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

Easier alternative: drop them from the WTO

[WillAffleckUW]

A much simpler method would be to just drop China from the WTO and have nations around the world reinstate their trade barriers against their unfairly priced goods on the open market.

But that would be easy.

And direct.

Re:Easier alternative: drop them from the WTO

[blind biker]

And they wouldn't export all the garbage they sell at the local Wal-Mart and just about every other department store.

Which would mean less lead and cadmium in toys, cosmetics and kitchenware. I can only hope.

Re:Easier alternative: drop them from the WTO

[shikaisi]

Good luck to you when the prices of your HDTV, your notebook PC, your iPad and your mobile phone all double, not to mention a hundred other hi-tech gadgets that you depend upon. The days when China only made cheap plastic crap are long past. Check all the high-tech goods that you own for Made in China labels. A huge proportion of all semiconductor manufacturing is in China, along with all the supply chain industries that enable it. And you are not going to just shift that to Africa or even India overnight, because they do not have the highly educated workforce that China can provide.

Re:Easier alternative: drop them from the WTO

[Anonymous Coward]

"The quality is crap but it fits it's purpose quite nicely."

Depends on the quality control and insistence of the parent company. I've owned and seen Benchmade knives made in China (their "red line", now discontinued, Benchmade brought their lines back home) that are superior to many US knives in the same price range (such as SOG and Kershaw). It really depends on who is watching the production. I've seen SOG lines made overseas (Fusion) that were actually pretty decent compared to some of the minor issues I've come across on their domestic lines, even though the Fusion line is the line that's supposed to be crap.

And some of the price differences aren't even in the same classification. Ever try a made in the USA workbench vise? The US version, while tougher, is $200 more. The China one is usually under $70 depending the size. There isn't even the option of finding a US version in most places.

Lodge makes their enameled cast iron (not their season cast iron) in China. They do strict quality control and spot checks supposedly. Excellent goods, far cheaper than any US or French made wares, and even many of the US branded ones are made in China now (Cuisinart). Compared to other supposedly US made lines, they're half the price, and compared to the French lines, more than a hundred cheaper.

Ever look at small gasoline engines for generators or replacement engines? The "blue" engines are exact Honda clones, since Japan gave China the dies. Some people say some of the machining is better than the Honda versions. And they're hundreds cheaper. In the US, most of the small engine plants were shut down (such as Tecumsah).

Anyone who spouts off made in China sucks, they really don't *buy* anything or *do* anything, otherwise they'd know--a LOT of made in the US goods suck. There's a lot of goods we still rock in (welders, auto parts, basic battery tech), but we were arrogant for years. There was a reason why Americans tend to buy foreign cars, and blaming the Japanese for flooding the market isn't the full explanation--some of the US cars were just crap.

Then again, I'm one of those people that think the reason US goods suck is more because the base suppliers are assholes. Try to buy good, exotic metal or plastics in the US is hell for a truly small business owner. It's freaking sick that you can often buy a finished good made in China in the US (made in China, shipped, and someone is profiting selling it in the US) that's a quarter of the price of the raw material blank from the lowest priced US supplier you can find. Add in regulations, lawsuits, etc., and it's near impossible sometimes to get a decent business that competes with China made goods off the ground--that's why many established companies have moved overseas, because if they don't, the entirety of their business fails.

Re:Chorus Motors electric motors dont use rare ear

[Wansu]

  Molycorp is restarting the rare earths mine in the U.S. but the industry to process the ore will take 15 years to redevelop.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-28/molycorp-s-ipo-aims-at-chinese-grip-on-smart-bombs.html

"While U.S. deposits also exist in several states such as Idaho, Wyoming and Utah, they are still being explored and could take as many as 15 years before becoming fully operational, according the GAO report."

It's alot easier to get out of industries than it is to get in. I suspect this won't be the last industry we'll want to redevelop. It was foolish to get out of it in the first place. The same can be said for other industries.

Re:Looking elsewhere...

[lionchild]

Unlike Conflict Diamonds, it's really hard to trace where the Conflict Rare Earths come from. So, if they get funneled through China, it's very difficult to say where it orginally came from. :-(

oops, blockquote didn't work

[HighOrbit]

Here is the part of the article I was quoting:

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.

History repeats?

[Ironsides]

In 1920 the operators at AT&T striked. This led AT&T to pick up the pace and change it's entire network over to switches and the rotary phone. AT&T had resisted this prior to it realizing how vulnerable it was to a strike.

It would be just history repeating itself if this action by China led us to a way to replace Rare Earths entirely rendering them obsolete. But that still depends on us being able to duplicate the effects.

Re:China is just the cheapest producer like Saudi

[compro01]

Bullshit. There's a pair of big rare earth mines in California that will be up and running by the middle of next year. One of them (Mountain Pass) used to provide the vast majority of the world's rare earths before China came on the scene and priced them out of the market.

