
How rare earth metals rose from obscurity - fern12
http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i34/whole-new-world-rare-earths.html
======
Animats
A few years ago, the Chinese producers increased the price of rare earths.
Then the Mountain Pass, California was taken over by Molycorp, and a new
process developed that didn't pollute much. (Even the Sierra Club approved.)
Then an Australia mining firm got into the business, and companies using rare-
earth magnets figured out ways to use fewer rare earths. The price of rare
earths crashed, there was a rare earth glut, and Molycorp went bankrupt.

The Mountain Pass, California mine is still shut down. A Chinese company is
trying to buy the assets cheaply. The current question is whether the US
Government will permit this.

~~~
shaqbert
A couple of years back, when rare earth prices were high and China restricted
exports, the media was full of scaremongering stories about how we gonna see
our industry shut down, etc.

Turns out that prices are a strong signal to start mining. While rare earth
sound like a scarce resources, they are essentially prevalent across the globe
in very low concentration. The existing mines are usually places where the
concentration is a tad higher. But once prices are high enough, a lot of
marginal deposits all over sudden become commercially viable.

~~~
digi_owl
Same thing going on with oil really.

And i think that was the original intent of the "peak oil" term. Not that we
had found everything we could in absolute terms, but that the ROI on
extraction had hit a plateau (or something of that nature).

~~~
aidenn0
We hit peak oil later than planned because the rate of oil-consumption growth
plummeted. The estimates were within an order of magnitude (which is a small
margin of error you double your consumption every 20 years).

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roceasta
Fortunately for us all regular free shipments of rare earth metals are now
available:

cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/

Simply deflect onto the approval-pending lunar crash site! Friendly robots
will construct an Ore-some(TM) plant for processing and EM-powering
fulfillment to the ZIP code of your choice.

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njarboe
"As Evans alluded, the demand for rare earths could lead to their commercial
demise. Access to the metals has always been tenuous, leading to worries that
one day demand for them may outstrip supply."

I understand that starting up a mine takes many years, but if you are not
under a command economy where the Bureau of Rare Earths "demands" 1 million
tons of Neodymium per year and the mines only produce 1/2 million tons, the
use of the word demand does not make any sense to me. I heard demand used in a
similar way in the oil industry sometimes and I could never really figure out
what they meant or have it explained well.

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ridgeguy
There appear to be rich seabed rare earth deposits that are feasible to mine.
[1]

[1] [https://phys.org/news/2013-03-japan-rich-rare-earth-
deposits...](https://phys.org/news/2013-03-japan-rich-rare-earth-
deposits.html)

~~~
cobbzilla
I know it sounds terrible, but at geologic time scales, the sea floor is
recycled at a higher rate than non-coastal land [1], maybe it's better to keep
more land in a better state, if that's the choice? The sea floor is immense.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_crust#Life_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_crust#Life_cycle)

~~~
ridgeguy
I agree there's much more sea floor than land area to use, and that it gets
'renewed' faster than continental land masses.

On the other hand, we know so little about submarine ecosystems - what might
be important in sustaining humans, what isn't, how they get damaged, recovery
times, etc. It seems much harder to get that info from sea bed sites than from
land sites.

Complicated decisions with no apparent easy choices.

------
SirLJ
Fortunately those are not so rare...

~~~
SirLJ
Are Rare Earth Elements Actually Rare?

[http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/06/15/are-rare-earth-
elements-...](http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/06/15/are-rare-earth-elements-
actually-rare/)

