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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I’m a little late for pre-empting the Malthusians among us and other commenters have advised that the rare earths are not so rare. Some comparisons with the crustal abundance of more familiar metals might help:
http://bing.search.sympatico.ca/?q=crustal%20abundance%20of%20the%20elements&mkt=en-ca&setLang=en-CA
For example: crustal abundance of Ce is 83 ppm, La 50 ppm; Nd 44ppm; lesser abundant RE minerals are the so-called “heavy rare earths”: Eu 2.2 ppm; Tb 1 ppm; Ho 1.6 ppm; Tm 0.52 ppm; Lu 0.8 ppm. “Abundant metals”: Cu 58 ppm, Ni 72 ppm, Zn 82 ppm and Pb 10 ppm and compared with gold Au 0.002 ppm, silver Ag 0.08 ppm
The problem as usual boils down to governments affecting the prices of commodities that puts cost recovering industries out of business and artificially reduces availability.
From: Ralph on September 24, 2010 at 10:49 am
You have stated the right idea but the wrong concepts.
Our current standard drivetrain design has many mechanical losses, it is inefficient. “Hybrids” are currently a transition form, using a single primary electric motor with the power transmitted through a main shaft and sub-shafts.
The desired final form has electric motors at the wheels, a direct “engine to wheels” connection except the engine is basically part of the wheel. As has long been used in industry, namely on CNC equipment but elsewhere, it is easy to have the right motors achieve many speeds with high torque from even a dead stop, to perform regenerative braking, even to hold position. The Tesla Roadster currently uses a single-gear gearbox, and it took some doing to get highly-durable gears that would last more than a few thousand miles. Electric motors have been electrically switched between clockwise and counter-clockwise rotation for many decades without employing gears, many designs are happily bi-directional with three-phase AC especially so, a gearbox is not required for that. Thus the gearbox is for shifting the speed range from the motor to what is needed at the wheels. But with motors you can add more magnetic poles to the design for a lower speed range, thus there is no need for a gearbox. Design them flat as possible and as 3-phase AC.
After moving to wheel/motor combination units, many things simplify, especially by using motors at all wheels and a steering wheel position sensor. Power-assist steering is achieved by reading the steering wheel position and having the proper wheel(s) on the outside of the curve rotate appropriately faster. This removes the need for hydraulics, however a manual steering unit is necessary in case of electronics failure and for the linkages that will stabilize the turning wheels (i.e. the front wheels as is standard).
Traction control, which I heard will be a requirement on US vehicles, is likewise easy as feedback can be used to determine if one wheel is turning too fast thus spinning without sufficient traction, etc, and power to individual wheels can be easily varied for corrections, without resorting to additional cumbersome devices. You have four-wheel drive built-in, however it is best thought of as any-wheel drive, as needed. On a curve only the front outside tire may need power, for example. There would also be a neat “limp home” factor, with all four motors having to fail to render the vehicle inoperable, as opposed to just one central power plant currently.
Braking will be three-stage. As you continue pressing downward on the pedal, through ranges of resistance so you can feel what’s happening, the vehicle can go from regenerative braking (fast) to energized braking (whiplash!) to a manual backup that will stop the vehicle if the electronics fail. There will be no need for a vacuum source, as is commonly used for power brakes.
After that, use electric resistance heating and for air conditioning use a sealed electrically-powered unit similar to what’s found in a window-mounted air conditioner. Without transmission-based wheel restraint, careful thought must be given to the parking brake mechanism. It can be manually applied with stern auditory/visual warnings to do so, or automatically applied, when the “direction lever” is set to Park or at least when the “ignition” key is turned off. If automatic there needs to be a manual disconnect for towing and pushing the vehicle. That can be settled between the lawyers and the engineers.
Voila, drivetrain eliminated, major mechanical inefficiencies gone. After that it’s just deciding what’s desired between loading it up on batteries as an all-plug-in vehicle, or having an engine/generator set under the hood with enough batteries to soak up a braking surge, perform quick acceleration with a load, and let the gen-set shut off periodically. Our current internal combustion engines are over-sized to provide high torque and acceptable acceleration. I had read the average vehicle only requires 20HP to maintain speed, presumably on a level road. Thus the gen-set’s engine can be considerably smaller. To remove another frequent mechanical problem, the engines could be air-cooled as were earlier Volkswagen engines, no coolant needed. For those lamenting the lost heat, it can be used to pre-warm the incoming air for combustion.
Also the gen-set’s engine only needs to run at one speed thus it will be easily tuned for efficiency and emissions, and can use a wide range of fuels as the performance aspects of the fuel will be far less critical.
