Rare Earth Elements Discovered in Deep Sea

Huge Rare Earth Deposits Found in Pacific

Vast deposits of rare earth minerals, crucial in making high-tech electronics products, have been found on the floor of the Pacific Ocean and can be readily extracted, Japanese scientists said on Monday.

We've been down this road before.  When I was a young, manganese nodules, a deep-sea mineral deposit was touted as the answer to our needs for a number of metals, including manganese, nickel copper, and cobalt. In the 1970s, one project did attempt to develop the technology to mine them for 8 years from 18,000 feet down, obtaining several tons, and extracted the metals.  However, low nickel prices made the project uncompetitive.  I have a small bottle of manganese nodules in my office on my "treasure" display (along with some fossils).

"The deposits have a heavy concentration of rare earths. Just one square kilometer (0.4 square mile) of deposits will be able to provide one-fifth of the current global annual consumption," said Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo. The discovery was made by a team led by Kato and including researchers from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology...

...He estimated rare earths contained in the deposits amounted to 80 to 100 billion tonnes, compared to global reserves currently confirmed by the U.S. Geological Survey of just 110 million tonnes that have been found mainly in China, Russia and other former Soviet countries, and the United States.

Those are pretty compelling numbers, however.  The ability to get a years worth of the the rare earth elements from  a square kilometer of sediment certainly suggests that we do not have to fear running out of these elements any time soon.

They found the minerals in sea mud extracted from depths of 3,500 to 6,000 metres (11,500-20,000 ft) below the ocean surface at 78 locations. One-third of the sites yielded rich contents of rare earths and the metal yttrium, Kato said in a telephone interview. The deposits are in international waters in an area stretching east and west of Hawaii, as well as east of Tahiti in French Polynesia, he said.

I would hazard a guess that the problems of obtaining large amounts of sediments from this depth, processing them on board ship and dealing with the waste materials would make this mining too uneconomical, unless the prices of rare earth elements (REAs) rise significantly.  Any prospect of that?

A chronic shortage of rare earths, vital for making a range of high-technology electronics, magnets and batteries, has encouraged mining projects for them in recent years. China, which accounts for 97 percent of global rare earth supplies, has been tightening trade in the strategic metals, sparking an explosion in prices. Japan, which accounts for a third of global demand, has been stung badly, and has been looking to diversify its supply sources, particularly of heavy rare earths such as dysprosium used in magnets.

Here is my bet.  We won't see economical exploitation of these deposits for years, if not decades.  However, knowledge that they exist will encourage the Chinese to keep prices, if not reasonable, at least low enough to discourage the research and development necessary to make these deposits feasible to mine. Furthermore, I predict that China will suddenly become a defender of the deep-sea environment, claiming that exploitation of these deposits is too environmentally destructive to tolerate, so we will just have to make do with their more REAs.  I also predict that western environmentalists will beat China to that punch.

First seen at Instapundit.