Swedish state-owned mining company, LKAB, on January 12 announced that it has discovered more than one million tonnes of rare earth oxides in Kiruna in the northern area of the country.
Key points
- This is the largest known deposit in Europe.
- Currently, no rare earths are mined in Europe and it mostly imports them from other regions. 98 per cent of rare earths used by the European Union were sent by China.
About rare earth metals
- The term “rare earth” arises from the minerals from which they were first isolated, which are common oxide-type minerals (earths) found in Gadolinite extracted from one mine in the village of Ytterby, Sweden.
- REEs are characterised by high density, high melting point, high conductivity and high thermal conductance.
- Rare earth elements or rare earth metals are a set of 17 chemical elements in the periodic table — the 15 lanthanides, plus scandium and yttrium, which tend to occur in the same ore deposits as the lanthanides, and have similar chemical properties.
- The 17 rare earths are: cerium (Ce), dysprosium (Dy), erbium (Er), europium (Eu), gadolinium (Gd), holmium (Ho), lanthanum (La), lutetium (Lu), neodymium (Nd), praseodymium (Pr), promethium (Pm), samarium (Sm), scandium (Sc), terbium (Tb), thulium (Tm), ytterbium (Yb), and yttrium (Y).
- Despite their classification, most of these elements are not really rare.
- One of the rare earths, promethium, is radioactive.
- These elements are important in technologies of consumer electronics, computers and networks, communications, clean energy, advanced transportation, healthcare, environmental mitigation, and national defence, among others.
- Scandium is used in televisions and fluorescent lamps.
- Yttrium is used in drugs to treat rheumatoid arthritis and cancer.
- Cerium, the most abundant rare earth element, is essential to NASA’s Space Shuttle Programme.
- The total world reserves are estimated at 120 million tonnes of rare earth oxides equivalent content (REO) of which China alone accounts for 44 million tonnes (37%) followed by Brazil & Vietnam (18% each) and Russia (10%).
- Though India has 6% of the world’s rare earth reserves, it only produces 1% of global output.
Minerals Security Partnership (MSP)
- In August 2022, the US and 10 other nations — Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the European Commission — came together in a bid to break China’s dominance in the global market and formed the Minerals Security Partnership (MSP).
