What is the issue? The Covid19 global pandemic has cruelly exposed the utter dependence of the US and the world on China’s mass manufacturing capability and supply of critical medical equipment and materials. Not only are personal protective equipment and medical ventilators in a massive short supply, Chinese supplied medical tests have also been found to be inaccurate when used in various countries. This acute shortage and dependence has raised alarms and questions about remediation supply chain strategies for materials and finished products. In this white paper we discuss the urgency of inverting the Chinese dependence for a critical family of raw materials, the Rare Earth Elements, required in numerous finished products. It is very tightly controlled by China by production and delivery quotas. The criticality, supply risk, and the economic impact of the supply risk is well documented.
What is the objective? The objective of this white paper is to present the background leading to the current perceived crisis in the sourcing of Rare Earth Elements and propose a national strategic insourcing model.
What are Rare Earth Elements and why Rare? Rare Earth Elements (REE) is a group of 17 elements in the third group of the periodic table. They include scandium (Sc, atomic number 21), yttrium (Y, 39), and the lanthanides which comprise of lanthanum (La, 7), cerium ((Ce, 58), praseodymium (Pr, 59), neodymium (Nd, 60), promethium (Pm, 61), samarium (Sm, 62), europium (Eu, 63), gadolinium (Gd, 64), terbium (Tb, 65), dysprosium (Dy, 66), holmium (Ho, 67), erbium (Er, 68), thulium (Tm, 69), ytterbium (70), and lutetium (Lu, 71). Promethium is not included in this because it is the only radioactive REE and does not occur in nature. Notice that the atomic numbers increase and, thus, the REEs have been classified as light REEs (LREEs, La to Nd), medium REEs (MREEs, Pm to Gd), and heavy REEs (HREEs, Tb to Lu and Y). These groups form the basis of the Chinese tax rates differentiation between LREE, MREE, and HREE concentrates.
The term “rare” is traced back to the time of discovery of the elements around 1800. The use of the word “rare” has stemmed from the notion that these elements were unknown and the infrequent finding of the materials in the earth. While research citations of abundance give only average concentrations – for example, cerium is as abundant as zinc, and lanthanum is as abundant as copper – they do not indicate typical concentrations in rocks. Gold, for example occurs as nuggets and is easy to mine. Thus, the actual extraction potential of the REES from the ores also lends credibility to the “rare” adjective to their classification.
What are Rare earth sources? Currently, the major active REE mines are in China, the US, and Australia. In China, the world’s largest mine is located in Bayan Obo in Inner Mongolia with separation and refining facilities nearby. There are additional mining areas in Sichuan and south-eastern China. In the US, the Mountain Pass mine is in California, while the southwestern Mount Weld mine is the Australian source. There are also reports of additional mining in Russia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Brazil.
The REEs occur naturally in compounds of carbonates, oxides, phosphates, and silicates. The major ores are bastnasite, monazite, xenotime, and ion-adsorption clays.
What are the important properties? Electrical superconductivity, strong magnetic properties of the majority of the REEs, and excellent optical performance are the characteristics of the REEs.
What are the applications? The following are some application examples. Each rare earth element and its atomic number is listed with the applications.
La 57: studio lighting, laptop batteries, camera lenses, hybrid car batteries.
Ce 58: Carbon arc light, TV color screen, fluorescent lighting. catalytic converter
Pr 59: Nickel metal hydride (NiMH), in hybrid cars, glass goggles for glass blowers and welders, high-intensity carbon arc light
Nd 60: NIB magnets (computers, hand phones, medical equipment, motors, wind turbines and audio systems), specialized goggles for glassblowers.
Pm 61: atomic batteries for spacecraft and guided missiles.
Sm 62: Magnets for headphones, small motors and pickups for some electric guitars, absorber
in nuclear reactors, cancer treatment.
