RareMetalBlog

BLOG: Rare Earths - The View From China

Last week the Chinese publication "The People's Daily Online" published a short article called "Overproduction of rare earth keeps prices low", which gives an interesting snap shot of at least semi-official thinking within the PRC, on this subject.

The author says that

China has no pricing right and discourse power in international markets. China's rare-earth has been sold as cheap as cabbages in the past two decades.

The author goes on to lament that

China's rare earth industry is facing a non-profit dilemma. And foreign countries took their chance hoarding much of the market supply. [...] Energy experts warn that with the current mining rate, mining area in Baiyunebo, China's Inner Mongolia will turn to non-rear-earth in the coming 30 years. Rare-earth resources in Jiangxi will be exhausted in the next 20 years and China's world largest tungsten resources will also be exhausted in 14 years.

An interesting glimpse into the Chinese perspective...  The full article is available here.

-- Gareth Hatch

MEDIA: Great Western Minerals Group President Jim Engdahl Featured on Financial Sense

Please click here to listen to Great Western Minerals Jim Engdahl's President's message on Financial News. (Please note, interview starts 28 minutes through audio clip)

MEDIA: LED Technology Reaches Out Everywhere

The world is certainly a big place, and at times there may be some of us who forget that CleanTech related subjects impact communities outside North America, China and Japan, and Western Europe. I came across the following article on EthioPlanet over the weekend. EthioPlanet News is a source for Ethiopian News topics (updated daily) and discussion from the Horn of Africa-Ethiopia. (It probably caught my eye as I was involved in an electric power project in Addis Ababa in the late 80s/early 90s.)

The following Guide to LED Technology provides a reasonably good synopsis on LED technology, and a couple of applications -- lighting and television:

“LEDs have risen from their original occupation as humble indicator lamps to serving as the light source for some of today’s most advanced TVs. Electronics engineers prize the LED for its brightness and cool-running efficiency. Environmentalists and utility companies tout its low power consumption. Videophiles are warming to it for the performance enhancements it facilitates.

And average consumers love the way it has slimmed their new TVs. In this article, we’ll explain how the LED works; how it’s used in current-model TVs and in the latest video projectors; and how it’s likely to be used in future displays. Of course, we can’t say exactly what the LED’s future in video will be, but we can say with a great deal of confidence that within the next 10 years, you’ll own at least one LED-based TV — if you don’t have one already.

LED Basics
LED is the acronym for light-emitting diode. A diode is the simplest type of semiconductor. Rather than control the flow of electrons, as a transistor does, a diode just conducts electricity in one direction and blocks it in the other. It’s made from a semiconducting material such as gallium arsenide or indium gallium nitride, combined with another substance that changes its electrical properties to suit the task at hand.

About a century ago, scientists discovered that diodes emit infrared light as an electrical current passes through them. In the 1960s, several companies developed diodes that produced visible light, and the LED was born. Early LEDs were dim and mostly limited in color to red, green, and amber. Despite these restraints, LEDs quickly replaced incandescent light bulbs for use as indicator lights, primarily because they last so much longer. Almost all LEDs have lifetimes specified in tens of thousands of hours, and some are even rated to last 100,000 hours or longer. In the 1980s and 1990s, brighter LEDs emerged, along with LEDs in white, blue, and other colors. These breakthroughs caught the attention of video engineers. As display technologies evolved away from light-emitting cathode-ray tubes toward “light valve” technologies such as LCD and DLP, engineers needed a cool-running, efficient, reliable light source. LED delivers on all three.

Interestingly, most white LEDs are actually blue LEDs coated with a yellow phosphor. Some of the photons emerging from the blue LED excite the yellow phosphor, thus producing yellow photons, which combine with the blue photons to produce white light. By fine-tuning the underlying blue LEDs’ color and the phosphor formulation, LED makers are able to deliver white light pure enough to drive high-quality video displays. In fact, white LED light is even broader in spectrum than the light from the cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFLs) used as backlights in most LCD TVs. LEDs can therefore produce a wider range of colors.

LED Meets TV
In video displays, LEDs are now used in several different ways. For the most part, they serve merely as a light source rather than as a way to reproduce individual pixels of video. But they can also produce images directly, rather than just working in tandem with other display technologies such as LCD.
For now, the video industry uses LEDs primarily as a CCFL backlight alternative for LCD panels. LED-driven LCD sets first appeared about 2 years ago, and they have since taken over much of the high-end LCD TV market. However, the cost is still high and overall market penetration is low; they currently account for only about 3 percent of total LCD TV sales.

LEDs have three general advantages over CCFLs: They’re more energy-efficient, they allow for a slimmer chassis, and they deliver a wider color gamut (or range of available colors). They can have other advantages, too, depending on how the TV is designed.

