The combination of dire economic news and equally dire environmental news over the last few years has focused attention on a hitherto little-known resource known as rare earth metals.
This is because the 17 metals in the rare earth portfolio are crucial to much of 21st Century technology and particularly for clean energy technology and as investors look for new opportunities in an uncertain economic world the rare earth metals have risen to prominence along with their value.
This is in part because they have to be extracted as a by-product from mined ores in which they are only present as small traces, making extraction a complex and costly business. But it is also because currently they are most widely available only in one country, China, which also has the most advanced technology for extracting and producing them in viable quantities.
Although the USA may also have sufficient potential mining locations to make rare earth extraction from ores viable, the lead development time and the environmental pollution concerns that will require the issue of permits, make it unlikely that there will be any significant production of rare earth metals in the USA within ten years.
Another option may be to develop more efficient recycling of REMs from discarded products, but at the moment China is responsible for 94-97% of the world's stock of these essential ingredients.
Without rare earth metals it would not be possible to manufacture, solar panels, hybrid cars, mobile phones, televisions and wind turbines to name just a few products that require their use in some components.
The US newspaper the Denver Times recently reported that the US manufacturing sector was dangerously dependent on the import of these raw materials. Its dependence on imports of gallium, for example is at 94 percent.
It is an interesting substance that is only found in Aluminium, Zinc and Germanium ores and only at a maximum concentration 0.01 percent. Its existence was first predicted by Dmitri Mendeleev but it was actually only successfully extracted from Zinc by the chemist, Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran, in 1875 in the small town of Cognac in France's Bordeaux region.
Gallium gets its name from the Latin name for France, Gallia. This is a silvery, glass-like, soft metal with a melting point of near room temperature. Like water, it expands when it freezes and in this state it is also very brittle.
Alloys containing gallium are used in some medical thermometers as non-toxic substitutes for mercury and it is also used in some pharmaceuticals. Alloys of various kinds containing gallium are essential for the production of semiconductor and the major-use compound is gallium arsenide, which is used in microwave circuitry and infrared applications. The blue and violet light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and diode lasers are created with gallium nitride and indium gallium nitride.
This rare earth metal also plays an important part in powering satellites where multijunction photovoltaic cells are made of thin films of gallium arsenide, indium gallium phosphide or indium gallium arsenide and was used in the Mars Exploration Rovers.
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Gallium is one of 17 rare earth metals that are currently making headlines as good investments with a rising value. By Ali Withers. http://www.denver-trading.com
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