From Slashdot:
The NY Times reports that the Chinese government has placed a trade embargo on all exports to Japan of a crucial category of minerals used in products like hybrid cars, wind turbines and guided missiles.
China mines 93 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals, and more than 99 percent of the world’s supply of some of the most prized rare earths, which sell for several hundred dollars a pound.
The embargo comes after a dispute over Japan’s detention of a Chinese fishing trawler captain whose ship collided with two Japanese coast guard vessels as he tried to fish in waters controlled by Japan but long claimed by China.
The Chinese embargo is likely to have immediate repercussions in Washington. The House Committee on Science and Technology is scheduled to review a detailed bill to subsidize the revival of the American rare earths industry and the House Armed Services Committee is scheduled to review the American military dependence on Chinese rare earth elements.”
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Sean says:
September 24, 2010 at 4:04 am
“There was a rare earth mine in the California desert, about 75 miles east of Las Vegas. Cheap rare earth materials from China and environmental regulations shut it down. If the commodity price is right and the proper protection money is paid to the green lobby, it will re-open.”
They are already working on it! The site is known as the Mountain Pass mine and is currently owned by Molycorp Minerals. The site is in eastern California just north of I-15 on the way to Las Vegas. .
From Molycorp’s website:
“The world’s two largest reserves of Rare Earth materials outside of China are in Mountain Pass, California and Mount Weld, Australia. Neither of these deposits are currently in production. Lynas Corporation (the current owners of the Mount Weld deposit), has begun development of a mine and concentration plant in Australia and a processing facility in Malaysia. Lynas has no announced plans to produce NdFeB magnets or intermediate materials. On the other hand, Mountain Pass, California possesses a mine that produced for 50 years prior to the suspension of mining operations in 2002. MM LLC plans to restart mining operations and complete an extensive modernization and expansion of the related processing facility. MM LLC further plans to broaden its operations to encompass the production of metal, alloys and NdFeB magnets. The initial planned production upon full restart in 2012 is 40 million pounds REO per year (almost 7 million pounds of Nd and Pr oxides). This production can be achieved by using less than half the tons of ore that was required in the past to produce 40 millions pounds REO per year. ”
Fortunatley for all of us, someone in our government had some foresight and excluded the property from the ‘Mojave National Preserve’ (ie. national park) which was created around the site in the mid-90’s by Senator Feinstein. While they have some reserves and stockpiled ore and can reprocess some old tailings in their new processing plant, it would probably be nice for them to have access to additional reserves of bastnaesite ore on the surrounding properties now locked up in the new national park.
Ironically for our green friends, the ore comes from a type of rock called ‘carbonatite’ which is a relatively rare and unusual type of igneous rock composed primarily of carbonate minerals.
Many of the commenters here still do not fully understand the game China is playing.
They are working on moving up in the suppy chain, from supplying bulk material to semi-finished goods and so on. By the time other countries have invested large sums of money in opening new RE-mines, China will offer the semi finished goods at prices nobody can resist. And so on….
Moving into the added value production is the only way for China to keep their growth sustainable. It is planned and executed carefully, patiently and consistently.
They love it that especially the people in the US think that the Chinese are just a bunch of stupid copiers, since it buys them time and makes the execution of the plan only easier.
You may also want to check the number of PhD’s that their universities crank out every year and wonder when innovation will flow to China. (it already is..)
The next man on the moon will wave the Zhong Guo flag while NASA is still figuring out the successor of the obsolete space shuttle.
mosomoso says: September 24, 2010 at 12:54 am
We are constantly warned about a new economic power that will push the West to the margins. In the seventies, the Arabs would buy us all, straight out. Well, they got Harrods.
In the eighties, clever people talked of how Japan planned to make Europe its shopping centre and Australia its mine. I can’t remember the bon mot to describe America’s marginalisation by the Japanese, but the chattering set found it delicious. Sadly…
The Japanese economic threat in the 80s was that Nikon made the best lenses in the world. ICs, computer chips, demanded higher and higher resolution for a new generation every 1.5 years. The Japanese gov’t would not allow the top rated Nikon lenses out of their country, so they could take over the IC/computer industry. The U.S. gov’t countered by funding SemaTech, where U.S. companies donated engineers and/or equipment. We, the U.S., were able to move ahead of Japan using their second-rate lenses and beating process control into tiny 3σ deviations.
Given the opportunity, we seem to be able to rise to the situation and meet our challenges as humans.
