The Global Race for Rare Earths

"I don't think the average person realizes how deeply rare earths have seeped into the fabric of daily life. They're all around us. "

"Biden is making a big push to set up some alternative suppliers. Nothing's happening anytime soon, but I think within five years or so we could see the beginnings of tangible alternatives."

"Having that mine production [in California] in the U.S. is a great first step because it helps solve the chicken and the egg issue."

Ryan Castilloux, analyst, Adamas Intelligence research firm, Ontario

Rare earth ore from a mine in California. The metals are difficult to refine and costly to extract. Photograph: Steve Marcus/Reuters

"Who would invest in a rare earth mine with no access to a downstream facility [for processing] to create value-added rare earth products?"

"Who would invest in a value-added manufacturing facility when there is no upstream mine to source from?"

Pierre Gratton, chief executive, Mining Association of Canada

"The world is undergoing an economic transformation, with innovative technologies, clean technologies, driving the pace of change."

"This is not going to be easy. But there's growing confidence that it can be done."

"The risk of not doing it is that there also goes the technology -- the high-tech jobs and high-tech schools and programs."

Ian London, executive director, Canadian Critical Minerals and Materials Reliance

Soil containing rare earth elements at a port in Lianyungang. China is by far the world’s largest producer of the minerals. Photograph: China Stringer Network/Reuters

 

The world, in a very real sense, is in competition with China to access and preserve a fair share of rare earths minerals, critical to modern technology. Rare earths elements represents a group of 17 materials that are becoming increasingly vital to modern technology in their use in electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, military defence programs (missile guidance systems), headphones, motors and a wide range of other advanced technologies. The world is awakening to their critical function to the economy and security of the future.

Adamas Intelligence forecasts global demand for rare earths is set to increase at an annual growth rate of 7 percent until 2030. Rare earths are used for a type of magnet accounting for 90 percent of the elements' value, predicted to grow at ten percent through 2030, from 62,000 tonnes at present to 148,000 tonnes annually by 2030. Increasing demand for electric vehicle traction motors and other e-mobility applications such as electric bicycles, scooters and mopeds represent 77 percent of that growth.

A wheel loader operator fills a truck with ore at the MP Materials rare earth mine in Mountain Pass, California, January 30, 2020.   Steve Marcus | Reuters

 

Rare earths magnets are so critical to electric vehicles, according to analysts due to the fact that they represent a lighter weight alternative to conventional motors, promising to extend a vehicle's range for electric vehicles. Neither the United States nor Canada has established a supply chain of rare earths, even while China controls 70 percent of rare earths supply. A shaky situation given that China controls 90 percent of complex processing needed to transform rare earths into magnets and powders as end products.

'Rare' they may be identified as, but North America has great potential in rare earths where Canada has an estimated 830,000 tonnes of rare earths reserves, and nearly every province has seen identification with potential deposits that could be mined. Canada and the U.S. finalized a joint action plan on critical minerals in 2020, including rare earths, requiring increased cooperation on developing supply chains, research and development, along with support for the industry.

 

REE Periodic Table: The Rare Earth Elements are the 15 lanthanide series elements, plus yttrium. Scandium is found in most rare earth element deposits and is sometimes classified as a rare earth element. Image by Geology.com.

 

And it is a complex industry in total, requiring in-depth processing to begin with by taking rare earths out of the ground, separating, refining and placing them into products.  First, the ore must be extracted from the ground, then the rare earths are to e separated from other elements, a complex process requiring manipulating radioactive material. Following that, the rare earths must be separated from each other, and finally the processing of individual rare earths into oxides to be further processed into powders.

Uses of rare earth elements: This chart shows the use of rare earth elements in the United States during 2020. Many vehicles use rare earth catalysts in their exhaust systems for air pollution control. A large number of alloys are made more durable by the addition of rare earth metals. Glass, granite, marble, and gemstones are often polished with cerium oxide powder. Many motors and generators contain magnets made with rare earth elements. Phosphors used in digital displays, monitors, and televisions are created with rare earth oxides. Most computer, cell phone, and electric vehicle batteries are made with rare earth metals.

