The idea is that supply chains are only as strong as their weakest link. The fact is that many thousands of technologies — electronics, aerospace, military, automotive, clean-tech and renewable energy, to name just a handful — rely on a small number of specialty metals, or what some call “technology metals.” These metals have obscure names, but in many cases, there are simply no substitutes.

United States of Windmills

Some so-called “technologies of the future” are destined to fail due to lack of critical metals with which to effect buildout. Take the rare earth, neodymium, for example. It’s a component of strong permanent magnets — which are made out of a mixture of neodymium, iron and boron.

Strong permanent magnets are critical to gaining efficiency in rotating power-generation units like, say, windmills. Y’know… we’re going to replace burning fossil fuels with windmills, right? Isn’t that the idea? We’re going to live in the United States of Windmills, right?

Except one fact of physics is that without strong permanent magnets, you can’t generate nearly as much power with each turn of the large blades. So neodymium — in the magnets — is critical to our windmill future. There’s NO substitute for neodymium, and believe me, people have tried to figure a way around it.

But with neodymium, as with a host of other relatively obscure substances from the periodic table, the global supply is precarious. In some cases, the supply chain is at great risk because there are but a few sources. For some of those sources, we see things like a major mine playing out due to depletion (Baotou, China, for rare earths) or shut down due to environmental issues (Mountain Pass, Calif., again for rare earths). With other metals, many mines are effectively off-limits due to political problems (in the Congo, for instance).

Looking Ahead with Critical Metals

Most of the strategic and critical metals are just plain “different” than other major industrial metals, like copper, aluminum, lead and even gold and silver.

From the standpoint of nuclear physics, for example, rare earths are not like the other elements. They are brilliant, stubborn and complex, and at the same chemically similar and uniquely individual. You take each rare earth atom the way it was formed in a nuclear reaction within some long-gone, exploded sun, billions of years past.

Another more mundane aspect of the critical metals is that few are exchange traded. For the most part, there’s no futures market, other public market or well-defined transparent price discovery mechanism. There has never been sufficient volume to build up a worldwide market for futures in these obscure elements. So most of the critical metals that get used in world commerce are sold under one-on-one, long-term contracts.

Lacking a forward market, industrial users can’t lock in future prices or deliveries through traditional hedging. They have to sign a contract and agree to pay for future product. It sounds straightforward, but the reality is different. The firms that use many specialty metals live in the worst of both worlds. There’s no futures market, but they are still vulnerable to supply interruptions, spot shortages and price squeezes in the market.

Dealing with Risk, and Virtual Hedging

One technique for users — as well as strategic-minded governments — is simply to pay upfront and stockpile material. This leads to issues with the costs of storage, ensuring physical security, the cost of money and the usual problems with inventory accounting and taxes. Also, with some metals, there are insurmountable storage problems with the rapid deterioration of product due to oxidation or other chemical deterioration.

In other words, in a world where supplies of critical metals are spotty, the traditional tools of costing and forecasting are unreliable. There’s just more risk in the critical metals biz, in some cases rising to “bet the company” levels.

The newest trend in the industry is what’s called “virtual hedging.” This is a term to describe a menu of techniques for developing forward prices and assured deliveries of critical raw materials. Firms use virtual hedging where a futures market does not traditionally exist.

One tool of virtual hedging is to make a direct investment in a mine and get payback via guaranteed metal deliveries (also called off-take agreements). Other kinds of virtual hedging are wide ranging, from stockpiling (for oneself or others), synthetic and/or over-the-counter hedges, material leasing, strategic reserves (i.e., get the government to do it for you) and closed-loop recycling.

Meanwhile, users are hard at work trying to work around issues of physical supply. There are aggressive efforts going on with traditional programs like critical material “thrifting” (use less and see what happens), material substitution, pricing index selection (gear the amount of input to the cost), flexible transfer pricing (charge the customer a surcharge for the extra costs of critical inputs) and in-house waste stream recoveries. The idea is to develop an overall strategy and methodology to mitigate price and supply risk of critical raw materials.

Similarly, producers and industrial processors may also employ these tools as a way to assure adequate income streams for debt retirement, more assured profitability and funding for future expansion and production. Virtual hedging truly has the ability to be the elusive win-win formula that most Western businessmen publicly promote, but are rarely able to employ.

Living Off Past Stockpiles

With one particular element — which I’ll decline to name just now — there’s already a severe supply crunch. This is an element that’s used in a wide variety of electronic products. The supply chain could run dry soon.

Thus, the industry that uses this item is “living off past stockpiles,” according to one inside player. Last year, the general estimate was that there’s enough product in the supply chain to last for two years. So the pipeline will be dry by 2012.

What happened? The problems originated with an unprecedented spike in the spot market price in 2000. In this thinly traded resource, supply fears caused many nervous dealers to sign long-term contracts and lock themselves into high market prices. Then when prices crashed for product off contract, across the user community, there were significant inventory write-downs, both current and future.

By 2006 and 2007, the industry returned to some semblance of normality. But with the crash of 2008, everything fell off a cliff as the economic meltdown jammed the brakes on consumer demand.