Eu 63: anti-forgery marks on bank notes, nuclear reactor control rods, compact fluorescent bulbs
Gd 64: Microwave, MRI, color television picture tubes.
Tb 65: Magnet for wind turbine and hybrid car motors
Dy 66: Speakers, compact discs and hard discs, medium source rare-earth lamps (MSRs) used in the film industry
Ho 67: Yellow or red coloring for glass, cubic zirconia, nuclear reactor control rods, solid-state lasers for non-invasive medical procedures treating cancers and kidney stones.
Er 68: Nuclear reactor control rods, coloring agent in glazes and glasses. Laser for skin treatment (remove tattoos).
Tm 69: Laser, blue fluorescence under UV applications.
Yb 70: Stress gauges to monitor deformations, fiber laser amplifiers.
Lu 71: Catalyst, detectors in positron emission tomography (PET).
Y 39: Microwave filter, color (red) television tubes, high-temperature super-conductor.
Sc 21: Aerospace industry components, bicycle frames, fishing rods, golf iron shafts, baseball bats.
What is the production process? REEs processing consists of six main steps which include deposit exploration, mining for ores (REOs), beneficiation, chemical treatment, separation, refining, and purification. Beneficiation is the process to remove impurities and to increase the REE concentration prior to chemical treatment to further increase the concentration. The separation process purifies the individual REOs for final refining of each REE.
What is the US production history? From the mid 1960’s to the mid 1980’s, the US was one of the principal suppliers of monazite, an ore containing LREE and HREE, and thorium/uranium bearing rare earth element phosphates ores (thureep). The effects in the early to mid-1980 from the NRC/IAEA changes in the percentage amount classification of thorium and uranium in mined ores, led to a drastic reduction of mining of the superior thureep bearing minerals. Instead, domestic US mines ramped up production of lowest economic valued cerium and lanthanum, whose mother ores were not impacted by the NRC/IAEA guidelines.
What has been impact of US regulations? The unintended regulation consequence was of virtual ceasing of mining of REE baring materials in the US. Molycorp, a key producer in the 1980s, and other companies shipped their oxides to China for refining and value-added production into metals, alloys, and magnets.
How has China captured the world market? China was a REE producer laggard until the 1908s. In the 1980s, the unintended consequences of the NRC and IAEA regulations for “source materials” uranium and thorium, led to abandoning of the thorium/uranium bearing rare earth element phosphates ores (thureep), principally monazite, from the REE supply chain. Ironically, the thureep ores are minerologically superior to other thorium/uranium bearing materials, like bastnasite, as they contain low-cost recoverable materials of all 16 REEs. Traditional thureep producers of the valuable byproducts either blended the thurrep back into the mines or dumped them into tailing lakes.
In 1995, GM sold Magnequench, the leading rare earth magnet manufacturer, to Chinese companies with close government relations. China immediately replicated the capability. This was a critical step for China from moving from a basic low-end material supplier to a highly capable producer of magnets, alloys, and metals needed in major industries. This led China to eliminate competition and dominate world supply.
China’s industrial policy prioritized the support and development of its rare earth industry as a national economic and security initiative. It aimed three areas of focus: (i) control REE value chain, (ii) capture Western IP, (iii) integrate into US defense and commercial systems by embedding into the defense company and contractor supply chains. Companies such as, GE, Northrup, Boeing, and others don’t have the capability to process REE oxides into usable components, such as, magnets and alloys. Currently, almost all non-Chinese REE mine ship the concentrates or higher-value oxides to China for processing into rare earth metals, magnets, alloys, and other high-value materials and components.
China’s industrial policy aim was to gain control of the market by control of mining, production, REE release quotas, and export taxes, use the REEs for increased internal consumption. It established two cities exclusively to service the rare earth value chain with hundreds of small and medium size companies providing value-added differentiated processing and component manufacturing. It is entirely possible that many of these companies are directly or indirectly supported by the central government.
End of Part 1. This article continues in Part 2.