Obama Trying To Start A War With China?

Oh geez, Obama is now rattling swords with China  over rare earth metals, desperately trying to save, or shift blame for his failed "green energy" plans.  I have news for the electric car advocates, cheaper, even better batteries won't make them fly.....or even roll out of the showrooms.  Oh, and why doesn't anyone in the mainstream Obama lap-dog media ever ask about where the electricity comes from to charge these marvelous electronic gadgets?  Ummmm......like maybe, largely, from coal-fired power plants?  How "environmental" is that?  It is just plain stupid.
Peter

Obama: Rare-earth case key for U.S. clean energy

12:25 pm ET 03/13/2012 - MarketWatch Pulse News Bullet

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The U.S. will pursue a rare-earth mineral trade case against China at the World Trade Organization because China's export limits have unfairly blocked U.S. domestic manufacturers from accessing the material, which are important components in clean-energy products, President Barack Obama said Tuesday. "Being able to manufacture advanced batteries and hybrid cars in America is too important for us to stand by and do nothing," Obama said. "We can't let that energy industry take root in some other country because they were allowed to break the rules," Obama said.

Neodymium: A Rare Element Which May Be The Weak Link In "Clean" Energy

I have never heard of this element, neodymium, and I had no idea of how rare it is and how vital it is for the manufacture of batteries for hybrid cars and the manufacture of wind turbines. It is ironic how often people, especially those in government, pass laws setting regulations for certain activities without thoroughly examining the consequences. Too often the results are negative and end up costing consumers and taxpayers BILLIONS. Such seems to be the case with this rare element neodymium.

The following article spells out the importance of this element, including its importance to so-called "renewable energy", energy efficient, "clean" or "green" cars, and even international commerce and security concerns. This is something to watch and possibly invest in.
Peter

Hybrid cars and wind turbines need rare-earth minerals that come with their own hefty environmental price tag.

by Lisa Margonelli

Clean Energy's Dirty Little Secret

Photo by Greg Vojtko/The Press Enterprise (source) Atlantic Online

The unincorporated community of Mountain Pass, California, has little to recommend it to tourists. A scraggly outcrop of rocks and Joshua trees alongside Route 15, it has no kitschy landmarks like the 134-foot-tall thermometer that nearby Baker, California, installed in the Mojave Desert, and no casinos like Las Vegas has an hour up the road. But behind a Band-Aid-colored industrial gate lies an attraction of sorts: a 55-acre open-pit mine created by a 21st-century gold rush, one result of the effort to keep the world from getting hotter than it already is.

Mountain Pass’s mine contains a rare-earth ore that yields neodymium, the pixie dust of green tech—necessary for the lightweight permanent magnets that make Prius motors zoom and for the generators that give wind turbines their electrical buzz. In fact, if we are going to make even a few million of the hybrid and electric cars that are supposed to help rescue the planet from global warming, we will need to double production of neodymium in short order.

But in 2006, nearly all of the world’s roughly 137,000-ton supply of rare-earth oxides came from China. And over the past few years, China has cut exports to nurture its own permanent-magnet industry, sending the price of neodymium oxide to a high of $60 a kilo in 2007. This worries analysts like Irving Mintzer, a senior adviser to the Potomac Energy Fund who sees shortages stifling clean-tech industry, and worse. “If we don’t think this through, we could be trading a troubling dependence on Middle Eastern oil for a troubling dependence on Chinese neodymium.”

Rare earths are actually fairly common. What’s rare is finding deposits that can be mined profitably, in part because most contain radioactive thorium. Relatively speaking, Mountain Pass—whose rare-earth deposits were discovered in 1949—is not too radioactive, and through the 1950s the ore was mostly used to make flints for lighters. In the 1960s, the pit grew deeper as demand increased for the rare-earth element europium, which was used to create the red tones in color TVs. In fact, until 1989, the expanding pit at Mountain Pass supplied most of the world’s rare earths.

