Rare earth prices which have been soaring in the wake of the Chinese export ban may now begin to fall. Many leading industrial houses have been working on substitute materials for rare earth metals in their manufacturing processes.
Corporations like Toyota Motor and General Electric which make electric cars and windmills have been looking at new prospective alternates to using rare earths. These companies were hit hard by the clamp down on supply by China which currently controls more than 95% of the rare earth market globally.
Jack Lifton, co-founder of Technology Metals Research, said in an interview that if you thought you could keep raising the prices for those materials and still keep your customers, you're crazy. The principal customer for rare-earth metals is a global automotive industry using rare-earth permanent magnets. That industry will engineer this stuff out, he added.
Which is what John Hanson, a Toyota spokesman in Torrance, California confirmed when he said that some Toyota vehicles will be built with an induction motor not using rare earth magnets. He added that Moving from a fixed-magnet motor to an induction motor is a huge savings with regard to rare-earth metals.
Christopher Ecclestone, an analyst at Hallgarten & Co. in New York is predicting that prices for lanthanum and cerium will drop by 50% in the next year. These are the two most abundantly found rare earth elements. He added that Neodymium and praseodymium, metals used in permanent rare-earth magnets, may fall as much as 15 per cent.