China Corners Over 90% of Market for Rare-Earth

Metals

by Washington's Blog

China has cornered 97% of the world market for rare earth metals, according to Byron King (the Times Online puts the number at 95%, and the Financial Times puts the number at "over 90%").
What are rare earth metals? Most people define them as including the following 17 metals:
Cerium Dysprosium Erbium Europium Gadolinium Holmium Lanthanum Lutetium Neodymium Praseodymium Promethium Samarium Scandium Terbium Thulium Ytterbium Yttrium
Some people also include some or all of the Actinide Series elements as rare earths. The Actinides include:
ActiniumAmericium Berkelium Californium Curium Einsteinium Fermium Lawrencium Mendelevium Neptunium Nobelium Plutonium Protactinium Thorium Uranium As the Times Online notes:
"The weight and magnetic properties of rare-earth metals have made them important for wind turbines, essential to hybrid cars, and indispensable if the world ever hopes to covert to fully electric vehicles..."
Don Burbar, the chief executive of Avalon Rare Metals, said: "The crux of the matter is that there are now a lot of technologies that can't work without rare earths, and China is currently in effective control of the global supply. China has positioned itself to retain control, and meanwhile politicians around the world do not appreciate how the supply side of green technology works."
As mining analyst John Kaiser writes:
"In the case of rare earth oxides, we're looking at a situation where the Obama Administration would like to see clean energy replace gasoline-based energy in transportation fuel. The Chinese are thinking along similar lines because they don't want to be dependent on foreign oil supplies any more than the United States does. Rare earth oxides go into these super magnets that are a key part of these hybrid and electric cars. The Japanese, the Europeans, and North American carmakers would like to commercialize the production of hybrid cars, but they are afraid to do so because all the rare earths right now come out of China . And China has said "we would like all the manufacturing to be done in China and we'll sell it to the rest of the world." Well, that puts everybody at the mercy of China . So now there's a scramble afoot to look for these deposits outside of China and never mind that China could flood the market with their rare earth oxides. The end users are thinking we need to have security of supply for these rare earth oxides so we're not at the mercy of political machinations by a country like China . And see this article from the New York Times on China's buying spree in Australia.

Economic recovery is wishful thinking
Dean Baker

The Guardian June 3, 2009

Last week we got a whole series of bad reports on the state of the economy. New and existing home sales both remain near their lowest level for the downturn, as house prices continue to drop at the rate of 2% a month. New orders for capital goods, a key measure of investment demand, fell by 2% in April. Excluding the volatile transportation sector, new orders were still down by 1.5%.
On Friday, the Chicago Purchasing Managers Index fell by more than 5 percentage points from its April level, approaching its low for the downturn. The employment component of the index did hit a new low.
These reports might have led to gloomy news stories, but not in the US media. The folks who could not see an $8tn housing bubble are still determined to find the silver lining in even the worst economic news. learn more at