 |
| Rare Earth Elements and the Periodic Table |
From Luann Lasalle, The Canadian Press, October 23, 2010 - 06:00 a.m.
Canada could become a key supplier of rare earth metals for high-tech devices
Article Tools
MONTREAL - Flatscreen TVs, laptops and Apple's iPhones all use rare earth metals, critical to tech devices but largely controlled and produced by China.
It's a market that a number of Canadian companies are trying to enter with their own mining properties in order to compete with and potentially take away market dominance from China.
"The market is only now catching up to the understanding of the sheer importance of these metals," said Peter Cashin, president and CEO of Quest Rare Minerals Ltd. (TSXV:QRM).
Besides TVs, computers and mobile phones, rare earth metals are also used in wind turbines, in iPod earbuds for sound quality, in hybrid electric cars' motors and batteries, and in smart bombs and other defence applications.
China controls about 97 per cent of the production of rare earth metals and has cut back on exports to meet domestic demand and help cut pollution. Japan has been already squeezed in its supply of these metals due to a dispute with China and said Friday it plans to mine for them in Vietnam in a bid to reduce its dependence on the economic powerhouse.
Cashin said he expects to have Quest's Strange Lake property in northeastern Quebec, near the Labrador boundary, in production by 2014 or 2015. He's also interested in finding a partner to refine the metals.
He said there's enough rare earth metals, both light and heavy, at the Quebec property for an estimated 65 to 100 years of production.
"That speaks very well to the security of the supply that's got the United States and other western governments concerned about their ability to obtain those important rare earths," he said.
Though they're called rare earth metals and may have been considered so when they were discovered at the end of the 18th century, they're not actually rare or in short supply.
They're a group of 17 similar metallic elements whose names aren't exactly common to everyday vocabularies, such as cerium, terbium, dysprosium and neodymium.
So-called "heavy" rare earth metals are particularly sought after because they're critical to the production of magnets found in wind turbines, computer hard drives and electric motors, and can tolerate very high temperatures.
Analyst Jack Lifton said the Chinese have cut back on production because they have to meet their own domestic demand and they're worried they're going to run out of the metals.
No comments:
Post a Comment