Searching For Alternatives To China's Rare Earth Monopoly

KantIsDead writes "MIT's Technology Review adds to the ongoing discussion of China's monopoly on rare earth metals, an issue that was temporarily catapulted to national attention during China's rare earth embargo of Japan. The current article focuses on the search for alternatives to rare earth metals that would undercut China's monopoly and allow nations to develop their industry without fearing the hand of a Chinese embargo. From the article: 'In the US, the Chinese dominance of rare-earth mineral production has prompted a surge of funding focused on developing permanent magnets that use less, if any, rare-earth materials, such as nearly $7 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E). In one of these projects, University of Nebraska researchers are working to enhance permanent magnets made with an alloy iron and cobalt, or FeCo. This class of materials is sold today, but delivers half or less of the power of the best rare-earth-based magnets. The Nebraska researchers will focus on ways to dope the structural matrix of these alloys with traces of other elements, thereby rearranging their molecular geometry to create stronger, more durable permanent magnetic materials.'"

Comments

Re:Looking elsewhere...

[lul_wat]

Considering all the investment China is putting into Africa at the moment they are probably one step ahead in that department...

Re:What about

[MightyMartian]

Apart from the fact that treaties pretty much bar any wide-scale development or extraction, simply put, it's damned cold down there, and even the limited amount of activity down there costs an exorbitant amount of money. Rare earth minerals would have to get really damned expensive before anyone would seriously consider it.

Import Tariffs would fix this

[HighOrbit]

From the article

Although well over 90 percent of the minerals are produced in China, they are found in many places around the world, and, in spite of their name, are actually abundant in the earth's crust (the name is a hold-over from a 19th-century convention). In recent years, low-cost Chinese production and environmental concerns have caused suppliers outside of China to shut down operations.

In other words, we (the West) have artifically created this situation by shutting down our own mines with labor and evironmental regulations, while allowing China (with no real enforcement of labor or environmental regulations, even if they are on the books) to dominate the market. I saw a TV spot about this a while back and apparently there was an operating mine in California as recently as 10 years ago, which simply wasn't able to compete with Chinese prices because the California mine had the expense of actually complying with the US environmental regulations. That gives the Chinese an artificial price advantage.

The market for these goods are mostly export markets in Japan, North America, and Europe, so this is in our power to control. To stimulate production in the west, we could do one of two things : 1) eliminate our own self-imposed regulations (perhaps unacceptabe from an environmental point of view) or 2) eliminate the artifical price advantage that the chinese have from not having regulations. I would choose # 2. We need only tax chinese imports and goods with chinese components. For example, say a motor from Japan uses magnets and is being exported to the USA, then the manufacturer would need to demonstrate that the magnet was made from non-chinese metals to be exempt from an import tariff. Once the artifical price advantage of the chinese component is nullfied, the manufacturer would be willing to pay higher prices from other non-chinese mines. Then other mines outside China would arise in the market. As an added side-effect, the Chinese might even begin regulating their own industry to get out from under the tariff.

Rare Earth Metals aren't so rare

[Anonymous Coward]

Rare earth metals aren't really that rare despite their name. China is good at mining them cheaply, which caused most everyone else shut down production. Some countries (U.S.A) are looking at reopening mines. By playing these games China may be shooting themselves in the foot. Time will tell.

it's about more than rare earths

[circletimessquare]

as others have noted, there are enough rare earths, they aren't that rare. it's just that china, wihtout any work force laws or legal protections for its workers it is allowed to treat like slaves of the state, is able to parlay that into cheaper prices. so mining elsewhere withers and atrophies

if push came to shove, we can start new mines rather quickly

what worries me is manufacturing know how and infrastructure. it takes a generation to have a good manufacturing base, at least. and i'm not talking machines, i'm talking people. the manufacturing base is dying in the west, as everything moves to china

this is where china can really squeeze us, and we won't be able to react fast enough, because in a decade or two, we won't know how to make anything, it will all be made in china

we need to keep our manufacturing base, the whole spectrum of technologies and know how and expertise, humming along here

a rare earth is a rare earth, whether dug up in california or inner mongolia

but that 70 year old guy who knows how all about phase transitions in the manufacture of specialty glasses, or that 80 year old guy who knows all about resistance settings on collodial separation equipment, or whatever: when they go, its gone, the only other brain with that info is in shanghai

it's like us in the west watching iran trying to build a nuclear bomb and stumbling in its lack of knowhow. in 20-30 years, in a conflict, china could be in the same position, just watching us try to manufacture all sorts of high specialized industrial applications and us over here going "how do you do this?" "i dunno, the guy who knew that died 20 years ago" "well where's his knowledge backup?" "well, the bank of china bought that portfolio 10 years ago and moved it all to guangzhou, no one at the time thought it was a big deal"

Re:Fungible Goods

[Anonymous Coward]

Those Chilean miners are damn lucky they weren't in China (or some part of Africa for that matter), if they were it would have been a write-off case kept away from the press and officials would have said "nothing to see folks, move along" despite protests from friends and family.

I think that says a lot about a country, when what most people would consider a third world nation does a better job of looking out for its people.

Re:Looking elsewhere...

[ae1294]

Precisely. U.S. was the the global leader in rare earth metals production in the late 1980s.

Hey we moved on.. now we export nice clean things like Hollywood movies and heavy metal eh music... Digging in the dirt is so hard on the nails and only Mexicans wanna do that sort of work.

Re:Easier alternative: drop them from the WTO

[WillAffleckUW]

There is no such thing as a former spy for the Chinese government.

You meant she's supposedly on reserve status.

Thanks.

Re:Actually, no

[Anonymous Coward]

China has the ONLY processing of REE. America had it with Magnaquench, but a bunch of neo-cons served as a front for China, bought it up, and then got W to override the DOD's object to the move of them company to CHina.

So here's a stupid question. This company that China bought, presumably it had US employees that worked for it? Employees who know how to process rare earth elements? So why don't they just start a new company, now that there is greater demand for it?

Re:What about

[MightyMartian]

A couple of things come to mind...

Both are cold, but large portions of the Antarctic continent get considerably colder. Now maybe there's a summer time window there, but even barring that, probably just as bad, if not worse, is the fact that unlike Sweden or the Northwest Territories or Alaska, or even Siberia and all those other hostile northern hemisphere places, they are all on the same land mass as large-scale transportation infrastructure. Antarctica lies in the middle of an ocean, the nearest major port is a helluva long ways away, across a rather big and at times dangerous stretch of water. You're talking about not just extracting in some of the inhospitable environments on the surface of the planet, you're talking about quite possibly moving it over more of that inhospitable environment, loading it on to ships, requiring a major port which has to be built there and then, barring any of that, you have to create major shipping lanes through the Southern Ocean.

Maybe at some point, perhaps when prices get high enough, it will be practical, but I know that this has been looked at before and no one could figure out how to make it work and make a dime at it.