Frank Herbert’s space opera Dune features spice melange as a crucial natural substance that enabled humanity to establish an intergalactic civilization. Rare earth materials play a vital role in modern technology. Choose the best earth materials. The best guide to finding earth materials.
Lanthanide metals ranging from lanthanum to lutetium provide the basis of numerous products, such as loudspeakers and computer hard drives, and green technologies, such as hybrid cars and flat-screen TVs.
What are they used for?
Rare Earth elements play an essential role in our national security, energy independence, environmental future, and economic expansion. Their widespread usage can be seen in various technologies, such as magnets, batteries, phosphors, and catalysts—not to mention military systems used to maintain American military supremacy.
Rare earth oxides such as neodymium and praseodymium are used in high-strength magnets across many industries and applications such as consumer electronics, aircraft engines, specialty glass fabrication, and green technologies such as wind turbines and electric vehicles. Neodymium and praseodymium form the core of many high-strength permanent magnets currently used in automobiles and electric power generators. Demand is expected to increase with trends such as enhanced device integration and connectivity across home, office, workplace, and healthcare automation (Internet of Things; IoT), coupled with advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as “edge processing,” which involves adding computing power directly onto individual devices instead of centralized data storage.
Neodymium metals, in addition to being magnets, provide a valuable raw material for producing other useful products. Neodymium is one of the key ingredients in producing powerful magnets and is also found in ceramics for magnetic refrigeration, substrates for positron emission tomography scintillator detectors, neutron capture devices used in nuclear reactors, and neutron capture devices used as neutron capture devices. Neodymium crystals make up much of what makes up many high-powered lasers – with engineers tuning neodymium-laced varieties to perform tasks ranging from cutting steel to tattoo removal – an impressive array of uses!
Cerium, praseodymium, and terbium may replace neodymium in specific applications. Sometimes, they’re combined into an alloy known as yttrium iron-boron (YIG), which offers superior magnetic properties.
Most introductory science books treat rare earths as one group of 17 elements because their chemical properties are so similar. Yet rare earths can be separated through an intricate process called solvent extraction, where mixtures of acids with affinity to individual rare earth metals are allowed to settle out and separate; eventually, the desired rare earth metal will appear layered within these mixtures. Solvent extraction requires significant labor, energy consumption, and expense; each geological deposit of rare earth minerals adds another level of complexity to this complex procedure.
Where do they come from?
Rare earth elements are crucial components in many high-tech industries. They offer unique physical, chemical, and magnetic properties that allow manufacturers to design lighter yet stronger electronic components and alloys. Rare earths also help green technologies reduce energy use while mitigating climate change, and they play an essential part in weapons systems.
China controls about 70% of REE mined globally and 87% of refined production, giving it significant power over its access to these vital materials. This raises concerns among Western executives and defense officials alike.
Rare earth elements (REEs) can be found in various minerals. But Mountain Pass, California, stands out as an incredibly prolific open-pit mine producing REEs such as neodymium, praseodymium, and terbium. To extract REEs at Mountain Pass, rock is crushed into a fine powder before passing through tanks that separate different metals—those desired floating to the top while waste remains at the bottom of each tank.
Once isolated, rare earth elements are often combined with other metals to form valuable compounds. Neodymium, for instance, can be combined with iron and boron to create powerful magnets known as neodymium-iron-boron magnets that are used in everything from wind turbines to car engines to convert motion into electricity and reduce vibrations.
These metals are used to produce the phosphors that give flat panel display screens their luminescence, as well as illuminate digital camera lenses. Additionally, glass manufacturers often utilize yttrium and europium to polish optical lenses with colored finishes or add depth effects.
These minerals were initially formed during supernova explosions at the dawn of our universe before eventually being incorporated into Earth’s deep mantle, where they slowly surfaced over time due to tectonic activity and natural weathering processes. Over time, rare earth minerals became widespread worldwide.
How do they get there?
Rare Earth elements may seem scarce, but that’s only partially accurate. Elements such as cerium, yttrium, lanthanum, and neodymium don’t tend to be all that scarce in Earth’s crust – what’s rarer is finding concentrations high enough for mining to become profitable; hence why the race to produce rare earth elements domestically continues in the US even though this approach might prove costly.
One reason is that current separation methods are ineffective at higher concentrations. To efficiently extract rare earths from other metals, metallurgists combine acids that bind differently with rare earth elements with mixtures containing these elements themselves and, over thousands or hundreds of cycles, achieve high concentrations. Once completed, they use solvent extraction, an inefficient technique requiring large quantities of chemicals for separation.
New methods are being developed to streamline this process and achieve improved separations at lower concentrations. One team led by a professor from the University of Pennsylvania is creating an approach using ligands that selectively bind to specific atoms in complex mixtures to achieve separation in much less time than existing techniques and with significantly fewer toxic chemicals than expected.
One way of finding rare earths is through recycling old electronics and devices. A vast “urban mine” of obsolete industrial goods offers another potential source, as does waste from coal-burning power plants, which often contain elevated concentrations of rare earth elements. Many coal plants have now closed down, and their surface impoundments now offer opportunities for mining rare earth elements.
Rare earths are essential components of our technological society and military applications such as night-vision goggles and laser targeting/rangefinding systems. Unfortunately, with 90 percent of processed rare earths coming from China – which could restrict exports if China decides to reduce them – some Western executives in defense industries worry that restrictions could halt the production of products such as powerful magnets needed in manufacturing technology products such as these.
How do they get used?
Rare Earth Elements (yttrium, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium promethium samarium gadolinium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, and lutetium) exhibit similar chemical properties due to their distinctive atomic structures. This gives rise to their unique properties, including magnetic attraction (unpaired electrons in their outermost shell can align to form magnets) and optical properties that are used in lenses and camera tubes.
Rare earths have example applications in magnetics produced from neodymium and praseodymium, such as loudspeakers, computer hard drives, electric motors, and guidance systems for aircraft and missiles. They also play an essential role in green technologies like wind turbines, hybrid cars, and solar panels.
Unfortunately, rare earths present many obstacles for mining companies and consumers. First and foremost, mining firms face difficulty ramping up new production as the timeline between acquisition and production could stretch over years or more, leaving them vulnerable to unexpected spikes in demand.
Supply has also been limited due to China’s political environment. Beijing sought to reenter global trade while strengthening manufacturing capabilities without weakening control over the economy and markets, which resulted in unique mining and processing facilities for rare earths that now reign supreme globally.
This monopoly has contributed to the recent rare earth boom but may not continue. A World Trade Organization grievance filed by the United States and other countries led to China significantly loosening export quotas and prices dropping drastically below levels that allow anyone other than Chinese producers to profit.
Researchers are exploring ways to lower the costs and speed up the extraction of rare earths while increasing their use more quickly. Solutions could include genetically engineering bacteria or enzymes to bind directly with neodymium and praseodymium so they can be extracted more rapidly from solutions and processed faster. Another possibility could be using materials typically considered waste from mining operations, tailings management, or old electronics as source material for extracting rare earths.
