South Korea's electronic giant, Samsung, has announced a 10-year 1.5 trillion Korean Won commitment (the equivalent of $1.4 billion U.S. dollars) to fund research to replace rare earth elements, thereby reducing the dependence on China as the world's dominant rare earths supplier.
As South Korea's JoongAng Daily reports, "one of the proposed projects will research whether optoelectronics [sic] materials can be used to replace rare earths in hi-tech kit [sic]."
In all likelihood they can. The catch is that optoelectronic devices themselves require a physical means of delivery -- a process that involves a family of devices called transducers. And quite often, these days, transducers depend on ... you guessed it: rare earths.
Case in point: The journal Ferroelectrics documents a piezoelectric transducer breakthrough (the pressure-based transfer of an electrical charge like the touchscreen application in our iPhones), for use in human tissue, in which Lead is replaced by rare earths -- and in this case not just a single element, but by five of the seventeen: Lanthanum, Europium, Neodymium, Samarium and Gadolinium.
As for materials key to acoustic transducers, Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry lists five elements -- Holmium, Cerium, Neodymium, Erbium and Thulium -- in the "high risk" supply shortage category. In each case, that's more rare earths, not less.
Samsung's research investment will yield important discoveries, and may well produce as a "by-product" South Korea's first Nobel laureate in the sciences. It will also succeed in engineering-out rare earths from some -- perhaps many -- present-day applications.
But it's equally likely that research efforts to replace rare earths -- and related research intended to do more with smaller quantities of it -- will only unleash innovation that develops novel, next-gen applications that will still rely on the unique properties of rare earth elements.
A century ago, these critical elements powered lighter flints and London lampposts. 50 years ago, Europium was used to produce the TV tubes that allowed proud color-TV purchasers to see Lucille Ball's red dresses in all of their glory. In our time, rare earths are found by the fraction of a gram in our ear-buds, and by the ton in wind turbines. They're in our MRI machines, our CFL bulbs, our EV batteries, our stealth aircraft and the terminal guidance systems of Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Can't we build a cellphone without rare earths? Of course we can -- and we did. It was about as big as a brick, and slightly less heavy. In the quest for substitution, let's remember that the earths themselves were substitute elements for earlier systems that were larger and less capable.
As for new sources of supply, the Korean report notes Japan's recent Pacific Ocean find of a massive rare earths deposit under the ocean floor. But the deposit is 5000 km from the nearest continental landmass, buried in seabed muck two to three miles below the ocean surface. In addition to the established permitting process, the UN's International Seabed Authority will also need to give its own green light -- once any country on Earth has weighed in, as the deposit lies in the open-ocean "commons," which the Law of the Sea Treaty says belongs equally to all 193 nations. Does anyone care to guesstimate when that project will produce its first rare earths?
In North America, the next rare earths mine slated to begin production is aiming at late 2015; others are aiming for 2016, 2017 and 2018. In the meanwhile, even with the addition of two mines in the U.S and Australia, China continues to supply more than 90 percent of the world's rare earths, and more than 98 percent of the scarce heavy rare earths sub-category.
So by all means, let's commend Samsung -- and even add a dollop of shame directed at U.S. and European companies that aren't funding comparable efforts to advance materials science. But at the end of the day, let's also allow for the possibility -- make that the likelihood -- that the research we fund may only find more uses for rare earths for each substitution we discover.
After all, technology is just one force transforming the world today -- the other is demography. There are two billion people in China and India intent on joining the Middle Class in the next 20 years. Add in the so-called "Next 11" -- Korea itself, plus Mexico, Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, the Philippines and Vietnam -- and that's another 4.5 billion rising consumers. They'll all want the gadgets we have right now -- in versions 2.0 to 20.0.
So unless we believe that we've discovered every conceivable application for the 17 elements on the bottom center of the Periodic Table, we're going to need more rare earths, not less. And unless the scientists at Samsung are working to drive more technology development to China, someone else will need to step in and bring more rare earth mines and separation plants into production.
