Cobalt, Critical, Strategic and Rare Earth Minerals and Metals

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Only about 150 years ago, almost all materials in a person’s home came from a nearby forest or quarry. By the 1960s, with more developed supply lines and more consumer appliances, the average American home contained about 20 different elements.

Since then, a revolution has transformed the products we use and the materials that allow them to work. Products now rely on elements that were once mere scientific oddities just a couple decades ago. In the 1990s Intel used only 15 elements in its computer chips.

Now the company demands close to 60 elements. While rare metals have been around since the beginning of time, most were just discovered in the past few hundred years, and some just in the past century.

This transformation in the products we use appear subtle to the untrained eye. Modern lights, for example, emanate hues slightly different from predecessors. But these subtle changes mask a profound change in resource use. Whereas Edison’s lightbulb contained a simple metal filament, the resources in today’s LED lights are more akin to computer hardware, powered by gallium, indium and rare-earth elements.

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“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share — no chance,” Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told a CEO forum before Steve Jobs released the iPhone in June 2007.

By the end of the first week of sales, however, most storeroom shelves were bare; Apple and its AT&T partner sold hundreds of thousands of phones. The company was on its way to taking more than 20 percent of the smartphone market within just a few months.

Only eight years later, we forget what a revolution the iPhone was. It became the first mainstream product to rely on a multi-touch glass screen, allowing the tapping, sliding and pinching that are now second nature for writing emails, determining directions and hailing a cab. As Steve Jobs himself said, “It works like magic.”

But in the initial hubbub little attention was paid to the iPhone’s most remarkable characteristic. The reason such a powerful device can sit comfortably in the palm of your hand is that it relies on nearly half the elements on the planet.

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Anne-Marie Brady, professor at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Canterbury in the New Zealand city of Christchurch, specializes in China, and has since 2008 been researching Chinese interests in the polar regions. Some time ago she saw on a Chinese website a map of Antarctica’s mineral resources. After she revealed her find, the map was swiftly removed.

She will in October be delivering a lecture on the subject of “China as Polar Great Power”, which is also the title of her forthcoming book. She says Chinese literature is “very, very clear about China’s interests in Antarctic minerals”. And everyone else’s.

Reading Jack Lifton’s incisive summation of the global rare earth situation posted on InvestorIntel yesterday, and the West’s continuing weakness in that sector, it occurred to me that this is part of a much wider problem. As Jack wrote, the strategy being followed by Chinalco involves a concerted, well-planned consolidation of Chinese interests.

And he added: “While American, European, Brazilian, South African, and Australian rare earth producers and juniors squabble with each other and promote their share prices as their only hope of raising new capital in a market dominated by China’s use … of the majority of the world’s rare earths as well as the majority of all metals, Chinalco is methodically planning to diversify its sources of raw materials and to seek out technology sales or purchases to improve its efficiencies.”

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