, “Critical Raw Materials for the EU” listed 14 raw materials which are deemed critical to the European Union (EU): antimony, beryllium, cobalt, fluorspar, gallium, germanium, graphite, indium, magnesium, niobium, platinum group metals, rare earths, tantalum and tungsten.

€œRaw materials are an essential part of both high tech products and every-day consumer products, such as mobile phones, thin layer photovoltaics, Lithium-ion batteries, fibre optic cable, synthetic fuels, among others. But their availability is increasingly under pressure according to a report published today by an expert group chaired by the European Commission. In this first ever overview on the state of access to raw materials in the EU, the experts label a selection of 14 raw materials as “€œcritical”€ out of 41 minerals and metals analyzed. The growing demand for raw materials is driven by the growth of developing economies and new emerging technologies.

For the critical raw materials, their high supply risk is mainly due to the fact that a high share of the worldwide production mainly comes from a handful of countries, for example:

China: €“ Rare Earths Elements (REE)

Russia, South Africa:€“ Platinum Group Elements (PGE)

Democratic Republic of Congo:€“ Cobalt

All four of the following critical materials appear on each list:

  • Rare Earth Elements (REE)
  • Cobalt
  • Platinum Group Elements (PGE)
  • Lithium

The key issues in regards to critical metals are:

  • Finite resources
  • Chinese market dominance in many sectors
  • Long lead times for mine development
  • Resource nationalism/country risk
  • High project development cost
  • Relentless demand for high tech consumer products
  • Ongoing material use research
  • Low substitutability
  • Environmental crackdowns
  • Low recycling rates
  • Lack of intellectual knowledge and operational expertise in the west

 Certainly the rare earth elements, the platinum group of elements and lithium are going to continue receiving investor attention,€“ they are absolutely vital to the continuance of our modern lifestyle. But there are two metals increasingly on my radar screen, one is on all three above critical metals lists and the other soon will be when/if production increases, and in this authors opinion, that’€™s very possible.

Cobalt

A critical or strategic material is a commodity whose lack of availability during a national emergency would seriously affect the economic, industrial, and defensive capability of a country.

The French Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minires rates high tech metals as critical, or not, based on three criteria:

  • Possibility (or not) of substitution
  • Irreplaceable functionality
  • Potential supply risks

Many countries classify cobalt as a critical or a strategic metal.

 The US is the world’€™s largest consumer of cobalt and the US also considers cobalt a strategic metal. The US has no domestic production, the United States is 100% dependent on imports for its supply of primary cobalt,€“ currently about 15% of U.S. cobalt consumption is from recycled scrap, resulting in a net import reliance of 85%.

Although cobalt is one of the 30 most abundant elements within the earth’s crust it’s low concentration (.002%) means it’s usually produced as a by-product – cobalt is mainly obtained as a by-product of copper and nickel mining activities.

Scandium

Scandium is a soft, light metal that might have applications in the aerospace industry. With a cost approaching $300 per gram scandium is too expensive for widespread use. Scandium is a byproduct from the extraction of other elements, uranium mining, nickel and cobalt laterite mines and is sold as scandium oxide.

The absence of reliable, secure, stable and long term production has limited commercial applications of scandium in most countries. This is despite a comprehensive body of research and a large number of patents which identify significant benefits for the use of scandium over other elements.

Particularly promising are the properties of :

  • Stabilizing zirconia: Scandia stabilized zirconia has a growing market demand for use as a high efficiency electrolyte in solid oxide fuel cells
  • Scandium-aluminum alloys will be important in the manufacture of fuel cells
  • Strengthening aluminum alloys (0.5% scandium) that could replace entire fleets with much cheaper, lighter and stronger aircraft
  • Alloys of scandium and aluminum are used in some kinds of athletic equipment, such as aluminum baseball bats, bicycle frames and lacrosse sticks
  • Scandium iodide (ScI3) is added to mercury vapor lamps so that they will emit light that closely resembles sunlight

Conclusion

The REEs, PGEs, Lithium and Cobalt are all truly critical to the functioning of our modern society. It’€™s easy to see why they are classified as critical or strategic. Scandium will increasingly find its way into our everyday lives and undoubtedly take its place on the various critical metal lists.

Access to raw materials at competitive prices has become essential to the functioning of all industrialized economies. Cobalt is one of those raw materials, so too will be Scandium.

Are these two critical metals on your radar screen?

If not, maybe they should be.