 

Finishing stages where the intermediate products are then converted into magnets or motors and inserted into products, complete the long and complex transitions. One of the largest rare earths mines in the world is in operation in California close to the border with Nevada, and it has been supplying its ores to China. A situation soon to change as a processing facility is being built in the United States. In the Northwest Territories, some 100 kilometres east of Yellowknife Cheetah Resources Corp an Indigenous enterprise, plans to mine small portions of rare earths from its Nechalacho project.

The ensuing product is envisioned as travelling by barge to Hay River and from there to Saskatchewan, then heading to Norway for further processing. The biggest rare earths company, Neo Performance Materials Inc. has no operations in Canada, doesn't mine, but is headquartered in Toronto, with a growing business enterprise geared to producing magnets with facilities in Estonia, Thailand and China.

China was able to create millions of jobs while increasing its capacity to manufacture various products, from refrigerators o washing machines, all occurring through its gaining of control of the rare earth supply chain. The country dominates the market in producing all manner of goods in its long grasp for production primacy, the globe its trading partner.

Stockpiles of rare earth ore at the Mount Weld mine in Western Australia. Photograph: Lynas Corporation/AFP/Getty Images

Internet Evangelist, Vinton Cerf

"The most troubling thing about the internet environment is the buggy software.  You hear people worrying about artificial intelligence and machine learning but I'm worried about autonomous software running on the Internet of Things [networks attached to smart devices] that have bugs."
"We have a lot of work to do to clean up the ecology we've created."
"It is a dog's breakfast of ideas [China's proposed New Internet Protocol] that do not fit together very well. What they wanted to do was to get more control."
"I have trouble believing it doesn't have any software in there [Huawei Communications] that lets the Chinese government get access to anything."
Vinton Cerf, father of the Internet, vice-president Google

The standards we now take for granted that maintain our electronic devices in connection to the internet were pioneered in 1973 by Vint Cerf, a then-assistant professor at Stanford University, along with his colleague Bob Kahn. They did that enormous deed to the world when they developed the Internet Protocol (IP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) for use by the U.S.  military to enable different types of software, hardware, operating systems and networks to communicate.

Their intention, as the developers of a brave new world of communications was to ensure that this be viewed as a universal tool open to being built upon, expanded and customized, with its basic underpinnings intact. When software developers came along to build over the basic structure they were able to do so with ease and confidence, bringing the world further along in recognition of the usefulness of the indispensable communication tool the product became, one that is still expanding.

It took five years to see the World Wide Web develop following the launch of the internet in 1983. Decades on, the wide open, free-to-use internet, geographically unattached is edging away from its place as a global standard, leading to what Vint Cerf speaks of as a "Splinternet", coined by the Cato Institute. A New Internet Protocol representing a set of standards replacing the original internet was proposed last year by China.

A country with vast influence, power and ambition, China seeks to control the internet just as its goal has become clear internationally to control everything and anything it recognizes for its importance to a fast-developing world of unimaginable technological advances. China alone has up to a billion internet users, where several successful internet companies such as Alibaba and Baidu are top of the Chinese social networks facilitating contact between its enormous population base.

And it has been China that has pioneered a goal of its own relating to the internet as it began to filter, block and manipulate social media for its own controlling purposes; technology they are making available at a price to other countries eager to control what their populations see and have access to under authoritarian governments. Britain's still tenuous intention to retain equipment from Huawei in its 5G network upgrade, U.S. warning aside of threats to national security also concern Vint Cerf.

Search Engine Journal  Vinton Cerf

Apart from his certainty that the Chinese government will have access to other countries' sovereign data, he worries that worldwide routing systems as well are not protected adequately. He spends a good portion of his time now campaigning for internet security, net neutrality and backing up information as being of vital importance.

American government agencies had created various networks for electronic communication, prohibited for public use by the late 1980s. This, at a time when Mr.Cerf worked for MCI Mail, among the first of the commercial email providers. He sought government permission in experimenting to determine if he could connect MCI's private email-system to the internet. Given a year, his efforts were successful, leading other email providers to lobby for access openings and  soon public email accounts were rampant.