But in the early 1990s, cheaper Chinese rare earths began eating into the mine’s market share. Deng Xiaoping famously compared China’s abundance of rare earths to the Middle East’s huge oil reserves. As Chinese ore came onto the market, the price fell from $11,700 a ton in 1992 to $7,430 a ton by 1996 (in constant dollars). Amassing strategic supplies suddenly seemed old-fashioned, and the U.S. government began selling off its stocks of minerals.

Mountain Pass couldn’t compete on price alone—especially given the mine’s growing ecological costs. In 1998, chemical processing at the mine was stopped after a series of wastewater leaks. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water carrying radioactive waste spilled into and around Ivanpah Dry Lake.

Mark Smith, the CEO of Molycorp, which bought Mountain Pass in 2000, thinks that the environmental problems that have made the mine’s operation so difficult have largely been resolved, and believes the site can be fully revived. Standing on the edge of what is now a 500-foot-deep pit, he touts his successful negotiations with 18 California regulatory agencies to reopen the mine, and points out some of the company’s newfangled environmental safeguards. (One involves interlocked 18-sided plastic balls floating on standing wastewater pools to limit evaporation and prevent salts from building up after the mine eventually shuts down.) “We want to be environmentally superior, not just compliant. We want to be sustainable and be here for a long time,” he says expansively before talking about opening a permanent-magnet factory employing 900 nearby.

But Smith’s effort to turn Mountain Pass into an environmentally friendly producer—call it the Whole Foods of premium free-range sustainable neodymium—comes with costs his Chinese competitors don’t have to pay: for starters, $2.4 million a year on environmental monitoring and compliance. Will carmakers really be willing to pay more for local minerals and homegrown magnets? “Absolutely,” Smith says, noting that the mine’s historic customers in the U.S. and Japan have given their assurances.

Over the next 30 years, Molycorp is permitted to make its pit 300 feet deeper, which could increase the world’s supply of rare earths by 10 percent or more a year. But the consequences of the nascent green nationalism behind the mine’s revival—a weird amalgam of environmentalism, economics, and national security—will likely be less predictable. Consider the views of the industry analyst Jack Lifton—by no stretch your standard environmental activist (“I don’t give a rat’s ass about global warming”). To protect U.S. industry from supply shocks, he has called on the government to mandate the recycling of strategic minerals. A “bottle bill” for cars, long dismissed as an environmentalist’s dream, is just one possible outcome. Another could be a backlash of resource nationalism in supplier nations like China. As green nationalism’s potent mix of idealism and fear changes the kinds of cars we drive, it also promises to change the course of globalization.

The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/hybrid-cars-minerals

Lithium Mining In Bolivia: Where Environmental Nonsense Can Lead

First we became "addicted" to foreign oil. Now it looks like we're going to be hooked on lithium from Bolivia. And it won't be the lithium used in anti-depressant drugs. Read on. This is fascinating. Does anyone know why this area would contain so much of the element lithium?
Peter

Bolivia holds key to electric car future
By Damian Kahya BBC News, Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia (source)

High in the Andes, in a remote corner of Bolivia, lies more than half the world's reserves of a mineral that could radically reduce our reliance on dwindling fossil fuels.
Lithium carries a great promise. It could help power the fuel efficient electric or petrol-electric hybrid vehicles of the future.
But, as is the case with fossil fuels, it is a limited resource.
Lithium carbonate is already in the batteries of laptop computers and mobile phones.
It is used because it allows more energy to be stored in a lighter, smaller space than most alternatives.
And as the auto industry rushes to produce new fuel efficient and electric cars, it too is turning to lithium batteries as its first choice to boost the power of their new models.

GM has one in its new hybrid Volt, Toyota is testing one in its next generation hybrid Prius. Mercedes is testing an electric version of its Smart, while BMW is doing the same with its Mini.
And Nissan-Renault, Mitsubishi and VW are all rushing to buy or produce enough of the batteries to power their future models.
The best of the pure electric cars can reach ranges of more than 150 kilometres per charge.
More is needed
But there is a problem.
“ This isn't a magic solution ” Luis Alberto Echazu, Bolivian minister for mining
Mitsubishi, which plans to release its own electric car soon, estimates that the demand for lithium will outstrip supply in less than 10 years unless new sources are found.
And they have ended up in Bolivia.
"The demand for lithium won't double but increase by five times," according to Eichi Maeyama Mitsubishi's general manager in La Paz.
"We will need more lithium sources - and 50% of the world's reserves of lithium exist in Bolivia, in the Salar de Uyuni," he adds, pointing out that without new production, the price of lithium will rise prohibitively.

