Most of us can remember some basic chemistry from high school.
We can remember that hydrogen is the lightest element, that there are noble gasses that are inert, not combining easily with anything, that oxygen is O and nitrogen is N. Most of us have probably been ingrained with the unusual symbols like Sn for tin, Na for sodium, Fe for iron even if we cannot remember the Latin roots or reasons for these. So we can pass trivial pursuit nights and shout at TV quiz programs.
Fewer of us will remember the atomic weights and the electron structures, even though we know about reactions: that an acid and a base combine to make a salt and water, and that benzene has a ring structure, and things burn in oxygen to make compounds like rust.
We all remember the periodic table. Most of the interesting stuff we learned was with the elements in the earlier part of the periodic table. Where small changes in atomic weight result in dramatically different chemical properties. At number 8 is carbon, the versatile stuff of life. But just one more proton in the nucleus and at 9 we have nitrogen, a gas that is currently being considered in Alabama to eliminate life in executions. 13 is Aluminium, the lightest metal. First, second and third sports medals are Au gold at 79, Ag silver at 47 and Cu copper at 29 (part of bronze).
I’d be surprised if any of us know what Hs is at 108, or Sg 106, or Mt 109. The chemical properties of these super heavy elements are very similar because they are close together in the same group (transactinides), unlike the dramatic differences between smaller atoms like say carbon and nitrogen which are also close together in the same group (nonmetals).
So it seems that the properties of large atoms become similar when they are all big. A bit like say individual Lego blocks which are very different from each other and interact with other blocks in clear ways, whereas a stack of say a hundred random building blocks making a blob is unlikely to act much differently than any other similar sized blob of blocks.
Except all of that is hogwash. You may remember that the heaviest naturally occurring element is uranium at 92. Those super heavies I mentioned above are all artificially created in labs. They are all radioactive, have very short half-lives and are not around long enough for scientists to work out their physical properties. If you had trouble with Sg and Hs and Mt, try Y, Sr, La, Ce, Pr, Nd, Pm, Sm, Eu, Gd, Tb, Dy, Ho, Er, Tm, Yb, and Lu. All with atomic weights of 71 or under. So they are all naturally occurring. You didn’t learn them at school.
Those 17 elements are referred to as the rare earth elements or REE, or just “rare earths”. They are metals. Physically they are almost indistinguishable from each other. All of them are silvery-white in colour, soft and malleable. They are reasonably abundant in the Earth’s crust, there is more cerium than copper for instance, so why call them rare?
When an ore is mined and processed, the various elements are extracted by whatever physical processes can be devised. Floatation, crushing, vibration, gravity separation, magnetic separation, centrifuging, frothing. Iron ore for instance is treated by smelting to extract the iron and remove contaminants. The rare earths are so similar physically that these processes do not work or do so inefficiently. And a rare earth ore typically contains a large number of the possible 17 elements, each compounded, so not in raw elemental state. Much more complex, expensive and time consuming methods have to be employed, such as ion exchange, solvent extraction, all chemical reactions, not simple physical ones. The difference between physical and chemical separation is like separating salt from ground pepper, which can be done even if you sit down with a magnifying glass and tweezers to do it by hand, but you cannot separate the sodium from the chloride in salt in a similar physical way.
So it is expensive, complex, and difficult to separate out the 17 different REEs from each other. In fact Promethium, the last of them, was only purified in 1945. It is rare to find an REE in isolation, hence the name “rare”. In fact, they oxidise so readily that the final product is still not the element, but most often rare earth oxides. Also they are categorised as heavy and light rare earths, and two of them, Yttrium and Strontium are actually from another group but are usually found in the same ores, so are included as REEs.
A chemical rare earth element processing plant
Here is the cruncher. While the physical properties are so similar that it causes all those mineralogical challenges, the chemical properties can be vastly different. The chemical properties are so diverse, and so useful, and so commercially valuable, that the cost of mining and separating them is worthwhile.
Today’s magnets are super powerful because they are REE alloys. So strong that they result in powerful but tiny motors used in everything, and large ones in wind turbines and electric vehicles. There are probably a dozen miniature super motors in your car, and another dozen in your kitchen. Without them your kitchen appliances and hand tools would be twice as large and inconvenient and your electric car battery would be flat before you got to the store. Other REEs are used to reduce exhaust emissions in catalytic converters, for high energy batteries. They are used for cancer treatment, for nuclear reactor testing and control rods, used in light bulbs, for different colours in fluorescent tubes, fluorescent paints, for ceramics and jewelry, fine polishes for glass and mirrors, semiconductors, hard drives, used in PET scans, lasers.