For the past 15 years Mr. Cerf has worked for Google, advocating for accessibility-by-design to service Google's business plan, now viewed by the public as a conglomerate advertising machine with political biases. Mr. Cerf has seen the internet morph from neutral to hosting abuses such as fake news, cyber bullying and other negatives of social media. Google's neutral platform position is seen now to be hanging in the balance.

Image:NASA/JPL

"Many of us did not anticipate the harmful potential of these technologies. The people who are creating these products and writing the software should feel a much greater burden than in the past because the harmful side effects can be devastating on a global scale."
"Not only do individuals need to feel this ethical pressure, but I feel that companies need to be incentivized to do everything in their ability to ensure these bad things do not happen."
Vinton Cerf

Brave New World Ahead

"We live in the most extraordinary time in history. The next ten years will see more changes than occurred in the past one hundred years."
"In 1920, we could only find four innovations; the first commercial radio station, the handheld hair dryer; the Band Aid; and traffic lights. By contrast, last year saw tens of thousands of technological and scientific breakthroughs."
"As more people have access to technology, more problems can be solved and the more capital is available to find those solutions."
"To be clear, there will still be terrorism, war, and murder. Dictatorships and disease won't go away. But the world will quietly continue to get better."
Peter Diamandis, entrepreneur, M.D., aeronautical engineer, founder XPRIZE Foundation

Peter Diamandis on a weightless flight launched by his Zero Gravity Corporation: ‘Every powerful technology is used for good and for bad.’ Photograph: XPrize/Steve Boxall

We have it then on the impressive authority of this man that the world we inhabit is on the cusp of accelerated innovation so profound it will leave our heads spinning. After all, this is a man who invents, innovates, creates, reasons, researches, and envisions no end to humankind's stretch into a remarkable future. He is engrossed with the fields of Human Longevity, Planetary Resources, Space Adventures and biotech Celularity, founder of Singularity University. He is no cerebral slouch.

Artificial neuron in its protective casing on a fingertip © University of Bath/PA

He is as well, as might be expected, a writer, his latest book just released, The Future is Faster Than You Think, a careful inspection of how the reinvention of the world will progress through innovative technology, industry after industry, with historical comparisons, leading to an aura of complete optimism that a better world lies just over the horizon of transformative goods, devices, services, business models and human behaviour.

But not, sadly that much a change in human behaviour, such that we can serenely contemplate an end of strife and any diminishing of pathological capital offences against humanity. On the other hand, people in developed countries will be graced with savings of time and funding as when, for example it began with the invention of the Google search engine, of iPhones and massive data storage capacity; time and money better used to invest in other innovations.

geralt / Pixabay

The science world has moved forward in great leaps and bounds to the present where the cost of sequencing the genome was $100 million in 2001, whereas it now can be done for a mere $100; before that the prototype computer of today took up an entire room, and today's computers are the size of a human hand with infinitely more capability and storage and communicability. Today's technologically advanced cameras, the advances of storage, facial recognition, telephones, laptops, and artificial intelligence; all great leaps forward.

Blockchain technology supported by crowdfunding that raises billions for research and development; brain enhancement techniques boosting concentration and memory to accelerate research outcomes. Before long, consumers will be enabled to play, learn and shop through headsets, glasses or implants and robots and appliances will recognize our faces and voices and preferences. Voice commands on the cusp of replacing typing.

Artificial intelligence will be smarter than the human brain, according to the co-founder of Singularity University who gives that advance to 2029. This innovation will ensure intelligent collaborative tools are available for workers, professionals, analysts and leaders so they can discover smarter solutions to challenges before them. Renewable energy enhancements, batteries and local power grids to accelerate with lower costs and higher performance, globally.

The tourism potential of space travel and the prospect of space colonization lies ahead. Food production, superior education, shopping variations and ideas in real estate all to change profoundly. The dark side of the optimistic view is that technology will not always remain securely in control of responsible agents. New problems can arise when the wrong hands grasp the potentials for global disruption inherent in new technologies, neutral in themselves, dangerous when manipulated that way.

Science Focus