That’s where we should be heading. That will be most efficient. Now we just have to get there.
A Chinese tale to understand their psychology:
“A Chinese landlord was complaining that he was not receiving his pay from his American tenant, one day, tired of asking him to pay the rent, he menaced to his tenant by telling him he was going to punish him by using the “Chinese way of vengeance”. The American guy laughed at him, telling him: “Do whatever you want, I won’t pay you”.
The next morning, after waking up, the American guy found a brick on his night table with a written message on a paper attached to it. The man read it and said to himself: “Silly Chinese, I won’t pay it no mater what he does!”, and throw the brick with the message through his window…….the brick was tied with a string to a certain and very delicate of his body…, from then on, his friends call him the “eunuch”…..
Suddenly realized the analogy with the debt you have with your now landlord……
Yes, Peter Miller, but I would add that any geologist should look with a jaundice eye at any resource the USGS puts a number to–have they really done a thorough inventory of all the land out there, or are they modeling what they believe is there by using certain foregone conclusions that constrain their models? The answer is thye have not done a thorough check–there’s always more resources, especially surpise finds, when a really diligent effort is applied.
@Enneagram:
Don’t forget that the US pays China with money that they just print as needed. And as the Renminbi is tightly coupled to the US Dollar, it loses value synchronously with the US Dollar. As long as its coupled that way, one could see it as one currency for two nations. So it looks like the Chinese and the American in your tale have tied themselves together with the piece of string…
Haven’t read through 131 responses but understand that rare earths is an oxy-moron. They aren’t rare. That is not to say it wouldn’t take a year or two to get significant mines going, even if they were fast-tracked through approval legislation. We have rare earths desposits in Western Australia too … I know, I know… there isn’t much we don’t have cos were a bunch of lucky bastards. Here’s a decent bit of background info for Australia:
http://www.australianminesatlas.gov.au/aimr/commodity/rare_earths_10.jsp
At the moment we bury most monazite at mineral sands operations, which can contain some rare earth elements. I am not sure if any or much of it is processed for rare earths in WA at this stage.
China and Japan going to war?
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2010/09/wars-and-rumors-of-war.html
*Sigh* Malthus must have left GM some money in his will. Let’s take a look at a REALLY rare element: Ru. Worldwide reserves are estimated in the low kiloton ranges. It also happens to be a staple of the disk drive industry for making media and when originally generous amounts of it were used per surface there was a scare that we’d “run out!” Panic sent prices up which then promptly crashed a year later when it was determined that maybe each disk didn’t really need quite that much after all.
http://www.ebullionguide.com/price-chart-ruthenium-all-time.aspx
Gee, I thought we were all gonna die.
As said by others the Chinese are trying to use their supply monopoly as leverage in other ways. I suspect that not only will their monopoly be broken quickly (within 2-3 years), but this will also show the world that maybe China isn’t such a great alternative to the US after all.
>>Kadaka
>>Ralph – You have stated the right idea but the wrong concepts.
Anyone can get rid of a drive train in an electric vehicle, but you cannot get rid of the creation/storage/motive power losses.
A modern diesel is nearly as efficient as a power station, when run on a motorway, and so the electric vehicle is bound to be less efficient than a diesel on the open road (but not so in town). The electric vehicle will only make sense, in terms of a reduction in fossil fuel emissions, when we have nuclear energy. (Discounting any renewables – I want my car to run every day, including during anticyclones.)
Electric vehicles are cheaper, even now? Yes, but only because (in Europe), they do not pay the wapping great tax that a diesel car pays on its fuel.
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Ralph says:
September 25, 2010 at 12:39 am
“A modern diesel is nearly as efficient as a power station, when run on a motorway, ”
Not by a long chalk. A new super-efficient diesel, operating at its optimum load, will be about as efficient as an old inefficient power station. If you compare like with like, state of the art with state of the art, fixed power stations are still a lot better (factor of two or more). Moreover, electric or compressed air vehicles can utilise regenerative braking and better aerodynamics, which gives another factor of two for both city cycle and motorways; ignoring capital costs, overall energy consumption per tonne mile will be much lower, irrespective of where your primary energy comes from. The advantage of internal combustion vehicles at the moment lies in their lower capital cost and higher performance, an advantage that will be gradually eroded as competing technologies mature. Internal combustion may be able to fight back for a time by moving to gas turbines, which are potentially about twice as efficient as a conventional diesel. Supercharged pre-heated diesels operating at very high pressures are another possibility, but technologically problematical and an unlikely general-purpose competitor.