The heavier ones, which have amazing refractory properties like hardness and melting points are used in defence and aerospace, missiles, warheads, fuel cells and superconductors.
It is an understatement to say that the modern world would not exist without them. No flat screen TV’s, smart phones, medical diagnostics, cheap efficient appliances like fridges and microwaves, miniature motors and batteries and magnets in cordless power tools.
From 2012 until 2014 I led an ASX listed rare earths exploration and mining company in Townsville called Krucible Metals. At the time, all REEs came from China which controlled the supply monopoly. No one outside of China was capable of competing. Including Krucible, there were only three companies outside China involved with rare earths. A Western Australian company called Lynas, which diversified from gold to REE around 2000 and which the Australian Government prevented selling off to majority Chinese interests; and the Mountain Pass open-cut mine operated by long-established (since 1919) Molycorp in the USA. Molycorp approached me at Krucible to discuss an M&A possibility. Afterwards in New York I was interviewed to take the CEO position of Molycorp. That would have happened except Molycorp acquired the Canadian company Neo Material Technologies Inc, (which was also almost denied by the USA Government), but resulted in their CEO taking over. Then, after a bankruptcy and a shareholder take over, Molycorp becoming Neo Performance Materials. Back at Krucible, after I visited Molycorp’s Mountain Pass operations, Chinese operations in Cheng Du and the Solvay REE processing plant at La Rochelle in France, we developed technology to compete with the Chinese monopoly. Poised to immediately become the first profitable REE producer outside China. The enormous demand, the complexity of producing REE, the strategic defence position and economic consequences are clear from this short history.
Allan Branch (R) at Mountain Pass, and at Solvay in France
The economics law of supply and demand states the obvious. That prices of things are determined by the relationship between the availability of a goods or service and the demand for it. When demand exceeds supply, prices tend to rise, while if supply exceeds demand, prices tend to fall.
However the price of REEs were not high. Had never been high. With the increasing interest in them as new technologies emerged, pundits espoused that one day soon they would achieve their due price. But it never happened. What was going on?
“So how do you figure a commodity group that exists within ‘the enigma of a market with critical global demand, deliberately controlled geopolitical supply, yet with prices which, when not depressed, are reported as incomprehensible.?” These are the words of mine quoted by financial mining industry journalist Robin Bromby for the Australian Newspaper on 8 September 2014.
Robin took the words from the text of an international presentation I was delivering at rare earth conferences around the world, (see the Cheng Du pic below), and which had been taken up by the USA Critical Materials Institute, a division of the Ames National Laboratories in Iowa., after my keynote delivery at the conference in Lake Tahoe in 2014. The presentation was published in the proceedings of the conference.
Looking back at the applications for rare earth elements, some are used in defence and aerospace, but nearly all of them are in domestic products or consumer appliances like automobiles, or community infrastructure like alternative electricity systems. These are all commodities in markets where there is a price ceiling over which the resultant products fail to sell, so sales decrease. It is called an elastic market. In such a market, when the components used in a consumer product become too expensive, if demand remains, alternatives, even less efficient ones, are resorted to. So REEs are trapped in applications where they cannot be too expensive else they would lose market share. Larger less powerful magnets would have to be used instead of miniature super magnets with neodymium or samarium for instance.
In November 2014 shareholders of Krucible took over the company with its huge cash assets and scrapped all of the rare earth activities. Oh well!
The paper “Global Pricing Dynamics of Rare Earths Industry Europe” now has its own page on Blackjay here at Rare Earths.
Good job on this. Two points of interest:
1 – Wind turbines are MAJOR users of REEs, and can use 5,000 to 10,000 pounds per turbine!
2 – Radioactive waste is a significant by-product of producing REEs.
(E.g., see point #20 here: >.)
Thank you John.
You are absolutely correct on both accounts.
Rare earths have an affinity for uranium, so it is impossible to mine REE without having a radioactive footprint. Just another complexity to the extraction and chemical processing of them.
It is fair to say that REE fit into two market categories. The consumables and commodity products that I discuss in the article. And the more value-added applications in defence, aerospace, energy. The first has a price ceiling, the second does not. In fact recent price histories show hints of this market duality. Exacerbated by the geopolitical shenanigans going on around rare earths at the moment.
