rare earth conference in sydney

China absent at rare-earths conference
BY: COMMODITY WATCH: ROBIN BROMBY From: The Australian February 23, 2012 12:00AM

IT seems an awful lot of fuss over a commodity for which annual production could fit in two Panamax vessels.

But it brought some of the big names in the North American and Australian rare-earths business to Sydney this week, people such as Gareth Hatch of Illinois' Technology Metals Research and Dudley Kingsnorth of Curtin University whose every word is listened to intently.

But no big names from China, which still provides 97 per cent of the world's rare earths. With rare earths, there's China and then there's the rest of the world.

The second IQPC annual rare-earths conference was given a fortuitous prop: a Panamax bulk carrier, so named for the largest ship size that can fit through the Panama Canal, edged slowly under the Sydney Harbour Bridge and past the conference hall windows, allowing the speaker to put this industry into perspective.


With annual world demand for rare earths sitting at 120,000 tonnes, he pointed, that ship alone could transport half the world's production.

Perspective, yes, but we can't function without them. More importantly, you would shelve many clean energy plans if these 17 elements did not exist because new-age cars need rare earths for their engines, and magnets driving wind turbines mean you don't have to install huge mechanical gearboxes on each tower.

Applications multiply: yttrium is used in dental crowns and washing-machine manufacturers use rare-earth magnets in their electric motors to cut noise.

The scale is changing.

It started off with rare earths being used in grams in small devices such as disk drives, then it went to kilograms for hybrid and electric-car engines, and now it's moving into tonnes with direct drive wind turbines.

It will require, for example, hundreds of kilograms of rare earths for all the magnets needed in just one 3MW wind turbine.

With global neodymium production by 2016 estimated to be about 31,500 tonnes and demand at 33,500 tonnes, you can see how one innovation can affect these highly specialist elements. High prices have taken their toll, too.

Last year, Chinese miners were charging between 300 per cent and 1000 per cent more than they had a year earlier, and that encouraged hi-tech manufacturers in China and Japan to adopt a "reduce, recycle and replace" drive.

They dropped the grades of their magnets to use less dysprosium, they invested millions in new plant to recycle cerium (used in glass polishing powders) while Toyota and Nissan are among the carmakers looking to bypass rare-earth magnets in hybrid engines.

Cerium demand has fallen by 60 per cent in the past year and it is estimated cerium will be in oversupply by 2016, yet mines will be producing only about two-thirds of the required europium (it provides the red colour in screens) five years from now.

There's a fair bit of sorting out coming for the industry. Hatch says he's tracking 406 rare-earth projects owned by 251 companies in 36 countries.

Kingsnorth sees three certain, seven possible, new non-China producers by 2016.