America's New Energy Dependency: China's Metals

Vanadium in Africa will fuel future eCars and offer storage for the Smart Grid

Lucky for USA the world's largest low-cost deposit of vanadium was discovered just couple months ago by Uranium Star Corp (URST on the OTCBB) www.uraniumstar.com Vanadium is poised to be in the next generation of car batteries. It is also the only battery that we know of today that is completely scalable and ideal for load-leveling which allows renewable facilities to become more than just 10-20% of the national power grid - a goal according to Obama. If you want to follow the progress and news around vanadium batteries, follow my tweets @VanadiumJoe on Twitter. It is exciting times for green economy investing and vanadium is still under the radar but not for long.

Vanadium Joe

US Companys are private

but Great Western Minerals from Canada www.gwmg.ca has a Rare Earth deposit in Utah and 3 in Canada.

1200 square mile deposit of rare earth gold

Wr Grace tried to lease some of this property many years ago when the produced the rare earth metals. This area, Rhone Polnic a French company was going to recovery the rare earth metals. This area has had extensive drilling and many reports on the heavy mineral suit and gold that is in this 30 mile by 40 mile deposit. I would think that a deposit of this size would be one of the largest in the world., and would worry China very much. The technology is already known how to produce the rare earth metals from this deposit. Most of the area contains enough gold to pay for mining and milling and show a profit.

Australia has Rare Earths and could be the major producer

We recently did a study on the world distribution of Rare Earths deposits and found that Australia has substantial quantities of mine grade rare earth deposits.

In fact Australian listed ASX companies control almost as much rare earths as China...

There are three Australian compnaies that have large Australian deposits and one very small by market cap company ASX:Code: GGG that owns the very large Greenland deposit (that may not be able to be mined due to political concerns)

To get an understanding of these issues please vist: http://www.australianrareearths.com/current-issues.html

<img src=http://www.australianrareearths.com/images/rees-update1.gif> if the image doesn't show cut and past this http://www.australianrareearths.com/images/rees-update1.gif

Nothing So Rare As A Real Shortage

I have seen some other articles on this topic lately. I find it to be of concern, but I also think it may be a bit of a "tempest in a teapot". Economic and political forces may make it impossible for China to cut off supplies of critical materials to the rest of the world. Even if the costs of some of these materials increase 10X, many users may be largely indifferent because they use only small amounts.

There are a number of steps that can be taken to ameliorate the situation:

1) Stockpile - Western governments (including Japan) can stockpile years' of strategic supplies of these materials as a hedge against China shutting them off. This makes at least as much sense as a strategic petroleum reserve.

2) Exploration and mining: the fact that it currently takes 8-12 years to open a mine doesn't mean that the process can't be expedited

3) RECYCLING: One big difference between rare earth metals and oil/coal/natural gas is that we don't burn metals up. Not much discussed, but possible shortages might be another rationale for developed countries to STOP shipping their electronic junk to 3rd world hell-holes and work on processes to recover more of the metals here at home - for the US better for the global environment and American jobs.

4) Alternatives: with some time, creativity and ENERGY, substitutes can be found for most anything. It just may be that the results will be bulkier, heavier, less efficient, etc.

Let's think of how to solve the problem, not just wring our collective hands.

necessity of the rare metals

Would the US really be in a crisis if we could not obtain iPODs blackberrys or plasma TVs?

American Rare Earth Metals - China's Monopoly

Thank you Mr. Garber for your insightful article, I believe that you have constructed a perceptive chronicling another pending US resource disaster. Much of our nation’s leadership has become so apathetic to the significance of our strategic natural resources that we may very well be subjected to another foreign monopoly.

Kudos to Rep. Mike Coffman of Colorado and Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana for their legislative proposals and I hope that your article will garner interest in the US holdings of Molycorp and Thorium Energy, Inc. Please continue to write of the urgency in preserving and developing these rare earth elements as an American resource and of their importance in our “green economy”, our military and to our commercial sector.

Rare Earths

Great reporting. This article opens your eyes towards a great investment opportunity. I have noticed that Molycorp and Thorium Energy, Inc. are not public companies-maybe someday. I will keep an eye to see if Thorium Energy, Inc. or Molycorp does go public.

question

does anyone know if thorium energy, inc or molycorp are public?

Great to know

This is a great article. A real eye opener and very informative. I hope that the US gets with it. Why not produce our own rare earths since we have them.