Five things to know about rare earth elements

UW-Madison Professor Julie Klinger shares her expertise on a resource that is reshaping geopolitics.

Aside from oil, rare earth elements may be the most buzzworthy thing coming out of the ground these days. Headlines trumpet news about new partnerships to produce rare earths, warn of potential shortages and analyze steps to curb China's role in rare earth markets.

What are rare earth elements? Where do they come from? What's the big deal? Julie Klinger, associate professor at UW-Madison's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, explored these questions and more in her 2018 book "Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes." Recently, she's been making the media rounds, including with an essay in the New York Times and an interview that is expected to air on CBS' "60 Minutes" this Sunday. Ahead of that, we spoke with Klinger to be break down everything you need to know about rare earth elements - and the geopolitical concerns around them.

1. Everyday devices are possible because of rare earths.

The phrase "rare earth elements" generally refers to 17 chemical elements, including Scandium, Yttrium and a 15-member family from atomic number 57 (Lanthanum) to 71 (Lutetium) called the lanthanides.

Many of them share magnetic, conductive and optical properties that make them useful as coatings and additives in alloys and glass and other materials used in a wide range of modern technology. These include jet engines, LED bulbs, fiber-optic cables, lasers and a lot of military technology.

"In some of those applications, it's safe to say rare earths are irreplaceable," Klinger says. "For example, neodymium and praseodymium make super powerful magnets that have enabled the miniaturization of technologies in phones and computers. These really powerful magnets make the magic happen in high-speed trains and MRI machines, too."

Not every application feels particularly high-tech. Seat belts in cars also use rare earth magnets.

"It's not due to a particular engineering need either," Klinger says. "It turns out that when folks were developing the seat belt retracting mechanism, that was the type of magnet they had on the shelf."

2. "Rare" is a misnomer.

Rare earths are not, in fact, particularly rare. The rare earths name is a holdover from the 18th century, when Yttrium was discovered by a miner in Sweden. These elements were "rare" then, because nobody had seen them before. But now we know they can be found around the globe.

"Seventeen elements is actually a sizable chunk of the periodic table," Klinger says. "We're talking about a fair amount of the stuff that makes up the Earth's crust, from an elemental and mineralogical standpoint. The rare earths that we use most commonly are as abundant as copper or lead."

They're just not particularly fun to dig up.

"The geological conditions that cause rare earths to come together in higher concentrations can also concentrate radioactive materials," Klinger says. "That makes them hard to mine safely, and can really increase costs."

That doesn't mean rare earths are expensive. They're actually relatively cheap, according to Klinger, trading at prices far lower than precious metals like gold or platinum. In China, which has 30% of the world's proven rare earth reserves, mines typically discard as much as half of the rare earths they dig up, because prices aren't high enough to put the effort into recovering more.

3. Rare earths may seem so scarce because "Avatar" was so popular.

In December 2009, the sci-fi film "Avatar" was released, and it remained the most popular film in U.S. theaters for months. The plot was built around humans displacing a native race on another planet to make way for mining a fabulously valuable material called "unobtanium."

In 2010, in the real world, a diplomatic dispute led China to cut off Japan's access to rare earth elements - a very temporary blow (the embargo didn't even last as long as "Avatar" did as the No. 1 film) to Japanese tech manufacturers.

"There were headlines that said something like 'China cuts off access to unobtanium,' " Klinger says. "Our popular imagination was kind of primed by the movie, and then this short-term crisis happened. The narrative - which has continued to support a lot of other politics over the years - stuck, and it's been hard to get unstuck."

4. It's unlikely one country would just turn off the rare earths tap.

While China does have ample rare earths reserves, we know the elements are distributed all around the world. Aside from China's willingness to take on the environmental price of rare earths mining, the real source of the country's market dominance is the expertise and infrastructure it has developed to process what it mines.

"Where China does have an outsized share of the rare earth economy is in the crucial intermediate steps involved in transforming a rock in the ground into useful technological components," Klinger says.

Other countries and industries have supported the establishment of China's rare earths strength by continuing to trade for the materials, and maintaining those trading relationships is important for everyone.

"Price squeezes and supply chain concerns tend to be episodic rather than sustained," Klinger says. "Buyers and sellers like to be connected. If you're a seller located in China with buyers located outside China, you don't want to be cut off. There's pressure in China to avoid longer term trade wars that might hurt domestic businesses."

5. Abandoned mines could be a rare earths gold mine - and sustainable solution - for the U.S.

A recent study showed that much of the domestic demand for rare earths (and other important minerals) can be satisfied by recovering the rare earth elements from the waste piled up around old and active mines in the United States.

"A lot of these materials are already present in what was cast off by other mines," Klinger says. "Maybe we could actually get what we need by cleaning up these long standing, problematic, abandoned mine waste sites. It could literally be trash to treasure."

That's where Klinger's research comes in. One of her areas of study is the resource requirements of technology required to transition away from fossil fuels and mitigate climate change. Will it take some deforestation to save more forests? How much of the raw materials like rare earths needed for solar arrays and wind farms are already being used in climate-harming technologies - like the equipment needed to pump oil out of the ground and refine it?

The good news, according to Klinger, is that there are ways forward for rare earths and other critical resources that support other important environmental imperatives.

"We really can shift to a circular economy paradigm while also building out the technologies that we need, while also protecting sensitive environmental areas, while also cleaning up heavily contaminated areas," she says. "That's entirely possible. In fact, doing all of those things together is the best way to get them done."