I appreciate your work and I thank you for your time.

I hate to be a bother, but I feel I must ask; can you think of any reasons not to invest in Alkane stock at current prices?

Gareth (my middle name by the way), are you familiar with these guys? If so, what are your thoughts? If not, care to check them out?

http://www.alkane.com.au/

Thanks for any feedback.

I disagree that the issue of environmental standards is not a genuine factor in the decisions being made about the industry in China. While I don’t buy the connection between those standards, and export licenses (they should of course be applied across all producers, and for all production), there are many indications that China is serious about implementing stricter pollution standards.

As for the inclusion of Nd-Fe-B magnet alloys in next year’s export (not mining) quotas – I’ve heard folks talking about this too, but I’d be very surprised if that happened.

@ Carlos Braga: as stated above in the article, I am in the process of verifying the associated data for the Araxa project, as well as others, and will report on them in the near future.

@ Gary Sutton: you can already get grades of Nd-Fe-B magnets with higher Br (magnet strength) and lower coercivity. As you alluded to, you can also get significant Br values from older materials such as the Alnico family. Usage of specific materials depends on the design of the device into which you are placing the magnets, and whether or not there are potential stray magnetic fields from adjacent magnets or other devices, if there will be heating etc. As a rough rule of thumb, the longer and skinnier a magnet is (with the N-S orientation parallel to the long axis of the magnet), the better the magnet will resist demagnetization, but that might not be a convenient shape for a given application. In motor designs, for example, the shape is quite the opposite – the magnetic orientation is typically through the thinnest dimension. It’s definitely a case-by-case situation, determined by the magnetic circuit designer.

MBAC has made public information on our Araxa Project in Brazil with about 2.7 million tonnes of resources (43.101 compliant) at 8.4% TREO on December 6th. When can we expect our project to be included in your Project Index?

Thank you,
Carlos Braga

Do you agree that the recent announcement from China’s ministry to ban the export quota of Baotou Steel, which produces 50% of world’s rare earth currently, will lead to huge spike in prices of LRE’s and severe supply shortage. Moreover, i don’t buy the reason being environmental concerns, as most of the mines operating in china doe not do not follow environmental standards. Recently there was also a news of NdFeB magnets being included in next years mining quota. Do you agree that China is trying to put pressure on consumers to relocate their facilities to China.?

This is the reason why when Dy is added to neodymium-based magnets, the strength of the magnet actually goes DOWN with increased Dy. We add the Dy to improve the ability of the magnet to resist being demagnetized (known as the coercivity). Increased temperature is a common source of such demagnetizing effects. Incidentally, this increased resistance is NOT as a result of increasing the Curie temperature of the magnet – a common misunderstanding of the role of Dy in these magnets (if you really want to know, increased coercivity comes from increasing the anisotropy field for the magnet, which makes it harder for the N-S orientation of the magnet to get “flipped”).

So no – you won’t see Ho-based permanent magnets, just like you won’t see Dy- or Tb-based permanent magnets, because they simply wouldn’t work. It’s a shame that in their misguided efforts to demonstrate that every rare-earth element is useful, a lot of folks in our sector (and I’m not referring to you, Toly!) love to simply regurgitate excerpts from Wikipedia willy nilly, without understanding any of this… the fact of the matter is that some rare earths are more useful, in practical, everyday terms, than others.