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Why do you think there is a greater shortage of oil than of rare earths? The point with both is the extraction. The U.S. has a lot of oil wells, but there is on

Why do you think there is a greater shortage of oil than of rare earths? The point with both is the extraction. The U.S. has a lot of oil wells, but there is only one working rare earth mine in the U.S. http://gizmodo.com/the-strange-second-life-of-americas-only-rare-earth-min-1702199894 http://gizmodo.com/the-strange-second-life-of-americas-only-... Rare earths may be abundant, but that doesn't matter when the type of mining required to extract them is almost impossible to do in much of the world because of the environmental implications.

kragen 11y ago
Oil is valuable not because it contains hydrogen and carbon, but because it contains exergy (usable energy) in a dense and conveniently liquid form. Burning it and using the heat to drive an engine destroys the exergy. That means that the more oil you extract, the less oil remains. By contrast, when we use rare earths, generally what we do is to concentrate them and put them into standardized products like automotive catalytic converters, glass, petrochemical catalysts, neodymium magnets, Nd:YAG lasers, or CRT phosphor dots, in which they are even more concentrated than in the ores we mined them from. That means that the more rare earths you extract, the more easily accessible rare-earth resource remains, exactly the opposite of the situation with oil. It's just in landfills. (There is also a small amount of loss from things like cigarette-lighter flints, which end up as urban dust of mixed lanthanoid oxides, and waste incineration. Refining the outputs of these processes back into rare earth minerals is probably going to be difficult. But that's not where most of current rare-earth refining ends up.) I don't buy the environmental argument. Yes, mining is dangerous. Yes, refining minerals is always easier and more profitable if you can dump massive amounts of poison into the ground instead of cleaning up the mess. But you can do it in an environmentally friendly way. You just can't depend on capitalism to make that happen.

kragen 11y ago

Oil is valuable not because it contains hydrogen and carbon, but because it contains exergy (usable energy) in a dense and conveniently liquid form. Burning it and using the heat to drive an engine destroys the exergy. That means that the more oil you extract, the less oil remains. By contrast, when we use rare earths, generally what we do is to concentrate them and put them into standardized products like automotive catalytic converters, glass, petrochemical catalysts, neodymium magnets, Nd:YAG lasers, or CRT phosphor dots, in which they are even more concentrated than in the ores we mined them from. That means that the more rare earths you extract, the more easily accessible rare-earth resource remains, exactly the opposite of the situation with oil. It's just in landfills. (There is also a small amount of loss from things like cigarette-lighter flints, which end up as urban dust of mixed lanthanoid oxides, and waste incineration. Refining the outputs of these processes back into rare earth minerals is probably going to be difficult. But that's not where most of current rare-earth refining ends up.) I don't buy the environmental argument. Yes, mining is dangerous. Yes, refining minerals is always easier and more profitable if you can dump massive amounts of poison into the ground instead of cleaning up the mess. But you can do it in an environmentally friendly way. You just can't depend on capitalism to make that happen.