October 22, 2010

A Wall Street Journal poll has highlighted that 82% of people are concerned about China's control over rare earth resources. "For months, Japan, the U.S. and the European Union have braced for less supply from China, which dominates the market with up to 97% of world production, and whose export quotas for this year are nearly exhausted. The materials are used for high-tech products including batteries and hybrid cars. Could China's control over the market  hurt other countries technologically?"

October 22, 2010

David Kolman, editor of Fleet Magazine published an article on Electric Vehicles in the October edition of the periodical. He writes in the print edition:

Commercial Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles are being manufactured in a variety of technologies, shapes and sizes, suited to a wide range of uses.

Light duty electric vehicles for the commercial industry have advanced into a reliable and marketable product. Electric vehicles are being manufactured in multiple configurations and for diverse applications. The evolution of electric vehicle technology is ever going forward, and developments make electric traction technology already suitable for many applications.

(Resources that were most helpful in providing information and material for this article included Yaron Vorona, TREM Center Director, Institute for the Analysis of Global Security; the Electric Drive Transportation Association; and Robert Stüssi, mobility consultant and president of the European Association for Battery, Hybrid and Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles, and vice president of the World Electric Vehicle Association.)

Full text here: http://www.fleetmag.com/print/Fleet-Maintenance/Commercial-Electric-Vehicles/1$4562

In his blog, Kolman continues with the following

Electric vehicle technologies

During my research for the feature on commercial electric vehicles that will appear in Fleet Maintenance Magazine’s October issue of, I had a conversation with Yaron Vorona, director of the TREM Center, Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS), about electric vehicle technologies.

TREM (Technology & Rare Earth Metals) and IAGS are essential parts of the clean technology and defense industries.

The mission of the IAGS TREM Center (tremcenter.org) is to create a forum where policymakers and companies from the minerals, defense technology, cleantech, automotive and finance sectors can advance policies that ensure secure and diverse supply chains for technology metals.

The TREM Center hosts regular meetings on policy developments in Washington, DC, and abroad. In addition to holding annual TREM conferences in Washington, it holds periodic briefings for members of Congress, their staffs and various branches of the Administration.

The TREM Center also conducts research and issues reports on related issues and convenes stakeholder task forces.

The Institute for the Analysis of Global Security is a non-profit organization which directs attention to the strong link between energy and security, and provides a stage for public debate on the various avenues to strengthening the world’s energy security.

Basically, there are four main types of electric vehicles: pure electric vehicles (also known as battery electric vehicles); hybrid vehicles; plug-in hybrid electric vehicles; and fuel cell vehicles.

I asked Vorona which of these four technologies holds more promise than the others.

In the short term, he said he believes the best technology lies with plug-in hybrid flex-fuel vehicles. Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles allow the driver to travel shorter distances (30-50 miles, depending on the battery) using battery power only. After that, propulsion is provided by an internal combustion engine.

“Using flex-fuel technology gives the driver or fleet manager the power to choose what fuel to use on any given day, depending on the price and availability of fuel,” Vorona told me. “The decision at the pump will sound something like this: ‘Do I want to fill up on Saudi oil, American corn, Brazilian Sugar, Israeli algae or Canadian switchgrass today?’”

This kind of choice only costs $100 extra per car to produce flex-fuel vehicles, according to Vorona.

“In the medium term, the future is electric,” he said. “Battery electric vehicles will likely be the driving force behind transportation - pardon the pun. Advances are constantly being made to charge times, energy densities and lifespan in terms of both time and charge/discharge cycles.”

Full text here: http://www.fleetmag.com/interactive/2010/10/01/electric-vehicle-technologies/

Calls on the President and Congress to take Immediate Action

October 20, 2010

(WASHINGTON) - Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO) issued the following statement after media reports surfaced that the Chinese government was halting exports to the United States of critical rare earth metals:

“Reports that the Chinese government has expanded its rare earths embargo, blocking shipments to the U.S. and announcing it will cut exports of these critical materials by up to 30 percent next year as retribution for currency and trade disputes are extremely disturbing.  It is absolutely critical to our national security that the president and this Congress take immediate action to protect U.S. interests.”

“In the short term, it is incumbent upon the president to make this a national issue and ensure our national security interests are not beholden to the Chinese.  As a long term solution, I am reiterating my call that Congress immediately pass the RESTART Act.  The looming crisis can be averted, but America must act now.”

“Every day that passes without the U.S. taking significant action to restart a domestic rare earths industry, our national security is placed in greater jeopardy and we become further beholden to a nation that time and time again shows they are not a reliable ally or trading partner. Make no mistake, the threat that reliance on China for rare earths poses to both U.S. economic and national security is real.”

