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Ardent Listener
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 Posted - 11/20/2007 : 19:25:43
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Minor Metals II: The Surprising Usefulness of Rare Earth Metals By Jack Lifton
20 Nov 2007 at 07:41 PM GMT-05:00
DETROIT (ResourceInvestor.com) -- Ivan Herring, whose presentation at this year’s regular San Francisco session of the IIC’s Hard Assets Conferences, I reported upon yesterday expanded that presentation yesterday, Monday, November 19th, for an invited audience at a private luncheon sponsored by Great Western Minerals Group, Ltd. [TSX-V:GWG] After a lengthy talk, profusely illustrated by a slide presentation, Mr. Herring left his audience, literally dumbfounded, when he concluded with the statement that there were about 1,700 additional uses for the rare earth metals (REMs), which he had not had time to cover.
He had begun his talk by telling the attendees that at a recent conference on rare earth metals in Hong Kong, a speaker had pointed out that while steel made up the bones of the body of our civilization, and oil the blood, it was the rare earth elements which functioned as the ‘vitamins.’
I was provided with a copy of the slide presentation by Mr. Herring, and due to a number of requests I have received, and with Mr. Herring’s permission, I am attaching it here. This, luncheon, slide show covers also most of what Ivan Herring spoke about in his presentation to the open conference as well. Let me explicate for you some key technical areas which can be a roadmap for investors on what news stories to look for to spot uses of rare earth metals.
My title today was suggested by the theme chosen by Ivan Herring for his talk at the luncheon, and I used it because it made me think of the ‘popular’ article entitled, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” by the Hungarian-American refugee scientist, atomic weapons pioneer researcher and Nobel Prize winner, Eugene Wigner. Just as Wigner pointed out that no one could have predicted how useful mathematics would be in explaining and predicting physical phenomena, no one could have predicted, on then known chemical or metallurgical principals, what, if any, practical uses there might be for any of the REMs before they became widely available as separate and purified, if not highly purified, metals.
In metallurgy and chemistry, as in any other scientific endeavour, you must eliminate as many variables as possible before you begin to study a material, so that you know what you are actually looking at! The positive influence of pure research, intended to assist preparations for the military defence of the United States, which the U.S. government funded to study and develop techniques for the separation and purification of metals has been profound. It has, as a byproduct, amounted to the greatest subsidy for the pure sciences in the history of mankind. Rare earth metals are available today separately and in pure form only because of this subsidy.
For those who might need some more convincing let me tell a little story about long-term thinking. In 1906, my father’s father was farming in the Ukraine, near Kiev. He had served in the Russian Army and had seen enough misery and squalor to know that there was no future in or for the Russian Empire. At that point in time the British Empire was seeking immigrants for its unpopulated territories in North America, so my grandfather accepted a grant of farmland in Manitoba, which his Britannic Majesty’s Government was offering to those who could or would work the land.
My own father told me that by 1916, his father and he and his brothers were tired of trying to make a living from the farm, because so little of it was useful cropland. Most of it was covered with clay, and when you turned the clay with a (horse drawn) plow you saw that it was shot through with a bright yellow material. My father remembered his father telling him that local native potters sometimes had used the clay because it produced a nice yellow glaze effect when fired.
My grandfather sold the land and moved on to Winnipeg; my father went to work on the Canadian Pacific Rail Road as a (teenage) labourer, and 50 years later, 40 years after he had emigrated to the U.S. and eventually opened his own car repair shop, he told his son, me, the story of the yellow clay when I told him that I had read in school that there was a lot of uranium being discovered in Manitoba. My father and I both learned what carnotite (the basis of yellow cake) was that afternoon.
Not even the prescient James Dines, the self-proclaimed ‘original uranium bug’, would have not recommended uranium in 1938, or before July 15, 1945 (the day on which the Trinity test was successfully carried out), nor would he have recommended rare earth metals if he had been around in that time period, because neither uranium nor any of the rare earth metals then had any important industrial uses at all. Mr. Dines attended the presentation perhaps looking to branch out into REMs.
Uranium’s use for fuelling nuclear reactors, its main use, other than to ‘breed’ plutonium for making fission (or fission triggers for fusion) weapons is even today a political football, and it’s entirely possible that there is already a sufficient supply of uranium for the reactors, which will actually be constructed in the next decade or two. This is not the case for the other ‘power’ metal, thorium, the jury’s still out on that.
As for rare earth metals, Mr. Herring pointed out that the projected increases in usage of rare earth metals and their alloys with non rare earth metals are expected to grow by more than 45,000 tonnes annually above the actual figures for 2005 to reach a total projected usage of 162,000 tonnes in 2010.
China today produces 123,000 tonnes annually of mixed rare earth metals. That number is today essentially 100% of the global production of most of the rare earth metals, and due to that fact, the U.S. today is 100% dependent on imports for its rare earth needs! The question is where is the additional material to come from not only to meet projected increases in current uses such as the following but also any new uses?
Keep in mind that the above uses are for materials made from individual highly purified rare earth metals, not mixtures. The value added processing to make this so is a specialty of very few companies, although some of them, as well as some public institutions also license the special separation and purification technologies they have developed to individual companies for producing individual metals, alloys and compounds.
With that in mind I can point out that Mr. Herring discussed also two of the newest uses for rare earth metals and their alloys and compounds now under serious development:
Magnetic refrigeration with no moving parts and;
Oxygen generation in place.
Both of these technologies would quickly move from high value added uses such as the internal cooling of sensitive electronics and production of oxygen in confined areas where weight is at a premium (such as space craft) if more of the rare earth metals upon which they depend were produced or assured to be available by a supply base with no political risk.
One more usage that Ivan Herring only touched upon comes to mind: The use of rare earth based alloys to ‘store’ hydrogen as a solid hydride for the purpose of supplying gaseous hydrogen on demand as a motor vehicle fuel from safe non pressurized systems.
The development of such fuel ‘tanks’ has proceeded apace with the development of the nickel metal hydride battery, and even though the best, in the sense of practical, alloys for this purpose are of nickel and a rare earth metal such as lanthanum they can also be made from zirconium and iron, titanium and manganese, or even mischmetal and nickel, but none of this would have been discovered if it were not for research that began with rare earth metals’ properties being explored, and that was not possible until the rare earth metals could be separated and purified.
I am personally and professionally, as an electronics materials specialist, very impressed by the sophistication and progress of the research discussed in the privately published (But free for the asking) magazine, “Material Matters.” The latest issue, Volume 2, No. 4, which I received yesterday would have made a perfect handout for the more technically minded at Mr. Herring’s luncheon talk. Its theme is “Advanced Metals and Alloys,” and it contains papers on “Advanced Magnetic Cooling [using rare earth metal alloys],” and “High-Pressure Intermetallic Hydrides” among others.
This magazine is published by the American specialty chemical company, Sigma-Aldrich Co. [Nasdaq:SIAL], which manufactures and stocks rare earth metals in the purest forms available today for research and which advertises that it can produce industrial quantities of customer designed metals and alloys upon request. Keep your eye on Sigma-Aldrich as rare earth metals and their alloys come into their own.
Mr. Herring, as usual, is on the cutting edge of investment opportunities for the medium to long term. As he would say you can no longer ignore minor metals, certainly not the rare earth metals. Some other minor metals seem to me to be momentum (or as I like to call them, lemming) plays, but any nation that ignores its supply of rare earths is playing a losing game with its economic future.
Next week, I am going to revisit “Investing in Rare Earths,” and identify the key production players thanks to an ongoing conversation with Ivan Herring.
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