Tsk Tsk says:
September 24, 2010 at 6:20 pm
“As said by others the Chinese are trying to use their supply monopoly as leverage in other ways. I suspect that not only will their monopoly be broken quickly (within 2-3 years)”
You may be correct, but I think people are mistakenly trying to blow this up into some grand plan of Chinese World Domination or something. China and Japan are in the middle of a border dispute; this was a short-term retaliatory response by China to the holding of its trawler captain by Japan. No big deal. It won’t hurt the West – China is still exporting freely to the Asian tigers from which we get most such consumer products now. It will hurt Japan a bit – they will find it a little harder to compete with those Asian tigers (including China). China may export less rare earth metals in future, but if so, it will be because it is using more of its production itself, and prices will then naturally rise. If they rise enough, other players will enter the market.
From: Tsk Tsk on September 24, 2010 at 6:20 pm
Thus is demonstrated the value of independent investigation over accepting the “research” of an “investment site” engaged in transactions involving the researched materials. And right on the home page they’re recommending COINS? They have no shame.
Article on hard drive disk manufacture. It says annual production is only 27 tonnes. If we’re getting by on just that, and there are kilotons, we have plenty. Wikipedia ruthenium article states 12 tonnes mined, estimated reserves of 5,000 tonnes. In hard disk drives, layers of only a few atoms thickness are used. Wikipedia doesn’t even list it under “Applications.” In thin layers it provides wear resistance for electrical contacts. It’s used for thick film chip resistors. And that’s 50% of consumption right there. Other uses are in alloys, a little bit goes a long way. It’s a by-product of copper and nickel mining and processing and of processing platinum group ores. I don’t see any super-critical absolutely-must-have uses for it, it could be replaced, and there are North and South American sources.
If you’re worrying about hard disk drives, don’t. That technology is now getting dated as we await Solid State Drives (SSD’s) to finish taking their place. Currently they cost more, and generally available sizes aren’t as large. But the physical durability is unmatched, energy use is lower, performance is better, the estimated Mean Time Between Failures is so great the drive will very likely be long obsoleted by standard changes before one occurs, and the prices are dropping while size is increasing. I hunted down a new PATA EIDE SSD for a used Thinkpad I acquired without a HDD, works great.
However, ultimately size doesn’t matter. Really. What often hogs up drive space these days is large items like movies and games, sometimes large applications. With increasingly faster internet, especially wireless, local storage on your own machine will be declared old fashioned, web-based storage will become normal while online applications can handle the major stuff (also expect free/cheap access to content you buy like movies and music to replace downloads and physical media). In the end, a fast machine with fast communications using a lean mean operating system will be what regular consumers and most business users will need and use. The current SSD’s are already adequate for that.
Not even Ruthenium is really rare; there are tens of billions of tonnes of the stuff dispersed through the continental crust, all of it extractable if we really want it. Its relative rarity suggests that we should be using ~100 tonnes a year (0.01ppm of 10GT/yr), and lo and behold, we are, more or less. If anything, at 27 tonne/yr, we’re slightly underusing it.
I would go further and say that it is not possible for any element or isotope to be too rare; if it came to the pinch we could always synthesise it from more common nuclides at a cost ~1M$/kg or so (depending on the binding energy requirements and the demand). We already do this with various trans-uranics and other radionuclides.
From: Ralph on September 25, 2010 at 12:39 am
You could get rid of some of that for part of the time. Those things under the hood are called alternators because they make AC, often three-phase, which is then rectified to DC, which is more efficient than simply using a DC generator. (Calling the one part of the gen-set a generator is technically wrong but that’s common usage.) If the gen-set is running it could power the wheel motors somewhat directly with the AC, bypassing the batteries. This, however, is not the main point.
With a conventional drivetrain, there are already creation/storage/motive power losses. All spinning iron is storing energy as angular momentum, which is lost on braking and must be replenished on acceleration. Plus there are joints, bearings, and other frictional losses, and viscous losses as with lubricants needed for gears. Reducing the amount of spinning iron increases efficiency. Electrical/electronic losses between the engine of the gen-set and the tires for the system I described are less than for a conventional drivetrain, even without taking the regenerative braking into consideration.
First off, I’m no great fan of plug-in-only electrics. It’s just an option with the base system I described, my clear preference is for the gen-set makes-its-own-electricity version. The vehicle will be its own highly-efficient power station, lacking the normal power line transmission losses. I’m not worried about the emissions, although they will be reduced, and emission-reducing options like propane or perhaps hydrogen can be implemented without major engine design changes, that headache is on the fuel storage end.