Some confusion has occurred in the labeling of these LED-driven TVs, which could fairly be called LED/LCD TVs. Samsung has heightened the confusion by labeling these displays LED TV, which most video experts consider a misleading moniker. Generally, a true LED TV is defined as one in which the pixels are formed from individual LEDs. Each pixel is self-illuminating and requires no backlight.”

Rare earth enabled technologies certainly know no geographical or community boundaries.

If you would like to see the original article, please click http://www.ethioplanet.com/news/2009/11/05/guide-to-led-technology/

Until soon… Ian

NEWS: Independent NI 43-101 Mineral Resource Estimate for Ivanhoe Australia's Merlin Project completed

November 9, 2009 (Source: Ivanhoe) - Estimate Incorporates Only 115 of a Total 160 Drill Holes

Little Wizard and Recent Deeper Eastern Drilling not Included
 
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - Peter Reeve, Chief Executive Officer, of Ivanhoe Australia Limited (IAL), announced today that an Independent NI 43-101 Mineral Resource estimate, released by Ivanhoe Mines, has confirmed the company's Merlin Project, in northwestern Queensland, as the world's highest-grade, combined source of molybdenum and rhenium.

Merlin's Identified Mineral Resource estimate (based on an updated JORC equivalent estimate) at a 0.1% Mo cut-off is:

16 million tonnes at 0.6% molybdenum, 10 g/t rhenium, 0.2% copper and 3 g/t silver.

The estimate has confirmed that the metal content of the Merlin deposit for both molybdenum and rhenium positions Merlin as a globally significant source of these metals.

MEDIA: German Industries Concerned About Supply of REE

Our friend Graeme Irvine, author of the London Irvine Report alerted us to the news item in yesterday’s Der Spiegel on rare earths. Germany is a leader in green issues including energy from solar and wind sources. There is concern being voiced in that country about supply of strategic metals.

The article written by Alexander Jung and Wieland Wagner notes that ...”a Mercedes S 400 Hybrid contains about half a kilogram (1.1 pounds) of neodymium. Even larger amounts are consumed by the wind turbine industry, where the rule of thumb is that about 200 kilos of neodymium are needed for each megawatt of electricity generated. The turbines' giant generators, up to five meters (16 feet) in diameter, generate up to five megawatts each.”

"We are watching China carefully," says European sales director Helmut Dönges of Vacuumschmelze, known as VAC, a company with 3,800 employees that specializes in the production of permanent magnets.

The article in its entirety may be accessed by clicking here.

MEDIA: Researchers see the light on a new generation of LED lamps

“Professor Colin Humphreys of the University of Cambridge has seen the light. By growing gallium nitride LEDs on silicon wafers rather than expensive sapphire, he's planning to put compact fluorescent lamps into the shade. A next-generation LED production technology will eventually see today's compact fluorescents going the same way as Thomas Edison's incandescent bulbs.”... or so notes Michael Pollitt, in his article in the UK’s Guardian on Oct 21st.

Mr. Pollitt was reporting on the work being done at the Cambridge Centre for Gallium Nitride, which is supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council funding. He specifically refers to the cutting edge research which indicates that GaN is really capable of. Pollitt notes: “Humphreys's interest in gallium nitride (GaN) goes back to the mid-90s when he first investigated the man-made material with an electron microscope. As well as emitting a brilliant light, it is an important semiconducting material for high-power transistors.

Working with GaN-based light emitting diodes requires highly specialist equipment capable of growing the semiconductor crystals. "Something like 90% of commercial LEDs are grown on two-inch diameter sapphire wafers," says Humphreys. "To grow gallium nitride you have to grow it at about 1,000°C." Indium is added for a brilliant visible light – 10% for a blue light, 20% for green – with a phosphor coating on the LED changing this to white.”
 
But why use sapphire in the first place? It's an unreactive base material stable at the high gas temperatures used to form the GaN crystals. Humphreys says that a two-inch sapphire wafer costs $50 with an industry standard six-inch silicon wafer costing $15.
 
If you try and deposit GaN onto a silicon wafer to save money, differential thermal expansions between the materials result in a bent wafer with numerous defects in the neat rows of 1 mm2 LEDs. But by using an additional "compressive" layer of aluminium gallium nitride and other techniques, Humphreys has successfully overcome these problems.
 
"Effectively, you get at least as 10 times as many useful LEDs from a six-inch wafer as from a two-inch wafer." He also reckons the production costs for a finished LED lightbulb may fall by a factor of five.
 
LEDs offer three times the efficiency of compact fluorescent lamps and 12 times that of incandescents. They also switch on instantly, are dimmable, and last for 100,000 hours.”
 
The complete Pollitt article in the Guardian can be found by clicking on http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/oct/21/led-lamps-gallium-nitride
 
Until soon... Ian