I suppose no one cares, but last night Doug Burgum said this:
China controls 85 percent of the Rare Earth minerals. They’re called Rare Earth, because they’re measured in parts per million.
Nah. They're measured in grams or kilograms, just like everything else. They're only called "rare" earths because they were rare 200 years ago when they were first discovered. China mined about 300,000 metric tons of the stuff last year, up from 100,000 metric tons a decade ago. A mine in California is already producing rare earths and a mine in Texas will open soon. Sweden, the original home of rare earths, recently announced it had discovered a deposit of more than a million metric tons.
The issue with rare earths is not that they're especially rare. The issue is that China has low wages and lax environmental laws, which allows them to produce and refine the stuff cheaply. Two-thirds of all rare earth deposits are outside China, which means the rest of the world can catch up whenever it wants to. It will just be more expensive than Chinese product, that's all.
Dammit Drum, there goes the Rare Earth Gap! How are we gonna gin up a couple decades of frantic military spending against the Chinese Menace if you keep shooting things down?
They're "rare" in the sense that economically useful deposits are rare, because the not-particularly rare elements are usually thinly concentrated among much larger volumes of other material. You can find trace amounts of even rare stuff like gold within large volumes of rock - it's just not usually worthwhile to get it.
No, you're repeating the same nonsense that everyone else does.
They are not rare in any meaningful sense. The economically dominant mines are in politically inconvenient places, just like our host said.
Unless one’s processing costs were epsilon, and perhaps not even then, you cannot go just anywhere and have an effective mining operation for “ rare earths” or anything else. The distribution in Earth’s crust is not uniform.
As one person put it, it is the difference between “ore” and “dirt.”
"They're "rare" in the sense that economically useful deposits are rare," s Kevin pointed out, that's not true. They are rare today only in the sense that they are toxic and mining them economically kills the people associated with that activity.
Exactly. The rare earths are not particularly rare but they don’t tend to separate out like other elements. Usually the rare earth deposits are what’s left over after all other minerals have self selected themselves. This is why rare earth deposits tend to have other stuff in their deposits like uranium and thorium.
Vietnam is now ramping up exports of rare earths. The US has a mountain of rare earths someplace in Alaska.
On top of this engineers are finding ways to get by without using rare earths or using less of them.
Bokan Mountain on Prince of Wales Island in SE Alaska is the most advanced REE development. The mining company is building its processing plant in Louisiana, though, thanks to sweet tax breaks.
"China has low wages and lax environmental laws, which allows them to produce and refine the stuff cheaply."
That's a true statement if you focus exclusively on the price tag on the mineral. But the Chinese pay a high price for it in terms of unsafe drinking water, children getting rare, weird cancers, and vast swathes of land that can't be farmed because of various contaminations.
Republicans tend to say that enforcement of environmental laws is "totalitarianism." But in fact, totalitarian countries are where you find the worst environmental disasters. Gawd only knows what it's going to cost to clean up China someday.
+10
But in fact, totalitarian countries are where you find the worst environmental disasters.
Seriously. Just look at Miami.
This is also why 'free trade' was never about free trade; it was about labor and environmental arbitrage. As anyone with half an eye open knew at the time.
👍👍🏼👍🏿
Correct. East Germany had a large and messy industrial base. United Germany is STILL working on cleaning up the messes.
Does China have a history of its rivers catching fire? I don't recall of any river as major as the colorado no longer reaching the ocean but instead ending in a massive toxic dump.
Doug who?
I believe that in the case of rare earths, like so many other products, the Chinese government organized an attack on the rest of the world's businesses. Basically they exported rare earths at prices low enough to close most of the mines and production facilities outside of China. Then they could both raise the prices of the rare earths and limit their availability if you didn't just build your products in China. In China the rare earths remained cheap and available.
They've used this sort of strategy on many products. Furniture is one that comes to mind. Tig electrodes are another.
But anyway, rare earths are not rare. Chinese dominance is the result of coordinated market manipulation.
You're not sayin' that China had a fiscal policy are you? 'Cuz those are supposed to be counterproductive 😉
I read a couple of days ago about a major rare earth find in the Williston Basin region in North Dakota. It was announced initially in late April.
I thought they were called rare because it's hard to separate elements that are only different in the composition of the 4f electron shell, which is effectively "hidden" by the 5d shell's 8 electrons and the 6s shell's 2 electrons.
That's how I larned it: 'Rare Earths' is really just another name for the lanthanide series.
Not quite.
Yttrium and Scandium are rare earths but not part of the lanthanide series.
Tru, dat.
(Lanthanide) Lutetium, and "baby rare earth" Yttrium and Scandium all have outer two shells, 9, 2.
All are Group 3 elements.
Ya got me good, poddna.
Not criticizing, but enjoying this brief venture on the periodic table and electron shells.
In high school, the lanthanides were hardly even mentioned. Plus, they had strange names.
I know you weren't, just kidding around 🙂 Speaking of asides, that Arrhennius was quite a guy. Wasn't he the first chemist to come up with a theory of acids?
Cool thread. I learned something.
Arhennius called the rare because they had never been seen before and were difficult to separate from one another, and earths because that was the term at the time for metal oxides, which is how most of them were finally isolated. In fact, the difficulty of separating them led to dozens of false identifications of new elements.
A big reason why China has the edge in REEs is because of refining. The REEs tend to occur naturally all mixed together and they have similar chemistries, which makes them difficult to separate from each other. The separation process tends to be messy, which is where low environmental standards come in, and labor intensive, which is where low wages come in.