Also, the gen-set version will need only about three somewhat ordinary car batteries, so no massively expensive battery pack changes as with a plug-in-only. If people really want some plug-in capability, perhaps because they have some spare photovoltaic panels at home, the manufactuer can add more batteries to the gen-set version along with an “almost home” switch to tell the vehicle to let the batteries run down to a low charge. With parallel battery connections, adding batteries is easy. You could for example build the basic gen-set version to take six batteries and sell them with three at no great price difference on the manufacturing end for the expansion capability. And plug-in capability of some form should be standard to at least possibly allow the vehicle to get itself to the repair shop if the gen-set stops working. With 12V batteries in parallel, you’d only need some easy-to-get-at studs you could clamp a standard car charger onto for overnight charging. Which also allows for that great scenario where you run out of gas in the middle of the desert however you do have a small folding solar panel…
Fine dont blame China, unless they are behind the insane EPA agenda. We need a Macarthy style witch hunt and hang the Chicom supporters in the free world, that will help the overpopulation and the Darwin theory too!. Actually steam cars are looking good for city driving, it panders to the needs of traffic jams exactly, perhaps a steam/diesel hybrid would be perfect?? There was an antipodian inventer, Penham or something, who sold a steam kit car in the 1970s in the UK, to get near the performance of his steam plant he used an Alfa romeo top end cloverleaf motor and it was slower and less economical, the money has gone the wrong way, due to the socialist leanings of europe and the dems/rinos in the USA, we get to pick up the bill as usual, necktie party anyone??
Well, the Japanese will do what they probably did with things like coal and soybean – fund development of additional sources.
Typically minerals are not rare, and locations may be known, but the cost of verifying a good deposit and putting it into production is very high against the risk that someone else will flood the market from one of those low cost but questionnable-reliability countries.
(Veering off a bit, the discovery of diamonds in northern Canada is a story of smarts and realization. An individual thought northern Canada should have the type of geology in which they are found in South Africa – large vertical pipes of softer material. But he couldn’t find any. One day the light bulb went on – being softer the material might be depressed by glaciers in an ice age and not fully rebound thus become a lake. I suppose he then searched among the many lakes up there and somehow got under the bottom of a likely candidate – “the rest is history” as they say in the entertainment business, today Canada is a prime source of diamonds. (An area of northern Canada is full of lakes – flying from Yellowknife to Fort Simpson I noted that the lakes had a general elongation north-south, as one would expect from glacial action.)
>>Paul
>>Ralph “A modern diesel is nearly as efficient as a power station, when run on a motorway, ”
>>Not by a long chalk.
A modern supercritical fossil-fuel power station will be about 45 % efficient, depending on the design (and the fuel it is using). Combined cycle generators may give up to 55%, but they are few and far between at present.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_station
Conversely, a modern diesel vehicle will give about 48% efficiency, and they expect greater efficiencies in the future. That is why I can get a reliable 55 mpg from a European 5-seater saloon car.
http://www.epa.gov/otaq/models/ngm/may04/crc0304c.pdf
Thus a diesel vehicle is as efficient as a modern power station, and does not need the conversion inefficiencies of an electric vehicle. Thus diesel vehicles will always be more efficient than an electric vehicle, that uses electrical power derived from fossil fuels.
Stop-start town driving is, of course, a big disadvantage for the diesel. But then electric vehicles in the winter are pretty useless too. There is not enough waste heat from the electric motor to heat the vehicle, and an electric heater chews up your battery-energy faster than a Bugatti Veyron chews up petrol. An electric car in the winter, with windscreen and interior heating going, will be down on the equivalent of 20 mpg.
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Paul Birch says:
September 25, 2010 at 6:12 am
Not even Ruthenium is really rare; there are tens of billions of tonnes of the stuff dispersed through the continental crust, all of it extractable if we really want it.
===
REPLY: Makes me wonder if we would find rare earth elements on the moon…if any nation could monopolize THAT supply, it would be the US!
Oh, wait, Obama killed the Constellation space project. Never mind.
kadaka (KD Knoebel):
Wheel motors are an efficient way of getting power where it’s needed. But they are impractical in the real world of road-going, consumer financed and operated passenger cars.
In the first place, they increase the unsprung mass, reducing ride comfort and road-holding and therefore dynamic safety on less than smooth roads. The unsprung mass further increases the stresses on tyres on all practical surfaces, increasing the wear and, indirectly the rolling resistance as more hysteresis will occur.
In the second place, they are in a vulnerable location. The only thing between impacts and motor components is the cushion of air in the tyre. This requires either exotic (expensive) materials or more material to make the motor durable for consumers, again increasing the unsprung mass which in turn increases the dynamic road forces on the motor.
