Jack Lifton on October 28, 2014 at 9:47 AM said:
Tim,
There simply isn’t enough terbium and dysprosium being produced, and it looks like China cannot and will not increase the production of these. In addition it also even looks like there isn’t enough neodymium and praseodymium to meet the projections of future growth in demand for them. This applies not only for the REPM magnet industry but also for the the nascent and would-be-substantial aluminum and magnesium high strength alloy industries.
The Chinese are well aware of this problem of shortage, and, as I said, are moving into investment in non Chinese sources.
I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I have become suspicious of the low prices of the heavy rare earths, in particular, this year. In a transparent world I would ask China’s national government if it is paying higher prices to producers for the national “stockpile” and then having material directed, instead of to the stockpile, to selected end-users (or at least to the metal makers) at lower “advertised” prices. I don’t know, but China’s goal is to keep the most profitable aspects of the rare earth supply chain domestically in China. What better way to do that than to make certain that overseas production of critical rare earths cannot be economical, and at the same time make overseas investments in rare earth mining that non Chinese investors will not make due to low prices for rare earths.
To break China’s monopoly we need a market, backed by physical metal, outside of China, and a total supply chain outside of China. China knows this and China also knows that Western demands on capital for a “quick” return are of no consequence in a country that measures time in five-year ticks of the clock.
- See more at: investorintel.com/rare-earth-intel/...-patents/#comment-355301