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US Rare Earth Research Pulls in Part of $120 Million Grant

Details: Category: Rare Earth News; Published on Monday, 14 January 2013 17:40; Hits: 2692

In an age where cell phones, car radios and fluorescent lighting reign supreme, the world starts to look a bit bare without the aid of rare earth materials to build many modern technologies.

“You wouldn’t have very much of anything,” said Alex King, director of U.S. Department of Energy Ames Laboratory.

King received a phone call on Tuesday informing him that Ames Laboratory had received part of a $120 million grant over a period of five years to fund the hiring of 60 personnel and purchasing of equipment to advance research in the area of rare earth materials.

The grant is part of the U.S. Department of Energy Hubs, or a large series of projects to ensure sustainable energy in the future, announced to the public on Wednesday.

The funding will add an additional 20 percent to U.S. Department of Energy Ames Laboratory’s $40 million annual budget, with King estimating receiving about $8 million a year over the five-year period. With the funding of the Critical Materials Institute, a virtual institute collaborating between several national labs and universities, King is hoping to have an impact on the rare earths industry, saying the institute will be “ready to hit the ground running on day one.”

“We’ve always done rare earth research at Ames Lab; we’re kind of rare earths central for the [United States] if not the world,” King said. “All the best rare earth specimens come from the Ames Lab; we purify them better than anybody else.”

The opportunity to gain federal money for rare earth research had been on King’s radar for two years. When the U.S. Department of Energy formally gave the funding opportunity announcement last spring, Ames Laboratory staff pulled together a 1,600-page proposal within a period of 90 days.

Bill McCallum, senior material scientist at U.S. Department of Energy Ames Laboratory and co-principal investigator of the grant, anticipated the funding announcement in a few more months.

“I didn’t expect to hear the announcement for quite some time yet,” McCallum said. “It was very pleasing and very surprising when we got the announcement.”

After the paperwork is filed, Ames Laboratory will begin the arduous task of what King describes as “starting up a $25 million dollar a year business from scratch.”

Nearly as important as hiring personnel is the purchasing and upgrading of research equipment. Brandt Jensen, assistant scientist at Ames Laboratory, stresses the importance of finding the right balance of materials to create rare earth products.

“The basic form of the magnet is three metals, so we have to carefully weigh them in the right ratio,” Jensen said. “It’s a long process. To get a magnet you first have to melt them all together ... but it’s not complete yet, the atoms aren’t in the right location on the atomic level.”

In order to create a rare earth magnet to fit in a simple earphone, the magnet needs to go through several processes and characterizations to make sure it is just right.

Producing alternatives to and conservative use of rare earth materials is just one side of Ames Laboratory’s research. A new field called the economic forecasting and life cycle management of materials will give a holistic view of how different materials are being used and when scientists can start expecting those materials to be scarce.

“What we’re looking for is trying to understand the supply and demand dynamics of the rare earths ... but also using the economic analysis to try and predict what other materials are going to go critical suddenly without our being ready for it,” King said. “Today we’re dealing with the rare earths; tomorrow we’ll be dealing with something else.”

The economic analysis will take into account the political atmosphere in which materials are being produced in addition to predicting which areas are more at risk for large scale natural disasters.

Although he hasn’t had much time to himself since the announcement, King is enjoying the atmosphere of excitement that has overtaken the Ames Laboratory staff.

“We were all very excited,” Jensen said. “There’s going to be a lot more research opportunity, there’s going to be staff we train with, it’s going to open up a lot of doors.”

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U.S. Spends $120M USD to Set up Rare Earth Research Center to Counter China

Details: Category: Rare Earth News; Published on Friday, 11 January 2013 18:29; Hits: 1585

Chinese price manipulation has taken its toll on the U.S. economy

Rare earth metals are an increasingly integral part of everything from automobiles to television sets. But the precious metals are tightly controlled by China, with an excess of 95 percent of current suplly coming from Chinese-owned mines and refineries. The degree of control has allowed China to manipulate prices, cutting back on demand to sell less material for the same amount of profit, any businessperson's dream.

I. New Private-Public Partnership Sets Aim on Chinese Mineral Hegemony

The problem is that it takes several years or more to bring rare earth metal mines and refineries online; and the capital costs of such facilities are very high. It took China decades of clever planning to set itself in its current peachy position of rare earth hegemony. Now the U.S. is racing to try to recover, before Chinese price manipulation deals too much of a blow to the U.S. economy.

The U.S. Department of Energy has committed a relatively large investment of $120M USD to establish an Energy Innovation Hub under the supervision of Ames Labs to research ways to expand domestic rare earth production and otherwise cut reliance on Chinese rare earth supplies.

The new lab, dubbed the Critical Materials Institute (CMI), will be a joint effort between a number of large domestic firms in the private sector, universities, and top government research labs.

