Cobalt, Critical, Strategic and Rare Earth Minerals and Metals

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You can’t handle the truth (about rare earth elements)

If you need to know one thing about rare earth metals, it’s that they’re crucial to modern technology, helping power everything from MRI machines and satellites to headphones and nuclear reactors. If you need to know two things, it’s that despite their name, they’re not at all rare.

This second fact is crucial when putting recent headlines about these 17 oddly named elements in proper context. Last week, many publications covered the news that a Japanese team of scientists had found a huge trove of rare earth elements off the coast of the country’s Minamitori Island. Some 16 million tons were estimated to be lurking in the deep-sea mud, enough to meet global demand on a “semi-infinite basis,” said the researchers.

This news was positioned as having great geopolitical significance. China currently produces more than 90 percent of the world’s supply of rare earth materials (the exact figure tends to fluctuate year-by-year), and in the event of a conflict, said reports, it could jack up prices for the West and its allies, or even shut them out altogether.

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http://www.atimes.com/

A mineral deposit has been found in Japan’s exclusive economic zone in the Western Pacific, with a size and concentration comparable to China’s

A “semi-infinite” supply of rare earths, vital elements for the global production of batteries, hard disc drives, portable electronics, microphones and many others, has been found in a deep-sea ore deposit about 1,850 kilometers southeast of Tokyo, beneath the waves of the vast northwestern Pacific Ocean, The Wall Street Journal reported this month.

Researchers from Tokyo-based Waseda University have surveyed the roughly 2,500-square-kilometer region of the sea floor there, at depths of 5,600 to 5,800 meters, off the coral atoll of Minami-Tori-shima, aka Marcus Island, and affirmed the area could hold more than 16 million tons of rare-earth oxides.

They would include 780 years’ worth of the global supply of yttrium, 620 years’ worth of europium, 420 years’ worth of terbium, and 730 years’ worth of dysprosium, according to their paper that appeared in the journal Scientific Reports.

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http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/

As the price of cobalt skyrockets, major South Korean companies such as LG Chem and SK Innovation are scrambling to gain a supply of this key ingredient for electric car batteries.

Since the metal has become marked as a “conflict mineral” because of the prevalence of child labor in Congo, which accounts for more than half of its global supply, battery producers are looking to secure more stable supply channels.

On Apr. 11, LG Chem announced that it had inked a contract with China’s Huayou Cobalt to set up joint ventures to produce chemical precursors and cathodes. Huayou Cobalt is the global leader in its industry, refining 20,000 tons of cobalt that were imported from Congo in 2017.

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http://theweek.com/

hina will not be easily cowed in a trade dispute. Chinese President Xi Jinping is now exchanging threats of tit-for-tat tariffs with President Trump, who announced Thursday he’s considering raising the stakes another $100 billion. China vowed to defend itself “at any cost.”

Compared to the scale of the U.S. economy, the numbers are still relatively trivial and mostly theoretical. But if things do spiral into all-out trade war, it’s worth noting China has a nuclear option. I’m referring to rare earth metals.

These are elements like dysprosium, neodymium, gadolinium, and ytterbium. They aren’t actually rare, but they do play crucial roles in everything from smart phones to electric car motors, hard drives, wind turbines, military radar, smart bombs, laser guidance, and more. They’re also quite difficult to mine and process.

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