Hi Nate,

The monopoly position of China regarding rare earth oxides (REO) production can be broken by countries like the US and Australia by developing exploitation of other deposits on their own territories. The question is at what cost as compared to importing REO from China (if China even exports the quantities needed by us).

I do not have information on the energy share in REO mining cost or the energy share in rare earth metals refinery, and neither on development of these cost over time. Good question. It's of the utmost importance when analyzing energy input in metals mining and refinery that ALL energy input is being taken into consideration, not just explicit use of diesel fuel, electricity and so on. To give an extreme and odd but striking example: years ago some guy gave a presentation on the US Airborne Laser (based on public information), stating that the energy content of each shot (designated to shoot down a ballistic missile in its boost phase) would cost only a couple of dollarcents worth of electricity. That's because the power is huge, but the duration of the laser shot is extremely short. Wow, how cheap! But taking into consideration that at the time of the presentation, the construction cost alone of 5 ABL's would cost 7 billion USD (lasting how many shots? maintenance cost? fuel cost of flying the Boeing 747 ABL platform?) and that with each shot the huge chemical laser would consume about one metric ton of chemicals (to be dumped in the air after each shot), you'll understand that the real implicit energy and total cost per shot is very much larger.

The danger is that singleminded proponents of renewable energy, claiming this to be a 1 to 1 solution to replace fossil fuels, make the same incomplete assumptions on energy input in metals mining and metals refinery, making a similar shorcut as in the extreme example above to "justify" that the energy share in total cost is of no real concern. In the ABL example, this logic would dictate that even an increase in electric energy cost of a factor of one million would be of no consequence to the viability of using ABL's.