Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
There are lots of rare earths in other countries. China is just the cheapest place to extract it. If the price goes up then other deposits will be able to be brought online economically.
Considering all the investment China is putting into Africa at the moment they are probably one step ahead in that department...
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Chorus Motors is working with Boeing to put their electric wheel motors in Boeing's new aircraft. They are powered by the plane's APU instead of using the engines.
http://choruscars.com/
Their technology results in a smaller motor with higher torque that does not require an assist from an ICE at higher speeds in an electric vehicle. It also does not use any rare earths.
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."
You have two way of breaking the chinese monopoly :
1)Impose a polution tax on dirty industry. That allow the local rare earth metal mining company to start again with the incured cost of respecting polution law, while still staying competitive
2) repel polution law and allow local company to polute as much as the chinese. Human resource might still make them more expensive than the chinese though.
3) make up a miracle new technology. Good luck on that one.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
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.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
No, no one had to say that.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
China's on the other side of the planet. If we dig deep enough, we can mine their rare earth.
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.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
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. :-(
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
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.
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.
We're already working on it. There's a rare earths mine currently getting started up near Lake Thor in the northwest territories.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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.
There were many mines in North America. They were shut down because to comply with US/Canadian environmental regulation and pay the wages here would put them in a huge competitive disadvantage versus the Chinese mines. You just can't compete with places where they put environment and worker protection at such low places in their priorities.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
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"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
It's true. I saw this documentary on Nickelodeon called Penguins of Madagascar and, man, they looked tough! We're talking crazy commando skills, unwavering loyalty, the ability to talk to zoo animals... it was chilling!
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.
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.
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.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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.
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...northwest territories.
No, Washington and Oregon are states now.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
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!
Oliver.
Wait... that's a possibility? Well, then... I think we need to get moving on this "mine the belt" idea right away!
Rhapsody in Numbers
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"