With some 100,000 wind turbines in the USA alone, at 5,000 to 10,000 pounds per turbine, that is a huge market, at a demand price. Easy to see why politicians are wide-eyed about it. Same again in defence where REE are used in the advanced guidance technologies, but also as magnets in the guided missile homing systems.
I cannot access the link you provide, so cannot see what the “point #20” is John.
Thanks for the comment.
Another raft of elements, RHEs, are also not rare or expensive, yet difficult to extract from its bedrock, and when isolated will soon be contaminated or neutralised due to active antibodies. Now,
I am surprised to learn how much REE goes into a wind turbine. Then, I have never been persuaded by the economics which are suggested to be the basis of their application in alternative power generation. If environmental issues are included, the case for most of the subsidised renewables collapses entirely (IMHO). Its advocates are invariably either starry-eyed idealists or avid opportunists, or both- the one sort is not incompatible with the other. Now, let’s be clear. Seldom is any new development paying its way from the start, these days, due to the increasing complexity of human ingenuity. Formerly, the simple fashioning of a tool, implement or device would take thought and a little experimentation, but soon the work it was intended to facilitate would be much quicker, easier and overall more efficient. The yoke is one example. When I was growing up on the farm it was still in use. Not for oxen, on our farm, but for our shoulders. It would take whatever one had to carry yonder away from the legs, thereby saving one the strain of keeping the load spread out from one’s body (and not strain the arms and hands having to grip the items carried). If one had two items of varying weight, one hand would lift the chain on one side and one hand push down on the other chain. Feed and water buckets would be carried hence, milkchurns and whatever else could be hooked on the chains. Many inventions were duds, of course, eventually relicts just of special interest to its owners. Wind turbines were a clever invention and have been around for several thousand years. The modern versions for electricity generation have been hugely promoted and subsidised. The technology is bound to be useful in other applications as well and may one day lead to economic gain. Just now it is still an industry dedicated to take money from the common for the financial benefit of the particular. A transfer of funds from the state and its taxpayer-consumer citizens to a host of advocates working in the state subsidy industry, state-sanctioned corporations in the forefront. This helps grow the overall money supply very much and allows the corporations which do the creaming off easy and ever-growing financial, economic and (bought) political gain. Scientists, inventors (of ways to fleece the public), academics and scores of (self)appointed experts, apart from the usual suspects in politics and bureaucracy, have jumped on this and similar bandwagons. Without the facilitation by government, bureaucrats and the politics of greed trumping the basic economics of what goes for capitalism, we would have a totally different economy- an economy based on economic parameters. That, of course, is wishful thinking. Humanity does not live by bread alone, even if bread as money is increasingly valued for its own sake. As an aside; the more society as a whole values the mediums of exchange above economic production, as is now seriously the case worldwide, the less efficient the economy, the which is based on economic production as a means to not only service the necessities of life but also our foibles. So we cannot humanly function for economics alone. We have to have things to do, invent, try out, etc., and, especially, compete in all our endeavours even as we cooperate to get things done or to stymie the works of others as the case may be. And so it goes. Rational human elements are not in short supply, but these days only wanted if they can be roped in to facilitate the political and, indeed criminal, insanity which reigns supreme. Would, that the killing were to stop for a few decades. Maybe we as humanity could restore our rational human elements.
Many varied thoughts and ideas in your comment Jacob. All of them deserving of a response.
I am unable to find what RHE refers to. Is it rhodium?
There is certainly a preponderance of what is sometimes termed “big science” in the world today, nuclear energy, subatomic physics and colliders, quantum computers, targeted pharmaceuticals. Space with rockets and satellites, not just for trips to the moon or Mars or the Oort Cloud nor to spy on us, but to ensure GPS works well, for it is a fact that relativity comes into play when determining coordinates back on earth. And in domestic science too, the phenomenal cost and equipment for the current AI craze for instance. To receive a chatbot at your computer seems innocuous enough, a so-called SaaS, Software as a Service, but behind it are acres of buildings, (a farm taking u a farm), millions of hardware pieces, whole power stations dedicated to supplying electricity, and billions of someone’s dollars. The day of the small-time home inventor, creating a can opener or a mouse trap of a clever mop seem gone sometimes.
