Replacing the Rare Earth Intellectual Capital
The rare earth crisis slowly evolved during a 10 to 15 year period beginning in the mid-1980s, when the Chinese began to export mixed rare earth concentrates. In the early 1990s, they started to move up the supply chain and began to export the individual rare earth oxides and metals. By the late 1990s the Chinese exported higher value products, such as magnets, phosphors, polishing compounds, catalysts; and in the 21st century they supplied finished products including electric motors, computers, batteries, liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), TVs and monitors, mobile phones, iPods and compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) light bulbs. As they moved to higher value products, the Chinese slowly drove the various industrial producers and commercial enterprises in the US, Europe and Japan out of business by manipulating the rare earth commodity prices. Because of this, the technically trained rare earth engineers and scientists who worked in areas from mining to separations, to processing to production, to manufacturing of semifinished and final products, were laid-off and moved to other fields or they retired. However, in the past year the Chinese have changed their philosophy of the 1970s and 1980s of forming a rare earth cartel to control the rare earth markets to one in which they will no longer supply the rest of the world (ROW) with their precious rare earths, but instead will use them internally to meet the growing demand as the Chinese standard of living increases. To this end, they have implemented and occasionally increased export restrictions and added an export tariff on many of the high demand rare earth elements. Now the ROW is quickly trying to start up rare earth mines, e.g. Molycorp Minerals in the US and Lynas Corp. in Australia, to cover this shortfall in the worldwide market, but it will take about five years for the supply to meet the demand, even as other mines in the ROW become productive. Unfortunately, today there is a serious lack of technically trained personnel to bring the entire rare earth industry, from mining to original equipment manufacturers (OEM), up to full speed in the next few years. Accompanying this decline in technical expertise, innovation and new products utilizing rare earth elements has slowed dramatically, and it may take a decade or more to recapture America's leading role in technological advancements of rare earth containing products. Before the disruption of the US rare earth industry, about 25,000 people were employed in all aspects of the industry from mining to OEM. Today, only about 1,500 people are employed in these fields. The ratio of non-technically trained persons to those with college degrees in the sciences or engineering varies from about 8 to 1 to about 4 to 1, depending on the particular area of the industry. Assuming an average of 6 to 1, the number of college degree scientists and engineers has decreased from about 4,000 to 250 employed today. In the magnetic industry the approximate numbers are: 6,000 total with 750 technically trained people in the 1980s to 500 totally employed today of which 75 have degrees. The paucity of scientists and engineers with experience and/or training in the various aspects of production and commercialization of the rare earths is a serious limitation to the ability of the US to satisfy its own needs for materials and technologies (1) to maintain our military strength and posture, (2) to assume leadership in critical energy technologies, and (3) to bring new consumer products to the marketplace. The lack of experts is of even greater national importance than the halting in the 1990s and the recent restart of the mining/benification/separation effort in the US; and thus governmental intervention and support for at least five to 10 years will be required to ameliorate this situation. To respond quickly, training programs should be established in conjunction with a national research center at an educational institution with a long tradition in multiple areas of rare earth and other critical elements research and technology. This center should form close affiliations with other universities, governmental laboratories and non-profit research organizations having complementary strengths. In addition, single investigators or small teams of rare earthers at other universities should be supported by the usual grants from NSF, DOD and DOE. These investigators may or may not be affiliated with the center.