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The beginning of the end of Europe’s dependency on China for precious rare earth materials may lie buried deep under the rugged reaches of northern Sweden, well above the Arctic Circle. Sweden’s iron-ore miner LKAB said Thursday it has identified "significant deposits" in Lapland of rare earth elements that are essential for the manufacture of smartphones, electric vehicles and wind turbines. The government-owned company that mines iron ore at Kiruna, almost 1,000 kilometers north of Stockholm, said there are more than 1 million tons of rare earth oxides....

SALTA, Argentina, Sept 14 (Reuters) - In Argentina's remote northern Salta province, the silence of the desert landscape is broken only by the hum of machinery pumping salt-water brine to extract lithium, a sign of accelerating efforts to ride the global electric vehicle boom. Beneath the South American country's highland salt flats, reached by winding mountain roads, is buried the world's third largest reserve of the ultra-light battery metal, which has seen a price spike over the past year on the back of a global push towards greener modes of transport. Already the fourth top producer of lithium worldwide, Argentina's...

The Ministry of Land and Resources of China Wednesday brought 11 rare earth mines under state control, in order to improve the protection, utilization of the country's strategic resources and drive up prices of the element in global markets. These measures came after years of planning. All of the 11 areas for rare earth mining are located in Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province in China's southeast. The two iron areas are in Sichuan Province in China's southwest, a report in People's Daily Online said. Under the new policy, only companies authorized by the central government can conduct surveying and exploitation in those...

AN obscure, desolate plateau on the southwestern shores of Greenland could transform the future of consumer technology and shift the balance of power in the global supply of rare earth metals. ...beneath the rocks and ice of the Ilimaussaq Intrusion represents the world's largest known reserve of rare earth metals, the "technology" group of lanthanide elements used in products from mobile phones and low-energy light bulbs to hybrid cars and missile guidance systems. ...potential ...to severely dent China's global monopoly over rare earth production, a 95 per cent dominance of total worldwide output that Beijing has strategically nurtured for 15...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The Prius hybrid automobile is popular for its fuel efficiency, but its electric motor and battery guzzle rare earth metals, a little-known class of elements found in a wide range of gadgets and consumer goods. That makes Toyota's market-leading gasoline-electric hybrid car and other similar vehicles vulnerable to a supply crunch predicted by experts as China, the world's dominant rare earths producer, limits exports while global demand swells. Worldwide demand for rare earths, covering 15 entries on the periodic table of elements, is expected to exceed supply by some 40,000 tonnes annually in several years unless...

Will we run out of some of the basic elements fundamental to modern technology? This is a question that has recently lit up the blogosphere. In particular, the elements Indium and Gallium are frequently referred to as "threatened." The herd latched on to an eloquent post on Asimov's Science Fiction, which was itself a rehashing of a New Scientist piece, which took its cue in part from an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (which, oddly enough, does not discuss either Indium or Gallium). Regardless of the convoluted history, is there anything to really worry about...