lanthanum

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

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

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

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

German Newspaper Talks About Industrial Metals

Translation from an article in the German Financial Times:

Most people are not aware of the demand and value of rare metals. For more information regarding these metals, their uses, and their values, Haines and Maassen, one of just a few traders, will be able to provide you with any needed information.

Scandium, Lanthanum, Ytterbium. These words are foreign to most people but amongst people in the know, they are words which cause a lot of excitement today. These are metals rare and otherwise which are starting to become scarce. These scarcities are a real threat to many industrial countries, because these metals are used for important current and future technologies such as batteries for electric cars, aircraft turbines, solar panels or TV and PC screens

Many rare metals are currently produced in countries with complicated political environments. Countries like Russia, Brazil, Congo and China. China produces over 90% of the rare metals in the world today. The problem is that China covets these metals as much as any one and is currently drastically reducing their export levels to other industrial countries in need of these metals. At this particular time, because of scarity, there are 14 metals that are considered rare.

An Established Network

Even before China’s export restrictions it was not easy to get these commodities. Although there is a stock exchange in Shanghai, foreigners are not allowed to buy rare metals there. In a village close to Bonn, Germany, is an inconspicuous looking warehouse of a family-owned business called Haines & Maassen. In this warehouse many coveted commodities can be found. The five-meter-high shelves accommodate approximately 850 different metals in boxes, barrels, glass containers or bags. In one of the lower compartments are eleven barrels, 50 inches high and wide containing the metal, Hafnium.

According to the owners, “Gunther Maassen stores about 5 percent of the annual global production of Hafnium in their warehouse.”

Long-standing relationships benefit the company

For the last 40 years, the 77 year old father and patriarch of the family-owned buisness visits the London Metal Exchange every year even when there are no coveted and rare earth metals being traded. His sons regularly travel the world in order to maintain contacts and establish new ones. The family has a particularly good relationship with the Chinese, from which the company gets a little more than half of its stock of raw materials. The Maassens are currently benefitting from long-standing well-established, nurtured buisness relationship

The warehouse is not large but contains a fortune in metals.

More than 60 years ago the father of this family started in the metal business, and today both of his sons help run the company. Their specialty is the niche product of rare metals. “The important factor is that we built an established network, that allows us to bring the few producers and consumers together,” said Maassen. In the case of Hafnium there only three large manufacturers in the world and one of those is currently not in production.

Long-standing relationships benefit the company

For the last 40 years, the 77 year old father and patriarch of the family-owned buisness visits the London Metal Exchange every year even when there are no coveted and rare earth metals being traded. His sons regularly travel the world in order to maintain contacts and establish new ones. The family has a particularly good relationship with the Chinese, from which the company gets a little more than half of its stock of raw materials. The Maassens are currently benefitting from long-standing well-established, nurtured buisness relationships.

Deliverys are made to research institutions, industry and investors.

Bildunterschrift:
Thanks to their good name, they are also praised by foreign companies which wish to sell their metals. And even if someone is looking for a very specific commodity, it is Maassen’s pleasure to help. “We have a gentleman sitting in China, acting as a scout who recieves directions from us,” said Maassen. “He is highly-effective and instrumental in providing us with new clients and new contacts. “

Rare earth metals as an investment

Special requests come mostly from research institutes. As a matter of fact, eighty percent of the Haines and Maassen contracts, are with research institutes. But the family business sells the bulk of their metals to industry as research institutes only require small quantities.

Most recently, buisnesses and individuals outside of industry are beginning to buy substantial quantities of rare metals as a tangible asset used to combat the negative effects of inflation and the devaluing of currency.

It was because of this increasing scarcity within the commodity markets that the Maassen’s decided to bring the investors and the industry together, “In four or five years at the peak of the shortage if reached, the investors will be able to provide those materials to the industry. In return, the industry could contribute to the storage costs and receive advance rights for those rare metals.” , said Maassen.

A family that appreciates minerals

Apart from all his business activities Gunther Maassen is also a big fan of metals and rare products. He has collected large blocks of different materials, which are worth a fortune as they come directly from the the mines. If you visit Maassen it is not unusual to get a piece of a meteor placed in your hands to be surprised with its heavy weight. “We also have a deep-sea manganese nodule. That is the material which is in small chunks at three to four thousand meters depth on the ocean floor,” according to Gunther.

This enthusiasm for rare metals has spread to his sons who subsequently joined the company. The Maassen’s would never sell these particular pieces but they do lend them for exhibitions on occasions. These are family treasures to be passed down from generation to generation in the years to come.

Author: Insa Wrede
Editor: Rolf Wenkel

How electronics boom is creating surge in demand for rare metals

Everything from iPods to Toyota Priuses to wind turbines are made using rare metals.
By Andy Bloxham 7:45AM GMT 11 Feb 2011

For example, the silver-grey metal tantalum is used in mobiles as a powder which helps regulate voltage, which would otherwise drop as temperatures rose. Its abilities have been vital to reducing the size of mobiles.

Hafnium is a key ingredient of Intel’s computer chips.

However, China produces around 97% of the world’s supplies, much of it coming from small mines operated by criminal gangs.

In the middle of last year, when the world market for rare earths was only £870m a year, China capped production levels and imposed a moratorium on all new mining licences until June this year.

Then, in December, it cut exports of the metals by over a third, prompting protests from Japan and the US.

With demand for iPhones and iPods soaring (Apple sold a total of 23m of the gadgets in the last three months of 2010 alone) and China keeping a tight rein on supply, the price is only likely to rise strongly.

So-called “rare earth” metals are named as such because when mining boomed in the 18th century, they were particularly hard to extract.

There are 17 of them but they are necessary building materials for navigation systems, radar, night vision goggles and, more importantly, mobile phones.

They include cerium (symbolised by Ce), lanthanum (La), neodymium (Nd), dysprosium (Dy), terbium (Tb) and europium (Eu).

U.S. at risk of rare earths supply disruptions

The United States risks major supply disruptions of rare earth metals used in clean energy products unless it diversifies its sources of the minerals, the Energy Department warns in a report due to be released later on Wednesday.

The United States and other countries are worried that China, which controls 97 percent of the world trade in rare earth metals, will use those supplies as a political weapon and cut back their export when it is in a dispute with another country or to grow China’s clean energy technology sector.

“The availability of a number of these materials is at risk due to their location, vulnerability to supply disruptions and lack of suitable substitutes,” U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a report, due to be unveiled on Wednesday at a rare earth metals conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The release of the report coincides with trade talks in Washington between the United States and China. U.S. officials are expected to push Chinese officials to loosen export restraints on rare earth elements.

China, which said on Tuesday it planned to raise export taxes on some rare earth metals beginning next month, holds 37 percent of known rare metal reserves, the United States has 13 percent and the rest is in other countries.

The 17 rare earth metals, with exotic names like lanthanum and europium, form unusually strong lightweight materials and are used in a wide range of applications including high-tech and defense products, car engines and clean energy.

CHINESE STRANGLEHOLD

By Tom Doggett
WASHINGTON | Wed Dec 15, 2010 6:23am EST