Coffman is the author of H.R. 4866, Rare Earths Supply-Chain Technology and Resources Transformation (RESTART) Act.   Coffman previously introduced legislation included in last year’s defense authorization bill requiring the Comptroller General to determine the extent to which specific military weapons systems are currently dependent upon rare-earth materials and the degree to which U.S. is dependent upon sources that could be interrupted or disrupted.  That report was completed in April of this year and the Department of Defense is currently undertaking their own study, due to be completed in the coming weeks.

Read the original here:

http://coffman.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=366:october-20-2010-coffman-slams-chinese-for-rare-earths-freeze&catid=36:latest-news&Itemid=10

U.S. should restart mining to end vulnerability

By Gal Luft and Yaron Vorona - The Washington Times

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Original article here:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/oct/20/chinas-rare-earth-monopoly/

Earlier this year, China announced a 72 percent reduction in the export quotas for rare-earth metals for the second half of 2010, sending tremors across America's industrial complex. Rare earths are a group of 17 metals vital to the production of precision-guided munitions, cruise missiles, radar and other defense systems as well as consumer electronics and renewable-energy technologies such as wind turbines, solar panels and hybrid vehicles. Such metals are often compared to the yeast in bread - small in proportion but huge in contribution.

The rationale behind Beijing's decision to cut exports: China produces 97 percent of the world's rare earths, and its fast economic growth requires that more of its metals production remain at home for domestic use. But last month's unofficial embargo on shipment of rare-earth elements to Japan in response to the detention of a Chinese fishing-boat captain whose boat collided with a Japanese patrol boat shows that for China, rare-earth metals are not only iPod ingredients but also tools of economic warfare. As Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping noted in 1992: "The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths."

It is not the first time China has signaled its readiness to use its rare-earth monopoly in such a way. Last summer, when the Obama administration imposed import tariffs on Chinese tires, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology floated a proposal suggesting that the export of the rarest of the rare earths be terminated immediately.

China's domination over a global supply of raw materials key to America's military-industrial complex and its demonstrated readiness to use this domination as a weapon are undeniably a national-security vulnerability. Because of rare earths' unique role in maintaining America's technology work force, qualitative military edge and energy future, Washington should work to diversify America's technology metals supply chain and remove obstacles to building a competitive domestic rare-earth mining, processing and refining industry.

This should not be a tall order. After all, one-fifth of the world's known commercially available non-Chinese rare-earth reserves are concentrated in the United States. In fact, until the 1970s, the California-based Mountain Pass Mine (then owned by Chevron) was the world's largest supplier of rare earths. But in the decades since, China's lower production cost because of weak environmental enforcement and significant wage differentials has brought the U.S. rare-earth industry to extinction.

To restore America's industrial sovereignty, the U.S. should emulate China's success in taking over the rare-earths market. China has always ensured that its defense and energy policies are harmonized with supplementary resource policies that provide abundant raw materials of all sorts. The U.S. government, on the other hand, has no such policy synchronization. An April 2010 report by the Government Accountability Office stated that despite the metals' importance to national security, "the Department of Defense has not yet taken department-wide action to address rare earth material dependency."

Another reason for China's domination is research. China has two national laboratories devoted entirely to rare earths, and the Chinese Society of Rare Earths has 100,000 registered researchers. About 50 foreign companies are operating in the 3,850-acre Baotou Rare Earth Hi-Tech Zone in China's Inner Mongolia. Like China, the United States should support basic research and development and invest in academic activities that advance the domestic supply chain, primarily developing industrial processes that are less rare-earth intensive. The United States also should create geographic centers of excellence to improve methods for the extraction, processing, use and recycling of rare-earth materials.

Like China, the U.S. government also could support domestic rare-earth projects by streamlining the regulatory process associated with reviewing and approving permits for specific rare-earth mines located within the country, as well as through loan guarantees for domestic and international non-Chinese developments. The Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corp. (JOGMEC) and the Korean Resources Corp. (KORES), state-owned entities that provide assistance to Japanese and Korean companies in securing supplies of mineral resources, are one model to consider. With JOGMEC's support, Japanese companies struck a deal to set up a rare-earth mine in Vietnam and are working on a similar effort in Australia. KORES, for its part, this summer bought a 60 percent stake in a Chinese rare-earth company. These operations will ensure metals supply for Japan's and Korea's auto industries.

Ultimately, the responsibility for ensuring a supply chain of raw materials falls on the defense, automotive, electronics and energy industries. They need to recognize the risks of having a single source for their raw materials and invest in mitigating those risks. But industry cannot address this vulnerability alone. It is up to Washington to break China's rare-earth monopoly and ensure that American technology manufacturers never find themselves in the same situation their Japanese colleagues just faced.

Gal Luft is executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS), and Yaron Vorona is director of the Center for Technology and Rare Earth Metals (TREM).