Rare Earths: The Next Resource Shortage?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There's also been progress in making motor magnets with smaller amounts of rare earths, which has cut demand.[3][4]
So today we need less, there are more sources, and the technology to solve the waste problem from production is working. This is now a non-problem.
[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-22/rare-earth-miners-face... [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2015/06/26/three... [3] http://www.nissan-global.com/EN/NEWS/2012/_STORY/121120-02-e... [4] http://www.ims.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Session7a_01_M...
The name is somewhat confusing. Rare earths aren't particularly rare. They're about a hundred thousand times more common than actually rare metals like platinum and gold, and about a hundred thousand times less common than common metals like iron, magnesium, and sodium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...
Some of the metals mentioned in the article, like cobalt, ar neither rare nor rare-earth. Others, like indium and gallium, are about as rare and as expensive as silver, but are used in much smaller quantities.
Yes, rare elements help a lot with efficient wind turbines and CIGS thin-film solar cells (although note that CIGS contains rare metals, but no rare earths). But they aren't used at all in the silicon photovoltaic cells that dominate the solar market now and for the foreseeable future, which don't use any rare minerals at all. And you can build efficient wind turbines without rare earths if you have to; you just use field coils instead of rare-earth permanent magnets. (In fact, Abraham reports that GE wind turbines have already made this switch.)
In direct contradiction to what Abraham says, nearly all chips are 100% rare-earth free and rare-metal free, except for gold, which is in no danger of supply shortages. A small fraction of high-speed bipolar chips use gallium arsenide, which depends on rare gallium, but they're almost entirely limited to microwave-and-up RF analog circuitry these days.
And, of course, rare metals are 100% recyclable. They aren't a resource we can use up, except by launching them on space probes or burning them in nuclear reactors. If we're allocating them inefficiently, we can melt down our existing air conditioners and wind turbines to redeploy our neodymium to higher-priority uses. It won't be long before people are digging LCD panels out of garbage dumps to recover the thin-film indium: maybe five to thirty years.
This is a big issue if you're in the business of making motors, generators, or LCD panels. It affects your material costs significantly, and indeed indium cost volatility has been a major problem over the last decade or two. But it's not an issue at the level of human society as a whole.
I think the overwrought rhetoric here is deeply harmful because we really are facing real resource shortages: oil (though not this year), ocean-water buffers, and our atmospheric capacity to handle carbon dioxide. Hyping up bogus "resource shortage" dangers like this will just lead to the public dismissing the real dangers.
Molycorp's new process gets rid of the huge settling ponds that used to be used, and recycles most of the working chemicals and water. (Recovering the water, instead of evaporating it, is a big win; they're on the edge of the Mojave Desert and water is expensive.) What comes out is a dry waste, which is basically what was dug out of the ground minus the good stuff. But about half their plant is resource recovery.
Because of this, there's significant exposure to their export policies and hence high price volatility for these materials. For instance, in 2011, Neodymium saw a significant surge in price just because the government decided to limit export quotas.
They control it yet ironically cant do anything with that control or else it will sow the seeds of destruction of that control.
Rare earths may be abundant, but that doesn't matter when the type of mining required to extract them is almost impossible to do in much of the world because of the environmental implications.
By contrast, when we use rare earths, generally what we do is to concentrate them and put them into standardized products like automotive catalytic converters, glass, petrochemical catalysts, neodymium magnets, Nd:YAG lasers, or CRT phosphor dots, in which they are even more concentrated than in the ores we mined them from. That means that the more rare earths you extract, the more easily accessible rare-earth resource remains, exactly the opposite of the situation with oil. It's just in landfills.
(There is also a small amount of loss from things like cigarette-lighter flints, which end up as urban dust of mixed lanthanoid oxides, and waste incineration. Refining the outputs of these processes back into rare earth minerals is probably going to be difficult. But that's not where most of current rare-earth refining ends up.)
I don't buy the environmental argument. Yes, mining is dangerous. Yes, refining minerals is always easier and more profitable if you can dump massive amounts of poison into the ground instead of cleaning up the mess. But you can do it in an environmentally friendly way. You just can't depend on capitalism to make that happen.
The parallels between rare earths and oil are striking. Much like oil, while alternatives exist they are required in today's implementation of cornerstone technologies. Further, much like oil, they are controlled by country's whose agenda are antagonistic to Western values.
Its much easier to "sell out" to China then to change our production methods. I think we should all be aware of the problem.
They can effectively be used up by being spread out over the world. A natural resource can only be mined in an affordable way if it is concentrated in one place, for example in the form of ore or an oil well.