The rare earth’s are discussed in a book (link below) in the context of who discovered them and how they were discovered and added to the periodic table. It is a very interesting part of history. The book’s title made me pause because I thought it might be too oriented toward comic or silly material. Not so. It is not terribly difficult to read but it is somewhat demanding – especially that you have some knowledge of physics and chemistry.
http://www.amazon.com/Disappearing-Spoon-Madness-Periodic-Elements/dp/0316051640
[Full disclosure: I am not connected in any way to this book or author except I do own a copy – obtained via a well known science book club that will go unnamed.]
Now you know why we are in Afganistan. The have rare earth resources yet to be exploited. C
nealins says:
September 24, 2010 at 8:52 am
The next man on the moon will wave the Zhong Guo flag while NASA is still figuring out the successor of the obsolete space shuttle.
I am sure it will be a GREEN FLYING CARPET !! 🙂
fhsiv
The Mountain Pass rare earth mine is a huge resource. Molycorp gave themselves a black eye when their pipelines leaked in the Caltrans right-of-way and other places on it’s way to a nearby dry lake. The material was lightly radioactive, and when most people think about radioactivity they think of nuclear weapons and fallout. Between that overblown reaction and the Chinese undercutting prices the mine was idled.
I worked for Caltrans for many years and we have a highway maintenance station next door to the Molycorp mine in Mountain Pass.
In the interest of the US that mine should be reopened and always be online. Most people have no idea of the important, even critical uses of rare earths, or the impact of a shutoff of supplies would be to this country.
If the Chinese can ban rare earth exports, Anthony, can you at least ban comments from GM. I’m getting tired of having to thumbwheel over this moron’s bloviations.
The US knows exactly what’s it’s doing by not mining “rare” earth minerals. Why not let another country rip apart it’s landscape (China) for rare earths and save the US resource for an emergency. (It’s DOES NOT take 15 years to start up the old mines. The CEO’s who say that are the ones heavily invested in Chinese “rare” earth mining.) It’s the same as the oil industery. It’s called “use up your neighbors resources and only use yours when they run out.” There are other rare earths in America and several other countries. But, China in it’s sweet naivete, is only trying to look out for it’s people – and is not worried at this time about the risk to it’s landscape. Instead of putting down China, have compassion for their pollution, food and water shortage and stop putting it down. Don’t harbor resentment against little Chinese person – their government hasn’t yet learned how to not kill them in order to feed them. As for their military. Of course, they have to make a big show of it. That’s to keep greedy, grasping nations from trying to “grab and run.”
We do have these “rare earth” resources in the United States but lack the will to exploit them. Somehow, in this constant bickering between exploitation and environmentalism, we have become so polarized that the very idea of using our resources in a responsible manner escapes attention. These issues, which involve both our national security and econonmy, need to be addressed without extremism from either side.
GM says:
September 23, 2010 at 11:15 pm
“There is a shortage of rare earth elements. What is this telling you?”
It is telling me that you, GM, are caught in a Malthusian bubble.
You should go out more, meet people, read some books.
Thats what it’s telling me.
The stone age did not end because of lack of stones, you know.
Get over it.
Much ado about nothing. The Chinese are trying to increase prices because their cost of extraction have gone up due to new environmental regs now being put into place. This is all for the good. Plus, it will allow western companies to re-open and profit from the higher prices. Why do people see nefarious things in good news?
Chris,
You are right, there are good things here. But this discussion has broadened its scope well beyond the availability of a single mineral. Geo-politics are an interesting animal.
The tricks is trying to figure out what the leaders end goals are.
And for that, I am really interested!
Climate Change, The Sustainable Green Economy and the demonization of fossil fuels are all based on lies, lies and lies.
Paul Driessen gave us all the arguments already why green is not really green with his recent publication at WUWT and so did Burt Rutan:
http://rps3.com/Pages/Burt_Rutan_on_Climate_Change.htm
Besides that, who needs a Nippon hybrid if you can drive a much bigger and safer BMW using the same amount of fuel for the same price?
Why should we continue to build wind farms for electricity if they can’ t deliver 24/7 base loads at astronomic prices and maintenance costs?
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/09/scam-spreads.html
Why did humanity forget they fazed out wind power with expensive steam engines in around 1810, 200 years ago?
Why should we buy expensive solar panels subsidized with tax payers money that raise the price of electricity for people who don’t have solar panels if even President Obama does not want them on the roof of the White House?
Why should we grow bio fuels from food crops if 1.2 billion people go hungry and why should these bio fuels be sustainable in any way if people die?