There is much talk and action around carbon footprints these days, and the same applies to the application of REEs in general. You are correct that the economics are sometimes ignored or misapplied. While a great powerful magnet allows for a miniature motor that functions some amazing gismo, the cost behind getting the REE that makes it possible is never included. But economics of scale, efficiencies over time, usage and uptake, and many factors come into it. My post for instance mentions that the company I led, Krucible Metals, invented (in a small backyard lab), alternative preprocessing technology, cleaner and inexpensive, at ambient temperatures and pressures, so the negative footprint generally reduced over time, with the same human capacity for invention.
Even some remembrances in your comment. I also have memories like that, not of yokes, but horse drawn milk carts when I was very young. I guess the domestication of horses and the invention of a towed cart were the devices of thought and experimentation back then making work easier. Or was it the wheel? Or was it the plough? Or was it agriculture?
And yes, alternative energy has been around forever. Windmills and watermills are prime examples. Very practical, very efficient, (when the wind or the water is flowing), and very environmentally sound. But solar too, to dry food, gravity for irrigation, chemical to make wine or black powder. So it is not the wind per se, nor the mill, but the application to generating electricity that is the problem that you see. The cost of it. It is hard to know the difference between a less technologically sophisticated dynamo, requiring the mining of iron for rotors and copper for windings and cadmium (carcinogenic) for bearings versus the more powerful but less material content of a REE generator. The greater problem you identify and which I agree with is the government subsidies. That comes about primarily via two things I believe, lobbyists and corrupt politicians. A politician who can convince subsidising a windmill for a community benefit, when really there is a kick off benefit to the politician by the utility company, if not direct imbursement, then in pork-barreling. The same infrastructure based on merit alone would still proceed without all the money flowing to the top.
I also have thoughts about the economic structure. We talk about different markets. Free market, market economy, consumer markets, globalisation, capitalism, trickle down, Thatcherism, and so on. Formally markets are defined differently: monopolies, oligopolies, monopsony, perfect market. A market is a system of buyers and sellers in various proportions, with makers and governments coming into the mix in various proportions. You are talking about what I think of as a transactional market. Middle men. Whether it is banking, insurance, credit cards, commissions, day trading on stocks, kickbacks. There could be a bit more Riba in the world.
REE are here to stay. Some but very few would enjoy giving up their smart phones, iPads, coloured TVs, cheap clever cars, Roombas, cordless drills, karaoke loudspeakers.
Quite! So for those still wondering, RHE stands for Rational Human Element. I have no issue with REEs as such. Personally, I would have preferred to carry on without mobile phones and the rest of our ‘devices’, but have found it impossible to do so. Waiting until I was forced or shamed into the use of them has put me at a disadvantage which I doubt I will ever catch up on. But there it is. The inevitable inexorable progression and constant change relents not. We have to live with it.
As for military applications of everything necessary for self-defence, I am all for it. We cannot afford to be slackening off in that regard. That is the nature of life.
Thanks Jacob,
Good joke. I was too serious to see that you were being light hearted with RHE. Certainly a dearth of RHEs in certain quarters.
I have no cell phone, no iPad, not social media presence, I correspond by email, on a 4 year old laptop. I feel I am missing nothing. That’s personally, not professionally where the company I work with has everything.
Two things come to mind. The complaints about mining REE are very on topic and talked about allot in the local news. But no one talks about the gold mining chemicals and waste used here in Nevada for many years. I have no idea which one would be cleaner. We are now finding some issues downwind from the wind turbines. We cannot change first law principle in thermodynamics, so downwind we are now noticing issues of that missing energy. But data centers and water are it at the top of the charts for now…
Thanks for the comment Rick.
It is true that gold mining is dirty. The main problem is the arsenic that is usually found with gold deposits. In fact it is the very presence of arsenic that helps make gold discoverable. Arsenic concentrates the gold to make it visible. If not arsenic, then sulfur, just as dirty and messy and toxic.
And rare earth elements are extraordinarily dirty to process.
Mining laws usually include remediation regulations, requiring miners to repatriate the land, take it back to what it was before, what it looked like, make it habitable. If that were to be done, the actual mining process would not be so bad, but miners are greedy. Mostly because they are publicly listed companies with shareholders interested in nothing but wealth and profits. And because governments and politicians and regulators can be corrupt.
But we all love our gold trinkets and our smart phones, so the activity will continue.