CMI Director Alex King Talks About Rare Earth Supplies (Video 2)

Video CMI Director Alex King Talks About Rare Earth Supplies (Video 2) 11

Posted by Roblimo on Thursday November 20, 2014 @02:30PM from the the're-still-looking-for-unobtanium dept.

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Yesterday we ran video #1 of 2 about the Critical Materials Institute (CMI) at the Iowa State Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. They have partners from other national laboratories, universities, and industry, too. Obviously there is more than enough information on this subject that Dr. King can easily fill two 15-minute videos, not to mention so many Google links that instead of trying to list all of them, we're giving you one link to Google using the search term "rare earths." Yes, we know Rare Earth would be a great name for a rock band. But the mineral rare earths are important in the manufacture of items ranging from strong magnets to touch screens and rechargeable batteries, so please watch the video(s) or at least read the transcript(s). (Alternate Video Link)

Tim: Can you explain what ligands are, Alex?

Alex: Ligands are functional fractions of molecules. The way the world is today, we design molecules that have one piece that likes to be in a water based solvent, and conversely, likes to be in an organic solvent. And the other end of it likes to hold on to a rare earth element like praseodymium or neodymium. The functional piece that sticks to one or another of the things you want it to stick to that is called a ligand. And then if you can find ways to merge those ligands into a molecule then you’ve got a chemical that you can actually use.

Tim: And do I understand correctly, that is what the supercomputer use that you are doing right now when you are trying to design new molecules that’s essentially the functioning end of it, you are trying to create ligands that will attach to your solvents and to the rare earths themselves.

Alex: That’s exactly right. It’s relatively easy to find ligands that prefer organics or aqueous solvents but finding ones that are able to distinguish between rare earth elements—that’s a lot tougher. And we are sifting through very very large numbers of potential ligands that are then building blocks of molecules essentially.

Tim: Now are these based on other varieties of mining? Is mining in general used for sort of molecular design? Or is it a sort of innovative use?

Alex: This is innovative. Mining, with mining the earth’s crust, well, I have a textbook on my shelf which was originally written in Latin in 1500 or so and translated into English by Herbert Hoover actually.

Tim: Interesting.

Alex: A mining engineer. So we’ve been mining the earth’s crust for eons and we’ve been developing technology to convert rocks into metal by trial and error. What we do is currently is really technology that has been around for 100 years or so, dissolving it in acid, see what you can add to it, to extract it from the acid into something else. I think for the first time, we are really using high powered computation, concen chemistry tools, very sophisticated physics to try and actually predict what molecules we should be using instead of just trial and error.

Tim: Is it something that would apply just as much to other metals that are rare enough like gold, platinum, are there ligand based approaches that are designing new molecules that would actually be useful there?

Alex: Right. So one of the targets for the Critical Materials Institute is okay to solve the problems of today. Which include the rare earths and a couple of other things. To develop the tools as we are doing it, so that we can apply them to new problems as they emerge. And we certainly believe that there will be new elements that turn critical from time to time for various reasons in the next decade. When we want the tools ready, when that happens we will react.

Tim: Sure. Speaking of making those tools available you are obviously with a subunit of the Department of Energy. Is the research that you do also shared with scientists worldwide? Do you cooperate for instance with some of the mining operations and scientists who are working on this sort of materials research around the world and in China in particular? But I wonder how widespread is this information? Is it returned to the commonwealth in a way that people around the world actually will benefit from?

Alex: Yeah. So the answer is yes. And then we can expand it.

Tim: A short answer to a long question.

Alex: We have active collaborations with researchers in the European Union, and in Japan. There is actually what’s called the trilateral working group on critical materials that is the US, Japan, and the European Union. We are actually engaged with that, in fact hosted the last meeting of the working group here in Ames just a few weeks ago. Where we are in contact with people in Canada where there is a number of resources that could turn into mines in the fairly near future. When the future is measured like I said before, in hundreds of millions of dollars.

Roblimo: Hold on hold on.

Tim: There was a just a glitch there. Hold on, Dr. King, I think there was just a glitch in our transmission from out there. I wonder, you were just talking about the mine from Canada, that’s the last complete thought that I heard there. I wonder, would you be able to pick up from when you mentioned that there were mines that look like they may be viable, based on, you said the same thing, it depends it is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. And that’s there we hit a little artifact there.

Roblimo: If anybody wants to have a drink of water, this is a good moment. And then because I am going to cut this up obviously and go back in, we can do that, right. This is not a hostile interview.

Tim: And I also take this time to point out, Dr. King, I have just got really two or three more questions, and this has been a, I love the way you are answering, you have registered what they really want, I tell everybody that this our audience is basically your smart cousin in another field, so they can always, they can look things up, and I think you are really doing a perfect job, just what we are looking for, as far as the kind of answers you are giving, so I appreciate it.

Roblimo: Yeah, you are not treating them as idiots.

Tim: That’s a short way to put it.

Alex: I do.

Roblimo: Oh no no you have to realize. I have been writing about Linux and other forward software advances for many years and one day I wrote a freelance piece for a small paper called the Washington Post. And the Slashdot, a lot of Slashdot readers immediately castigated me for writing such a simplistic piece. I said, yeah, they are not you, _____7:11 stuff. So we are talking to smart people. Okay.

Alex: Alright, and we’re back I guess, so yeah, we are spending a lot of time talking with people in Canada. Canada has a number of resources what we call resources that could potentially turn into mines, Canada is traditionally a very strong mining nation, and has found a lot of rare earth deposits, some of which are getting close when measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, to being actually commercialized. So we spend a lot of time talking with people listening to people, the big secret for the Critical Materials Institute frankly is that we listen to what’s going on around the world and try and make sense of it and try and understand how it can most quickly be brought forward as operational technologies.

