Rare Earth Elements – Vital Factors In The Expert Assessment
Rare earth elements are that cluster of bizarre items on the Periodic Table that your Chemistry teacher blew right past, asserting that you would never need to know about the. Ironically, those oddities have become vital to our modern way of life. As if that’s not enough, the rare earth elements are the epitome of sound investments based on solid supply and demand principles. So I want to share market tips related to the industry to inform your investments accordingly. Rare Earth Elements Are Hiding In Plain Sight On the one hand, modern electronics, weapons of war, windmills, electric cars, as well as advanced television technology and cell phones would all be impossible without them. Telecommunications, computer technology, petrochemicals, optics and the like are toast without rare earth elements. If you find that you like your digital camera, make use of fiber optic lines, or have ever been the beneficiary of medical imaging devices, you can thank the rare earth metals. While some applications call for tiny amounts of these goodies, still others require massive amounts. Windmills, for instance, which are at the forefront of green & clean energy, consume huge amounts of rare earths. They can put away hundreds of pounds like it’s nobody’s business. A simple car battery in the Toyota Prius can gobble up over 30 pounds of lanthanum. The hybrid car industry alone can take on epic amounts of rare earths like it’s no big deal. At some point we may have to question where to funnel metered resources. Indeed, we’ve already seen the unintended consequences of feeding our corn to fuel factories to make ethanol rather than feeding it to us (or the animals that feed us). The push for clean car locomotion via rare earths may cave in to other options such as LNG. Only time will tell. Rare Earth Elements And The Insatiable Demand A critical piece of the puzzle is in realizing that rare earths are not quickly substituted out. These unique elements have electron landscapes and behavior that produce magnetic and other properties that simply are not found elsewhere. The level of performance and technological capability that rests on the shoulders of rare earths is not readily duplicated outside of that environment. If you’re fond of satellite systems, GPS, cell phones, iPods, laptops, DVD players and even a cordless drill, you have a new-found respect for the irreplaceable rare earth elements. With the rare earth elements cornering the market on their unique properties and applications, the inability to use alternatives sends demand parabolic. I struggle to think of a better example of a constrained supply of ingredients that are in rising demand. Not only are more and more people in need of these rare earth elements for existing uses, but it’s also the case that more and more applications for them are being discovered all the time. They are the veritable poster child of what happens when lots of people compete for a little bit of goodies. As for new and innovative uses, just consider these incontrovertible facts. The massive need for hybrid car technology didn’t even exist a short time ago. The windmill revolution was little more than a novelty on the Dutch landscape until relatively recently. What’s next? The world used up over 100,000 tons of rare earths in 2010. By 2015 the projection is to be at a quarter-million required tons. The expectation for electric and hybrid car use is so large that, just a decade later, the automotive could be using more than a million tons alone!
Friday, January 27th, 2012 at 7:40 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.