Richard Mills - Ahead of the Herd | July 14, 2011

Thirteen Exotic Elements We can’t Live Without

From indium touchscreens to hafnium-equipped moonships, the nether regions of the periodic table underpin modern technology,€“ but supplies are getting scarce

AS YOU flick the light switch in your study, an eerie europium glow illuminates your tablet computer, idling on the desk. You unlock it, casually sweeping your finger across its indium-laced touchscreen. Within seconds, pulses of information are pinging along the erbium-paved highways of the internet. Some music to accompany your surfing? No sooner thought than the Beach Boys are wafting through the neodymium magnets of your state-of-the-art headphones.

For many of us, such a scene is mundane reality. We rarely stop to think of the advances in materials that underlie our material advances. Yet almost all our personal gadgets and technological innovations have something in common: they rely on some extremely unfamiliar materials from the nether reaches of the periodic table. Even if you have never heard of the likes of hafnium, erbium or tantalum, chances are there is some not too far from where you are sitting.

You could soon be hearing much more about them, too. Demand for many of these unsung elements is soaring, so much so that it could soon outstrip supply. That’s partly down to our insatiable hunger for the latest gadgetry, but increasingly it is also being driven by the green-energy revolution. For every headphone or computer hard-drive that depends on the magnetic properties of neodymium or dysprosium, a wind turbine or motor for an electric car demands even more of the stuff. Similarly, the properties that make indium indispensable for every touchscreen make it a leading light in the next generation of solar cells.

All that means we are heading for a crunch. In its Critical Materials Strategy, published in December last year, the US Department of Energy (DoE) assessed 14 elements of specific importance to clean-energy technologies. It identified six at “critical” risk of supply disruption within the next five years: indium, and five “rare earth” elements, europium, neodymium, terbium, yttrium and dysprosium. It rates a further three - cerium, lanthanum and tellurium - as “near-critical”.

What’s the fuss?

It’s not that these elements aren’t there: by and large they make up a few parts per billion of Earth’s crust. “We just don’t know where they are,” says Murray Hitzman, an economic geologist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. Traditionally, these elements just haven’t been worth that much to us. Such supplies are often isolated as by-products during the mining of materials already used in vast quantities, such as aluminium, zinc and copper. Copper mining, for example, has given us more than enough tellurium, a key component of next-generation solar cells, to cover our present needs - and made it artificially cheap.

“People who are dealing with these new technologies look at the price of tellurium, say, and think, well, this isn’t so expensive so what’s the fuss?” says Robert Jaffe, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He chaired a joint committee of the American Physical Society and the Materials Research Society on “Energy Critical Elements” that reported in February this year. The problem, as the report makes clear, is that the economics changes radically when demand for these materials outstrips what we can supply just by the by. “Then suddenly you have to think about mining these elements directly, as primary ores,” says Jaffe. That raises the cost dramatically - presuming we even know where to dig.

An element’s price isn’t the only problem. The rare earth group of elements, to which many of the most technologically critical belong, are generally found together in ores that also contain small amounts of radioactive elements such as thorium and uranium. In 1998, chemical processing of these ores was suspended at the only US mine for rare earth elements in Mountain Pass, California, due to environmental concerns associated with these radioactive contaminants. The mine is expected to reopen with improved safeguards later this year, but until then the world is dependent on China for nearly all its rare-earth supplies. Since 2005, China has been placing increasingly stringent limits on exports, citing demand from its own burgeoning manufacturing industries.

That means politicians hoping to wean the west off its ruinous oil dependence are in for a nasty surprise: new and greener technologies are hardly a recipe for self-sufficiency. “There is no country that has sufficient resources of all these minerals to close off trade with the rest of the world,” says Jaffe.

So what can we do? Finding more readily available materials that perform the same technological tricks is unlikely, says Karl Gschneidner, a metallurgist at the DoE’s Ames Laboratory in Iowa. Europium has been used to generate red light in televisions for almost 50 years, he says, while neodymium magnets have been around for 25. “People have been looking ever since day one to replace these things, and nobody’s done it yet.”

Others take heart from the success story of rhenium. This is probably the rarest naturally occurring element, with a concentration of just 0.7 parts per billion in Earth’s crust. Ten years ago, it was the critical ingredient in heat-resistant superalloys for gas-turbine engines in aircraft and industrial power generation. In 2006, the principal manufacturer General Electric spotted a crunch was looming and instigated both a recycling scheme to reclaim the element from old turbines, and a research programme that developed rhenium-reduced and rhenium-free superalloys.

No longer throwing these materials away is one obvious way of propping up supplies. “Tellurium ought to be regarded as more precious than gold - it is; it is rarer,” says Jaffe. Yet in many cases less than 1 per cent of these technologically critical materials ends up being recycled, according to the United Nations Environment Programme’s latest report on metal recycling, published in May.