In the third place, the best place for proper brakes is at the wheel. But having a motor there significantly compromises the size and type of brake. Regenerative braking cannot absorb power quickly enough for safe braking in traffic. There are no batteries to absorb such a powerpulse, nor would it be feasible to incorporate e.g. supercapacitors in sufficient volume to capture the vehicle’s kinetic energy.
But brakes, when used, generate heat … by converting kinetic energy. Temperatures exceed 500°C in motor vehicle brakes. Heat and electric machinery don’t travel well in the same compartment. Motor car brakes can haul 2 tonnes of motor car to a stop from 100 km/h in 4 seconds. That’s nearly 200 kW on average. For most cars, that’s the most-powerful component built into the vehicle.
Those are 3 main aspects.
The wheel is the wrong place for a traction motor in a passenger car. There are better places. Locations that don’t compromise ride comfort, road-holding and are cooler and more friendly to motors; which don’t cost a lot in drivetrain efficiency. That inefficiency is balanced in part by being able to have a lighter motor which doesn’t have to endure large shock loads and high temperatures.
Ralph says:
September 25, 2010 at 7:33 am “…”
You are comparing what seem to be fuel-to-user efficiencies of power stations (from wiki!) with a theoretical cycle efficiency of a diesel engine, and even there understating the state of the art of the former and overclaiming the latter. The best power station thermodynamic efficiencies have been above 60% for a quarter of a century. Whereas diesel engined cars are lucky to get 30%, even in unrealistically optimal scenarios. Just do the sums. 55mpg is not much better than a petrol engined car (with ~20% cycle efficiency), which traditionally reached about 35mpg and are now up to about 45mpg. (And remember that diesel is a denser fuel than petrol). Heavy goods vehicles are different beasts entirely; they are more efficient at constant moderate speeds, but have poor performance and struggle to accelerate when heavy laden or going uphill.
With suitable design, warming the interior of electric cars using the batteries’ or motors’ waste heat should not be a major power drain (electric trains manage it quite effectively, and their power consumption per passenger is lower than even an electric car, because they have much lower rolling resistance – metal wheels on steel rails – and lower aerodynamic drage – long carriages).
Kadaka
Your wheel motors concept
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22328/
In reality, a very simple efficient concept with all the benefits of built in computer controlled four wheel drive
Some rare earths are used in exhaust cleaning technology, this technology is driven in part by the view that exhaust emissions are causing global warming.
The cynic in me says that if the Chinese gum up the works, climate scepticism will recieve a whole new fillip.
>>Paul
>>The best power station thermodynamic efficiencies have been
>>above 60% for a quarter of a century.
So you say, with no references bar your own assertions.
This is the Drax coal power station in the UK, our largest power station:
“We have committed to a £100 million to upgrade our high pressure and low pressure turbines. This will result in an improvement in our overall baseload efficiency of 5%, taking it towards 40%.”
http://www.draxpower.com/corporate_responsibility/climatechange/efficiency/
Yes, Drax is improving from 35% efficiency, to 40% efficiency. I think you forget that power stations remain in service for decades, unlike cars, and coal is not the most efficient of fuels. Any electric vehicle feeding off Drax electricity will have a terrible MPG equivalent efficiency.
And here, you will find that Didcot, a more modern gas plant, is running at 55%.
http://www.npower.com/rwenpowercr/6_power_stations/didcotb/6_5_1_didcotb.html
Better, but – after you subtract the battery storage and conversion losses of an electric car – less efficient than a 48% efficient diesel vehicle.
And you are completely wrong about heavy vehicles. They do not get less efficient when going uphill. Efficiency is based mostly on engine loading, and an engine running at about 90 maximum load will be at its most efficient. So going uphill is more efficient than running on the flat, in the greater scheme of things.
And I doubt that diesel cars are less efficient than trucks – I just cannot find a decent web-reference as yet. Car diesel engines have come along a great deal more than truck engines.
As I said, electric vehicles are a dead loss, in terms of emissions, until we can power our electrical grid with nuclear power.
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>>Paul
>>With suitable design, warming the interior of electric cars using
>>the batteries’ or motors’ waste heat should not be a major power
>>drain (electric trains manage it quite effectively
For goodness sake.
Have you touched a discharging battery? Does it feel hot to you? So how on earth can you heat a car in winter, from a cold battery?
And modern electric motors are fantastically efficient, approaching 95% or more, which is great – except that there is therefore no waste heat to warm a car in the winter. (Especially if you put the motors on the wheels – how do you get the heat to the cabin?)
The truth is, electric vehicle efficiency plummets in winter, because all the waste heat has gone up the cooling towers at the power station, and not into the car.
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