China’s stranglehold on world supplies of rare-earth elements has eased slightly, and prices for the minerals have fallen in response to slackened demand brought about by the recession. That is the testimony of industry experts before House subcommittee hearing on 7 December. Still, witnesses said, the US must pursue new sources of production and R&D to find substitutes and minimize the use of rare-earth and other materials that are critical to clean energy, electric vehicles, electronics, and other applications.
Representative Brad Miller (D-NC), the ranking minority member on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology’s energy and environment subcommittee, called for passage of legislation to increase federal R&D and support increased domestic production of energy-critical materials. Miller has written one of numerous House bills introduced since shortages and high prices for the materials developed in 2010. Hearings also have been held on at least two Senate bills proposing actions to address critical materials issues.
Miller said that declining prices don’t necessarily indicate a return to free markets; he noted that China had cornered the world market for rare-earth elements by slashing prices in the 1990s. Having driven nearly all competitors out of business, China, which accounts for as much as 97% of the world supply of some rare earths, then imposed restrictions on exports; that action drove prices up to record highs last year. But the high prices attracted renewed interest from producers in other countries. A long-shuttered Molycorp mine at Mountain Pass, California, has resumed output. Additional mines are expected to open in Australia, Canada, Vietnam, and Brazil in the next several years. News of the reinvigorated mining operations has helped push rare-earth prices down by around one-third from their summer peaks.
“Even if the current price drops were not mainly the result of the global recession, there is no reason to think that if we are not smart about how we support these industries the Chinese government won’t just make the same moves all over again,” Miller said. “To believe that markets can work when the biggest player in a particular industry is a hybrid Communist–capitalist state is to cling to ideology in the face of ample evidence that it just ain’t so.”
Carl Gschneidner, senior materials scientist at Ames Laboratory, said that in addition to a dearth of domestic mines, the US lacks the infrastructure needed for fabricating the intermediate products, such as magnets, phosphors, metals, and catalysts, from rare-earth elements. Federal support in the form of loan guarantees might also Federal support, such as loan guarantees, might also aassist in rebuilding US manufacturing for hard drives, electric motors, cellphones, wind turbines, compact fluorescent bulbs, and other products that incorporate rare earths, he said.
Robert Jaffe, a Harvard physicist who chaired a 2010 American Physical Society committee on energy-critical elements, said that although rare earths are the “flavor of the month,” a host of other materials, including tellurium and germanium for solar panels and lithium for electric vehicle batteries, could become scarce in the future. The US “cannot mine its way to safety,” he cautioned, nor should it stockpile the materials, which would discourage innovation. The APS committee’s report called for the government to sponsor further research to increase supplies of critical materials and reduce dependence on foreign suppliers. Further, the government should serve as a clearinghouse for information on worldwide critical materials resources, production, use, trade, disposal, and recycling.
Jaffe noted how General Electric, which in 2005 forecast a developing shortage of rhenium, began recycling the rare metal and instituted an intensive campaign to develop a new alloy. The effort paid off with the development of several new low-rhenium alloys for GE turbine blades just as world prices for the element soared 10-fold, to $10 000 per kg.
David Sandalow, assistant secretary for policy and international affairs at the Department of Energy, said the agency will provide an updated analysis of market conditions in a critical materials strategy to be released by the end of December. The document will include a plan for R&D at DOE designed to spur domestic output and recycling of energy-critical materials and to develop substitutes for them.
According to a critical materials strategy developed at DOE last year, four clean energy technologies—wind turbines, electric vehicles, photovoltaic cells, and fluorescent lighting—use materials that are at risk of supply disruptions during the next five years. Five rare-earth elements (dysprosium, neodymium, terbium, europium and yttrium) and indium were judged to be the most critical in the short term. For the purpose of the report, criticality was a measure that combined the element’s importance to the clean energy economy and its risk of supply disruption.