Even if we were to dramatically improve this record, some basic geological research to find new sources of these elements is crucial - and needed fast. Technological concerns and necessary environmental and social safeguards mean it can take 15 years from the initial discovery of an ore deposit in the developed world to its commercial exploitation, says Hitzman.

Rhenium again shows how quickly the outlook can change. In 2009, miners at a copper mine in Cloncurry, Queensland, Australia, discovered a huge, high-grade rhenium seam geologically unlike anything seen before. “It could saturate the world rhenium market for a number of years - and it was found by accident,” says Hitzman.

In the end, we should thank China for its decision to restrict exports of rare earths, says Jaffe, as it has brought the issue of technologically critical elements to our attention a decade earlier than would otherwise have happened. Even so, weaning ourselves off these exotic substances will be an immense challenge - as our brief survey of some of these unsung yet indispensable elements shows.
Bibliography

US Department of Energy, Critical Materials Strategy
American Physical Society and Materials Research Society, Energy Critical Elements
US Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries

by James Mitchell Crow

Precious Metals: Is Tellurium the new Gold?

Rare Industrial - Metal - Tellurium

Gold has been spectacularly popular among investors for the past couple of years.

Silver seems to be this year’s gold.

So, what’s next year’s silver gonna be?

According to Robert Jaffe, a physicist at MIT, tellurium could be a metal investor’s best new play.

“Tellurium ought to be regarded as more precious than gold — it is; it is rarer,” he tells New Scientist magazine.

An article by James Mitchell Crow in the June, 2011 issue of New Scientist, titled “13 Exotic Elements We Can’t Live Without,” points out:

We rarely stop to think of the advances in materials that underlie our material advances. Yet almost all our personal gadgets and technological innovations have something in common: they rely on some extremely unfamiliar materials from the nether reaches of the periodic table. Even if you have never heard of the likes of hafnium, erbium or tantalum, chances are there is some not too far from where you are sitting.

You could soon be hearing much more about them, too. Demand for many of these unsung elements is soaring, so much so that it could soon outstrip supply. That’s partly down to our insatiable hunger for the latest gadgetry, but increasingly it is also being driven by the green-energy revolution. For every headphone or computer hard-drive that depends on the magnetic properties of neodymium or dysprosium, a wind turbine or motor for an electric car demands even more of the stuff. Similarly, the properties that make indium indispensable for every touchscreen make it a leading light in the next generation of solar cells.

All that means we are heading for a crunch. In its Critical Materials Strategy, published in December last year, the US Department of Energy (DoE) assessed 14 elements of specific importance to clean-energy technologies. It identified six at “critical” risk of supply disruption within the next five years: indium, and five “rare earth” elements, europium, neodymium, terbium, yttrium and dysprosium. It rates a further three - cerium, lanthanum and tellurium - as “near-critical”.

Here are the 13 elements necessary for cleantech applications that may be winners in this year’s commodities portfolio:

Neodymium

New Scientist says:

These numerous uses make for a perfect storm threatening future supplies. In its Critical Materials Strategy, which assesses elements crucial for future green-energy technologies, the US Department of Energy estimates that wind turbines and electric cars could make up 40 per cent of neodymium demand in an already overstretched market. Together with increasing demand for the element in personal electronic devices, that makes for a clear “critical” rating.

Erbium

New Scientist says:

Erbium is a crucial ingredient in the optical fibres used to transport light-encoded information around the world. These cables are remarkably good at keeping light bouncing along, easily outperforming a copper cable transporting an electrical signal. Even so, the light signal slowly fades as it racks up the kilometres, making amplification necessary.

Tellurium

New Scientist says:

In 2009, solar cells made from thin films of cadmium telluride became the first to undercut bulky silicon panels in cost per watt of electricity generating capacity.

Because the global market for the element has been minute compared with that for copper - some $100 million against over $100 billion - there has been little incentive to extract it. That will change as demand grows, but better extraction methods are expected to only double the supply, which will be nowhere near enough to cover the predicted demand if the new-style solar cells take off. The US DoE anticipates a supply shortfall by 2025.

Hafnium

Hafnium’s peerless heat resistance has taken it to the moon and back as part of the alloy used in the nozzle of rocket thrusters fitted to the Apollo lunar module. Since 2007, though, it has also been found much closer to home, in the minuscule transistors of powerful computer chips.

That’s because hafnium oxide is a highly effective electrical insulator. Compared with silicon dioxide, which is conventionally used to switch transistors on and off, it is much less likely to let unwanted currents seep through. It also switches 20 per cent faster, allowing more information to pass. This has enabled transistor size to shrink from 65 nanometres with silicon dioxide first to 45 nm and now to 32 nm.

By Justin Rohrlich June 20, 2011