There is no possibility of a long term shortage.

Re:Looking elsewhere...

[Monkeedude1212]

Not to mention that there is a lot of potential ability to recycle Rare Earth metals from electronics yet for whatever reason we keep shipping them off to China to be disassembled.

If you don't want China to have all the Rare Earth Metals... STOP GIVING IT BACK TO THEM.

Re:Looking elsewhere...

[SEWilco]

Is an asteroid "elsewhere" enough for you? Most metallic asteroids probably have more metals than we have access to in the Earth's crust. We have ways of cutting up large metal objects, but I don't know if there are industrial processes for separating random mixtures of metallic elements. An asteroid which had melted and partially separated the metals would be an interesting challenge.

Re:That'S easy

[loshwomp]

3) make up a miracle new technology. Good luck on that one.

Your miracle new technology is ready. (You're welcome, and thanks for the luck.)

It's called the AC induction motor, and it uses no permanent magnets--only copper and/or iron and/or aluminum. A fine example was in GM's EV-1 in the 1990s, and its descendants live on at AC Propulsion, and, consequently, Tesla Motors. Permanent magnet motors are likely to retain slightly higher efficiency, but the difference in cost of the construction materials will allow the market to take care of the rare earth "problem".

Re:China is just the cheapest producer like Saudi

[L3370]

They can.

If we did, china would let it go on for a year or two, then wait till all the investors dump huge loads of cash into the business to expand and streamline. After fortunes are invested, China will stop any existing embargos and then triple their rare earth mining output just to slam all the competitors into the ground. If they do it right, they'd probably traumatize their competitors so terribly that no one would think of mining rare earth minerals for another 30 years.

China corners the market because mining rare earth minerals creates environmental issues...and they are willing to puke all over their own land. Western nations have to deal with environmental laws, and that drives up cost.

Re:Looking elsewhere...

[RsG]

Sure, but getting to and from is a bitch. And moving them into Earth orbit is the sort of thing you only screw up once. I'm all for mining the belt, but we need substantially better tech for both ground to orbit and in-system flight. Mind you, in the long run setting up such infrastructure is worthwhile for non-commercial reasons, so we really ought to be investing more in it on general principles.

Actually, no

[WindBourne]

There are 2 very distinct issues.

1. China DOES have the largest amount of currently cheaply available REE. BUT, they are not the only ones. However, they have ran around for the last 15 years trying to buy up mines, or put them out of business by ignoring the environmental issues, subsidizing the prices, and then dumping on the market. Right now, they have the vast majority of working mines.
2. 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. And again, this WAS being subsidized, dumped, environmental regs ignored, etc by China.

So, where does this leave the world now? Well, China mines the majority of the ore, and processes all of it. In addition, they will only process it if THEY buy it. Basically, we have China able to stop exports and screw the world. And we saw that with Japan.

The best thing that the west can do, is re-start the processing of REE as quickly as possible. The smart thing is for the west to restart this in two or more different nations. That way, when China decides to move their cold war up the ladder, then we are still guaranteed production. In addition, it can keep prices down.

Alternative == mine it yourself

[khchung]

Sorry to reply twice, but the article title is just too silly.

There is plenty of rare earth all around the world. So if you don't want to buy from China (or China won't sell to you), just mine it yourself.

Instead of printing money to give to bankers, why don't the US government just setup and run mines to extract rare earth from US itself? It create real jobs and solve this problem in one go.

But actually doing something to solve a problem? Nah... it is easier just to find someone to blame while still giving out pork to corporate supporters. It keeps the problem alive so more people can be blamed, and keep the pork money flowing too!

a company developing non-rare earth metal motors

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a buddy that has been developing such non-rare earth metal motors at a startup in Rapid City, SD... Dakota Power, LLC

Re:Is it like the IT worker shortage in America?

[ibsteve2u]

Now, after getting a pittance for all the rare earth sold for the past few decades, China finally wakes up and realize that having a rare earth reserve is actually IMPORTANT in the long term. And surprise(!), they don't to continue to sell on the cheap. So they are now trying to consolidate the rare earth mining industry (which takes time), and in the meanwhile, use administrative means to limit the export (i.e. limit their losses).

I'm sure that your use of the world "finally" is unintentional. China, on the other hand, rarely does anything unintentionally:

Entering the 21st century, the pace of industrial and economic globalization is speeding up. As China enters the WTO, the Chinese government has begun the implementation of its policy to develop its western regions. Located in western China, Baotou is famous for its rich rare earth resources, thus being named "The Mother Lode of Rare Earth". In 1992, Chinese President Deng Xiaoping pointed out, "There is oil in the Middle East; there is rare earth in China...."

Given the fact that the OPEC model of monopolistic control of resources was firmly established by 1992, I do not believe that Xiaoping - and China - had any intention other than gaining a monopoly, or they would have compared rare earths to dà biàn rather than oil.