Valuable resource
Lithium is found in rocks and sea water.
But almost all the commercially exploitable reserves are found in the brine under salt flats.
The world's largest reserves lie in Bolivia at the Salar de Uyuni - in the remote southern Andean plane.
But Bolivia is not a country known to be friendly to foreign industry.
Its socialist president, Evo Morales, is keen to expand state control over its natural resources, a task carried out by Bolivia's minister for mining, Luis Alberto Echazu.
"We want to send a message to the industrialized countries and their companies," Mr Echazu says.
"We will not repeat the historical experience since the fifteenth century: raw materials exported for the industrialisation of the west that has left us poor."
(Salt has been gathered from dry lake beds for thousands of years.)

Modest ambitions
Gold, silver, tin, oil and gas have all been found and exported from here whilst the country remains the poorest in the region.
“ They probably don't have a lot of experience of doing this sort of thing themselves so they'll have to bring in expertise and technology ” Charles Kernot, mining analyst, Evolution Securities
For President Morales' supporters, that is reason enough not to allow in foreign mining companies to extract the lithium.
Across the flats, freelance miners work to break up the surface salt selling it to passing trucks for just a few dollars.
Indigenous and poor, they are core supporters of the president.
A grizzled old miner, giving his name only as Alfredo, says he does not believe that lithium will ever be extracted.
"We don't want to see foreign companies here," he says.
"It would be very bad, as the government says."
Alfredo's hopes for the future are modest.
"I just want to work until I die" he says, a smile across his face. It is not an uncommon sentiment here.

Sharing the benefits
In spite of the grinding poverty here, attempts in the 1980's and 1990's by foreign companies to extract the lithium met with resistance from the community.
They say the money would go elsewhere.
Francisco Quisbert is a local activist with President Morales' party who took part in the resistance.
Now he is working with the president to hammer out a new plan for a state-owned pilot plant on the flats.
"We don't want international involvement," he says.
"This plan has raised the hopes of the region.
"Before our grandparents lived on the salt. They arrived from the valleys in caravans of llamas, but the market forced them to leave.
"We want to return to live on the salar [and] improve our living conditions and to participate in the project."
To begin with the pilot plant will produce no more than 1.2 kilotonnes a year.
If an industrial plant is then built it may increase to around 30 kilotonnes by 2012, - thats just under a third of current production.
But most lithium now goes to small batteries for electronic goods.
Car batteries are far larger and Mitsubishi estimates the world will need 500 kilotonnes a year just to service a niche market. For electric cars to become the norm, it could need far more.
Mitsubishi predicts that there will be a supply shortage by 2015.

Pollution nevertheless
Analysts suspect that Bolivia's government can produce this much.
"Governments in South America have had a very successful history of mining," explains Charles Kernot, a mining analyst at Evolution Securities.
But the question is how fast.
"They probably don't have a lot of experience of doing this sort of thing themselves so they'll have to bring in expertise and technology," Mr Kernot adds.
"That whole process may take a lot longer than people are anticipating."
Consequently, he continues, "the car manufacturers will have to strike a balance between how quickly they manufacture with the supply of metal because they don't want to drive the price up to such an extent that the cars get priced out of the market".
Long-term, Bolivia's government is wary of the environmental damage mass extraction could cause. (The salt flats in Bolivia look much like the famous Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, near the Great Salt Lake.)

The mining minister, Mr Eschazu, has a stark message for Western firms.
"The capitalist leaders have to change," he says.
"If all the world had consumers like North America, everyone with a car, it would grind to a halt.
"It is also going to generate pollution, not just from fossil fuels but also from lithium plants, which produce sulphur dioxide. This isn't a magic solution."
It is not a view likely to go down well in the offices of Toyota and General Motors.
Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/7707847.stmPublished: 2008/11/09 16:07:02 GMT