Why should we surrender to technology that doesn’t deliver what it promises at times we are drowning in oil and gas for generations to come?
Why don’t we simply wait until real technology is developed to replace oil and gas for the good reasons instead of advocacy.
Why don’t we trust our Governments, scientists and environmentalists anymore?
Why do I no longer like the color green anymore?
Why does the entire climate scam remind me of a scam artist by the name of Victor Lustig who managed to sell the Paris Eiffel Tower by inviting local scrap dealers to make a closed bid?
http://www.3ammagazine.com/short_stories/non-fict/truetales/eiffeltower.html
I think because the way Lustig managed to pull off his scam is similar to the UN IPCC process.
Not a problem.
Hybrids (and all electric vehicles) use more fuel than my large Citroen diesel (55 mpg out of town), so we will do the Earth a favour if we get rid of them.
A diesel has direct “engine to wheels” drive, and does not have to go through any of that messy “conversion to electricity/battery storage/conversion to motive power” business.
Ralph says:
September 24, 2010 at 10:49 am
Then our next choice for buying a car should be, being decent skeptics, a wild gas burning big and safe SUV.(With enough back space to carry a big carbon barbecue and half a methane emitter sacrificed cow).
Keith Battye says:
September 24, 2010 at 7:47 am
“Seeing that Lanthanides occur at concentrations of around 2000ppm in Hickory trees in the Eastern USA I hope nobody gets busy chopping them down, unless things get really desperate.”
Thanks, that’s an interesting fact. According to this link
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V66-487D984-5&_user=10&_coverDate=08%2F31%2F1958&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=e18854c4530531ef51de7fd6c0956a6b&searchtype=a
the Lanthanides are bioconcentrated in the Hickory leaves. If we get really desperate for Lanthanides, we could rake up hickory leaf litter in the Autumn, and process the leaf ‘ore’. Chopping these trees down would be counterproductive.
Enneagram says:
September 24, 2010 at 8:48 am
“Sorry, Chinese did it already:
http://autonews.gasgoo.com/china-news/byd-auto-admits-iron-battery-talks-with-vw-090424.shtml
”
Enneagram, this looks like a Chinese has translated it into English – at one place it says “Lithium-Iron Battery” so it seems he has mixed “Ion” and “Iron” up… BYD builds Li-Ion batteries.
GM,
Bwaaaaahahahahaa!!! Quick! STOP CREATING THINGS! Our only hope now is PANIC!
That’s right, GM, Game over, man! Game over!
“Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat.”
He whom the gods would destroy is nuts about the Prius.
Oh, allright, i see, i didn’t know about this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery
Lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) battery
OM[ALT 70]G you snipped my censored ALT 102 – word?
Messing up the environment is not the same as ALT 70, or ALT 102, -ing up the environment. Messing up something usually mean you can correct it, like cleaning up the mess. ALT 70, or ALT 102, -ing up something usually tend to mean you can’t correct it, fix it, or clean it up, as in the damage is already done so now you have to live with it, you need to adapt.
See what I did there? :-()
As any decent geologist can tell you:
1. ‘Rare Earth’ metals are not really all that rare.
2. According to the USGS China has the largest known reserves of rare earths, but the USA has 13 million tonnes out of a total world reserve of 99 million tonnes.
Global annual consumption of rare earths is circa 60,000t/year. So the USA’s known reserves could supply the world’s needs for 216 years.
In reality, the metals we should all be worried about are tin and tungsten – the Chinese have a real stranglehold in both these metals.
This is another example of the Chinese taking advantage of US government making it hard to operate inside the US. Another example is Kel-F (also known as CTFE or chloro-trifluoro-ethylene, a form of teflon). My company makes things that handle liquid oxygen, and there are very few materials that are appropriate for this application. Kel-F is a plastic that works well. It was invented and initially produced in the US, but is now not manufactured here at all. We buy from China.
For a lot of “Tin hats”:
Peru remains the world’s third largest tin producer, after China and Indonesia. Peru’s tin (in concentrate) production continues to increase, producing 40,202 t in 2003 a 4% increase from 2002. Peru’s largest (and only) tin producer is family run Minsur S.A.. The dramatic rise in production can be attributable to the expansion at Minsur’s San Rafael Mine facilities in the Mariátegui region. Minsur also operates the Funsur tin smelting and refining installation located in Pisco, south of Lima. The company increased tin production from its San Rafael mine to 42,145t in 2005.
http://www.mbendi.com/indy/ming/tinm/sa/pe/p0005.htm