While the mining of rare-earth element (REE) orebodies in Southern Africa is in itself not “difficult”, it is the separation of saleable products comprising pure individual metals or compounds that poses the greatest challenge in this field, emerging rare earths producer Galileo Resources technical consultant Dr Robin Harmer said on Wednesday.

“Essentially, the production of REEs is a chemical engineering challenge rather than a mining or geological one,” he commented at the Geological Society of South Africa’s GeoForum conference.

Harmer explained that the move towards cleaner sources of energy and consumer electronics, both of which used powerful ‘neomagnets’ containing several REEs, were driving demand for these metals.

Market projections suggested that the demand for ‘light’ REEs, such as neodymium, europium, and ‘heavy’ REEs such as terbium, dysprosium and yttrium would exceed supply to beyond 2020.

“As a result, the ability to market combinations of these critical elements at economic cost is likely to determine the success of any new REE venture,” he said.

Harmer added that the natural abundance and technological usefulness of individual REEs varied widely, which created extensive price variability.

China currently dominated the global supply of these metals, producing over 95% of the world’s rare earths requirements.

However, increasing domestic consumption by China, coupled with intensified government control of the industry, which included the consolidation of several producers, the strict implementation of environmental standards, a clamp-down on smuggled imports, and the introduction of element-specific production and export quotas, had increasingly limited the volume of REEs available for export.

“Restricted Chinese exports, coupled with a growing realisation of the strategic benefits of a secure supply of REE at open-market-controlled prices by major REE consumers Korea, Japan, the US, and the EU, have fuelled a rush to establish production outside China,” said Harmer.

There are several Southern Africa-based REE operations at various levels of development towards production.

“The success of these projects is gov- erned by a market that is significantly more complex than those facing ‘conventional’ commodities, and is being made more complex and unpredictable by the current stagnation of most major economies,” said Harmer.

According to Industrial Minerals Company of Australia director Dudley Kingsnorth, demand for REEs would grow by about 33% from 2012 to reach 160 000 t in 2016.