Rare Earth Metals

Tags

Top Highlights

• India has 6% of the world’s rare earth reserves, it only produces 1% of global output, and meets most of its requirements of such minerals from China.

• In 2018-19, for instance, 92% of rare earth metal imports by value and 97% by quantity were sourced from China.

• concentrated in the hands of IREL (India) Limited (formerly Indian Rare Earths Limited), a Public Sector Undertaking under the Department of Atomic Energy.

• India has granted government corporations such as IREL a monopoly over the primary mineral that contains REEs: monazite beach sand, found in many coastal states.

• IREL’s focus is to provide thorium — extracted from monazite — to the Department of Atomic Energy.

• What are Rare Earth Metals? They are a set of seventeen metallic elements. These include the fifteen lanthanides on the periodic table in addition to scandium and yttrium that show similar physical and chemical properties to the lanthanides. 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).

• IREL produces rare earth oxides (low-cost, low-reward “upstream processes”), selling these to foreign firms that extract the metals and manufacture end products (high-cost, high-reward “downstream processes”)

• They are a set of seventeen metallic elements.

• These include the fifteen lanthanides on the periodic table in addition to scandium and yttrium

• They are called 'rare earth' because earlier it was difficult to extract them from their oxides forms technologically.