Meanwhile, the few companies that mine the substance suspended production. So now there’s a situation in which primary production of ore is all but shut down. There are stockpiles, and just a very limited amount of material coming out of a very small number of mines in faraway jurisdictions.

Thus, with this product, as with most other of the critical technology metals, the question to ask is what does is the downstream industry fear more? High prices for an essential, irreplaceable input? Or lack of physical supply from the mine and mill and widespread unavailability of any product at any price?

It’s a problem within the industry. And it’s just this kind of situation that gives us an entree into an opportunity for profit.

Until we meet again,
Byron King

October 30, 2009

Rare Earths and Other Critical Technology Metals was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

This guy walks into a supply house and goes up to the clerk behind the counter. He says, “Excuse me, but could I buy some lanthanum?”

The clerk is busy smoking a cigarette. He looks the guy up and down and says, “We ain’t got no lanthanum.”

So the guy says, “What? You don’t have any lanthanum? OK, then how about some cerium? Or perhaps you could spare some yttrium? Do you have some cerium or yttrium that I can use?”

The clerk looks at him and shakes his head. “Sorry, pal. Not in stock.”

The guy begins to look a bit desperate. He says, “No? Well then, do you have any europium? Or is there any neodymium? While you are at it, can you please check for praseodymium or samarium? I don’t mean to trouble you, but do you have some gadolinium or dysprosium? And I need some terbium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium and lutetium.”

The clerk looks at him, shrugs and holds his cigarette out to flick some ash on the floor. “We’re fresh out,” says the clerk.

“Listen,” says the guy. “I hate to be a pest. But I can’t take no for an answer. I have to have these products. Without them, my whole economy shuts down. I’ll be ruined.”

The clerk looks at him and says, “Well, too bad for your economy. I guess you are just plain up the old creek, huh? Better grab a paddle.”

No Funny Punch Line to This Story

Well, dear reader, are you waiting for the funny punch line? Sorry, but there is no funny punch line on this one. This is no joke. I said at the beginning that I would tell you a good old story, not a funny story. And the investment recommendation makes for a good story, or maybe even a great one.

What were those strange-sounding things that the guy was requesting from the clerk? They are called “rare earths,” and for good reason. They are some of the most valuable, critical metals on the face of this planet or any other. Demand is soaring, and supply is…well, supply is not.

Meet the Lanthanides

In this issue of Whiskey I’m looking at an investment opportunity in 15 elements from the periodic table. In formal scientific nomenclature, they are called the lanthanides. More commonly, they are called rare earths.

None of these elements are famous like gold or sliver. None get shipped in giant ore freighters, like iron, aluminum or copper. You sure don’t learn much about these 15 elements in high-school chemistry class, unless maybe it’s the school that feeds lots of kids into MIT or Caltech.

In fact, the only people who really study these elements are master’s- and Ph.D.-level chemists and solid-state physicists. Oh, and national leaders in places like China. But without these elements, much of the modern economy will just plain shut down.

“Just plain shut down? C’mon,” you might say.

But yes, these elements are critical to the modern economy, and that is not hyperbole. We are addicted to rare earths as much as we are addicted to oil, except most people don’t know about the rare earth addiction. But I am going to explain it to.

Say Goodbye To TV Screens, Computer Hard Drives, GPS, and More…

These 15 elements are strategic. These elements play a critical role in petrochemicals, environmental protection, “clean” technology, electronics, automotive applications, optics, telecommunications, computing and defense. They are indispensable to a myriad of intermediate and end uses.

Really, without these 15 elements, you can say goodbye to much of modernity. There will be no more television screens and computer hard drives, fiber-optic cables, digital cameras and most medical imaging devices.

You can say farewell to space launches and the satellites that do everything from show you the weather to offer global positioning down to a few inches. And the world’s system for refining petroleum will break down, too. That’s pretty serious.

If you are curious about the details, I will discuss each of the 15 rare earth elements in greater detail at the end of this article. But this is not a technical paper on chemistry, no matter how interesting the subject might be from that angle.

What Are These 15 Elements?

These 15 elements are all metals, although usually one sees them in powdered form as oxides. They are called rare earths. But how rare are they? Well, they are scattered here and there in the Earth’s crust. But you won’t exactly trip over them as you stroll along the beach.

It is quite rare to find these elements in deposits that are economic to mine. So that is the investment lure.

Rare earths are usually found in rock bodies called carbonatites — for the most part non-geologists have never heard of them. And for our purposes today all we need to really know is that carbonatites are rare.

Once you find a deposit of rare earth elements in a carbonatite, it is still very difficult to mine and mill the rocks and minerals. The processing chain is long and complex. So we are dealing with rare earths in rare rock bodies that are difficult to mine, mill, and process.

Right now, almost all of the world’s supply of rare earths comes from China, which is why our investment opportunity is so appropriate. Unfortunately, I cannot let you know the specific investment opportunity I’m talking about. That simply wouldn’t be fair to the readers of my Energy and Scarcity newsletter. But now you at least know where to look.

Until we meet again…
Byron W. King
April 2, 2008

15 Rare and Valuable Metals was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder