Rare Earth Metals

Here’s an in-depth interview with Victor Gonçalves on the challenges of building a hybrid car fleet. Tons of ‘Rare Earth Metals’ will be required…here’s how he highlights the opportunity/challenge:

China controls 95% of the rare earths and says, okay, we’ll just keep them for ourselves, thanks.

You’ve got to fight for the rest of the 5% of them out there. So that’s obviously causing major upswing in the price of rare earths. That has been the main driver. But that coupled with a shift in how we do things — we’re going to see a ton more hybrid vehicles go on the road over the next couple of years and each one of them is going to require 50 pounds of rare earths. That’s going to add up.

Being ‘green’ is going to be a costly and challenging endeavor.