Corporate partners include General Electric Comp. (GE), OLI Systems Inc., Spintek Filtration, Advanced Recovery, Inc., Cytec Industries, Inc. (CYT), Molycorp Inc. (MCP), and Simbol, Inc. (Simbol Minerals).

II. Attacking the Problem From All Angles

Among the research projects will be:

    Improve rare earth recycling/reuse
    Improve extraction processes
    Develop rapid deployment mining techniques
    Develop rare earth material substitutes
    Study and optimize supply chains to minimize waste

Top targets for domestic rare earth production include neodymium -- used in neodymium iron boron (NeFeB) hard drive magnets and cell phone components -- and samarium -- used in samarium cobalt (SmCo) drive magnets. Currently the U.S. has no domestic neodymium producers and only one domestic samarium producer.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a 2011 research report [PDF] suggests that the U.S. rare earth supply chain, phased out in the 1980s at a time when the 17-element family looked non-critical, will take approximately 15 years to rebuild. The new lab aims to assist in that slow and arduous recovery.

The U.S. also will continue to purse action against China before the World Trade Organization (WTO) where it has filed complaints about the Chinese price manipulation.

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Ocean Floor May Hold Rare Earth Deposits

Details: Category: Rare Earth News; Published on Friday, 11 January 2013 18:03; Hits: 2701

JAPAN will launch a survey of its Pacific seabed in the hope of finding rare earth deposits large enough to supply its high-tech industries and reduce its dependence on China.

Researchers from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology will start the probe from January 21 on the seabed near Minamitorishima island, some 2000 km southeast of Tokyo, he said.

Finding large-scale proven reserves inside Japan's exclusive economic zone would be a boost to Japanese industry, which currently relies on imports from China.

These imports have in the past fallen victim to the delicate political relationship between the two countries, notably in 2010, when manufacturers complained supply was being squeezed during a spat over disputed islands.

The row, over a Tokyo-controlled archipelago known as the Senkakus that Beijing claims as the Diaoyus, has flared anew in recent months.

The survey will follow an earlier finding by Tokyo University professor Yasuhiro Kato, who took mud samples from an area.

He said these indicated deposits amounted to around 6.8 million tonnes of the valuable minerals, or 220 times the average annual amount used by industry in Japan.

Rare earths are used to make a wide range of high tech products, including powerful magnets, batteries, LED lights, electric cars, lasers, wind turbines and missiles.

China produces more than 90 percent of the world's supply of rare earths, but has clamped down on exports of them in a move Beijing says is aimed at protecting its environment and conserving supplies.

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Rare Earth Fund Falls As Molycorp Warns on Revenue

Details: Category: Rare Earth News; Published on Friday, 11 January 2013 18:16; Hits: 2635

Released date - January 10, 2013 - A fund for one of the more exotic mining bets the average investor can make is falling Thursday, keying off a big loss by a single stock.

Market Vectors Rare Earth/Strategic Metals ETF (REMX) is down by one percent. Rare earths are tough-to-mine metals with a number of high-tech uses, including in cell phones and semiconductors. One of the fund’s components, Molycorp (MCP), said it “anticipates lower than expected revenue and cash flow for 2013, and is evaluating its capital needs for 2013.” Shares of that company are plunging 22% this afternoon.

Molycorp makes up about six percent of the rare-earth fund. Thompson Creek Metals (TC), another firm with a 5.5% weighting in REMX, is down 1.2%.

Rare-earth metals’ importance in high-tech manufacturing hasn’t translated into stock-market success. The Market Vectors fund had an eleven percent 2012 loss that was preceded by an even bigger tumble — 32% — the year before.

Molycorp’s stock woes exemplify the trend. The stock dipped near $8 this morning, a level it hasn’t seen since November. The longer trend exaggerates it: The stock traded close to $80 after its late 2010 initial public offering.

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DOE Grants $120 Million toward Rare Earth Research and Production

Details: Category: Rare Earth News; Published on Friday, 11 January 2013 17:56; Hits: 2664

The United States Department of Energy has granted $120 million toward the creation of the Critical Materials Institute (CMI), which will be responsible for developing new methods of rare earth element production and management.

The CMI, led by Ames Laboratory and includes over a dozen research partners, hopes to create technology to avoid supply shortages while also reducing rare earth dependency on China. According to a report by Bloomberg, China provides about 95 percent of the world's rare earth shipments, and recently decreased production limits to conserve the environment and keep their supply in check. The CMI will focus on diversifying the supply of rare earths, develop substitute materials, and improve methods of reusing and recycling materials.

Rare earths include a group of 17 similarly structured elements that are used in the production of phones, disk drives, televisions, and other consumer products, and can also be used to manufacture wind turbines, electric vehicles, and advanced batteries.

Dependency on the import of rare earths is the result of insufficient technology and manufacturing facilities, as opposed to lack of raw material — the Mountain Pass mine in California, for example, has one of the largest deposits outside of China. The CMI will help discover new and more efficient ways to tap into the resources, while also decreasing the use of materials that can potentially have supply shortages in the future.

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