How rare earth metals rose from obscurity | Hacker News Reader

How rare earth metals rose from obscurity

cen.acs.org

69 pointsfern1212 comments

A few years ago, the Chinese producers increased the price of rare earths. Then the Mountain Pass, California was taken over by Molycorp, and a new process developed that didn't pollute much. (Even the Sierra Club approved.) Then an Australia mining firm got into the business, and companies using rare-earth magnets figured out ways to use fewer rare earths. The price of rare earths crashed, there was a rare earth glut, and Molycorp went bankrupt.

The Mountain Pass, California mine is still shut down. A Chinese company is trying to buy the assets cheaply. The current question is whether the US Government will permit this.

A couple of years back, when rare earth prices were high and China restricted exports, the media was full of scaremongering stories about how we gonna see our industry shut down, etc.

Turns out that prices are a strong signal to start mining. While rare earth sound like a scarce resources, they are essentially prevalent across the globe in very low concentration. The existing mines are usually places where the concentration is a tad higher. But once prices are high enough, a lot of marginal deposits all over sudden become commercially viable.

Same thing going on with oil really.

And i think that was the original intent of the "peak oil" term. Not that we had found everything we could in absolute terms, but that the ROI on extraction had hit a plateau (or something of that nature).

We hit peak oil later than planned because the rate of oil-consumption growth plummeted. The estimates were within an order of magnitude (which is a small margin of error you double your consumption every 20 years).

The problem is that the China price is politically motivated. It was cranked up to move motor production to China; exports of the raw material were restricted while motor exports were not. When that backfired, the price was dropped to maintain China's control of rare earth production.

Fortunately for us all regular free shipments of rare earth metals are now available:

cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/

Simply deflect onto the approval-pending lunar crash site! Friendly robots will construct an Ore-some(TM) plant for processing and EM-powering fulfillment to the ZIP code of your choice.

"As Evans alluded, the demand for rare earths could lead to their commercial demise. Access to the metals has always been tenuous, leading to worries that one day demand for them may outstrip supply."

I understand that starting up a mine takes many years, but if you are not under a command economy where the Bureau of Rare Earths "demands" 1 million tons of Neodymium per year and the mines only produce 1/2 million tons, the use of the word demand does not make any sense to me. I heard demand used in a similar way in the oil industry sometimes and I could never really figure out what they meant or have it explained well.

There appear to be rich seabed rare earth deposits that are feasible to mine. [1]

[1] https://phys.org/news/2013-03-japan-rich-rare-earth-deposits...

I know it sounds terrible, but at geologic time scales, the sea floor is recycled at a higher rate than non-coastal land [1], maybe it's better to keep more land in a better state, if that's the choice? The sea floor is immense.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_crust#Life_cycle

I agree there's much more sea floor than land area to use, and that it gets 'renewed' faster than continental land masses.

On the other hand, we know so little about submarine ecosystems - what might be important in sustaining humans, what isn't, how they get damaged, recovery times, etc. It seems much harder to get that info from sea bed sites than from land sites.

Complicated decisions with no apparent easy choices.

Fortunately those are not so rare...

Are Rare Earth Elements Actually Rare?

http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/06/15/are-rare-earth-elements-...

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