Tim: One thing that has been intriguing to me in reading about this is the undersea deposits that Japan has found appear to be at least possibly viable, even though the infrastructure to get them is it is much more than even putting an oil rig in the deep ocean, because mining at depths you have to actually get large quantities, and these are things that can’t just flow up a pipe very easily. They have got to be extracted in a pretty thorough way.

Alex: Yeah. Let’s just say that one’s a long-term solution, and we certainly need long term solutions as well as short term solutions. The state of the art in undersea mining is not that great. I mean there are undersea mining ventures they are not at such great depths and they go after very high value materials such as diamonds. But every year the technology improves, the cost comes down, the capability to work at greater depth is improved. You also have to consider the challenge with the deep sea that there are environmental concerns and very profound environmental unknowns that really are going to have to be addressed before that becomes a viable industry. All that said, there seems to be some very rich deposits down there.

Tim: On the other side of the altitude spectrum of course, one thing that people have been talking about for years and of late even more is the possibility of trying to mine asteroids for certain rare elements and that is pretty intriguing but also it seems like how can _____10:01 the role of 2014 and quite picture that happening in the near future?

Alex: Yeah, well, I have been a scientist for a long time, and I have seen some pretty amazing discoveries happen that I never thought would. So I’ve learnt to never say never. But having said that, the Critical Materials Institute has funding for five years. We have taken the possibility of renewal for ten.

Tim: No asteroid committee.

Alex: I don’t think that the asteroids are going to come in say before the end of ten years.

Tim: Right. That’s a good way to think of your horizon, at a given point is how much money you have to spend on it. Two other quick things that I really want to ask you about, and these are based on some reader questions we have had. As was described a few years ago, with regard to the economic supply of rare earths, was described as a crisis, there was a lot of sort of political hackles, and in particular, many people were worried because it is a single supplying nation that was the most viable supply. Are we in a crisis now, has anything changed, I think that you mentioned before that people have gotten out their boots and their geological hammers and have been opening up at least potential supplies—has that affected price, has that affected worldwide attitudes toward it?

Alex: Yeah, so well, we could talk for a long time about that. So yeah, there was a crisis in 2010-2011, and actually the roots of it was seen much earlier in 2008-2009 that the Health Science Committee in Washington DC held a hearing before the crisis really emerged, the price of rare earths had only doubled and on its way to going up by a factor of 25. The US government noticed and they put in place a number of things to try and help. What really got things going was when China threatened to cut off supply of rare earths to Japan during a diplomatic incident. There is a disputed island in the East China Sea the Japanese arrested a Chinese fishing boat captain, while the Chinese retaliated by throwing _____12:44 and that really got people’s attention. Around that time, speculators were getting in the market and driving the prices way up. They peaked in about 2010 late 2010, slightly dropping back down. We are now, as I said, the US government held a hearing when they had nearly doubled. And they had come back down from where they had peaked to about 4 or 5 times to what they were prior to 2009. So do we have a crisis? If you look at crises, you could almost call that just inflation, or natural responses to supply and demand. But what we still have is a great deal of fragility in the supply chain. So since 2010, two mines had come on-stream one in California at Mountain Pass, one in Australia at Mt. Weld, both of those mines together have caused China’s monopoly to slip from 97% to about 85 to 90%, and it depends exactly on their production rates coming up to full speed which they are gradually doing. Both of those mines are dealing with very high cost of establishing themselves and having to pay off those costs and operating the profit is a challenge, particularly at today’s prices. So we could very easily be back in a position where there is one dominant, in fact, we still have one dominant supplier. Two very minor suppliers either of which can go out of business if things don’t work very well for them. And then we are exactly back where we were before. On any given day, there might be enough rare earths for people to buy and use but there is always a vulnerability that the supply can be cut off. For any reason, if there is a tsunami, that takes out a Chinese port, then we are still out of luck. So it is only government action or anything else can happen. All sorts of things can go wrong in the world. And even if your supplier is in California, they have earthquakes, there is all sorts of things around the world. If there is only one supplier there’s a major risk for any material.

Tim: It sounds like your job is at least 50% economist as well as a

Alex: One of the best things we did when we set up this institute was bring in a good team of economists. You know, sure as heck, I’ve learned a lot of science in the last year and half while I have been directing this, but I have learned a lot more about economics, basically my knowledge was profoundly lacking in that area. I mean we are fond of telling our students that thermodynamics determines everything that can happen, economics determines everything that will happen.

Tim: Interesting bit. One more question, and this is also from a reader discussion, is: If someone wants to reduce their own personal tie to the world of rare earths, are there things that can be done, people for a while were trying to boycott, but it seems like every gadget you buy every computer, every time you upgrade a component to something, our houses are full of electronics there is no escaping that really, and we are not slowing down. So is there anything that that individuals can do?

Alex: Well, the only way you can avoid reusing rare earths is to go completely off the grid, no electricity, no electrical devices whatsoever, obviously no computer, no cell phone, no lights, you cannot use a lighter, because a flint in a lighter contains rare earths. So basically every technology you have depends in some way on rare earths. In fact, any metal you have whether it be steel or aluminum uses some form of rare earth in its processing usually. So goodbye to all metals, goodbye to most of the ceramic materials, oxides, goodbye to the polymers because a lot of them use rare earths in catalysis. You’d be pretty badly out of luck if you had to deal without rare earths.

Tim: _____17:34 we have all got a pretty strong interest in that supply chain then.

Alex: You should have.

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