Dec 11, 2009 Jack Lifton: Safeguarding Our Future Supply of Rare Earths
“Price may not be as important as security of supply,” says Jack Lifton, an independent consultant with more than 45 years of experience in sourcing nonferrous strategic metals. In the U.S., our dependence on rare metals is undermined by the simple fact that we’re not producing any. Given that China now controls 95% of these ‘technology metals’ and the world is projected to eat 200,000 tons of rare earth metals near 2015, Jack tells The Gold Report we need to jumpstart our own domestic supply chain and, more importantly, build the refineries to process them—rather than sending them to China for refining, which is our only option currently.more
Published: June 13, 2010
he United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped
mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any
previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan
economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American
government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron,
copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and
include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that
Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most
important mining centers in the world, the United States officials
believe.Trace Minerals
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and Blackberries.
October
31, 2009
“International Lithium Corp. put a new presentation on its website with timescales for different type
of Lithium and REE deposits. If we are going to enjoy advance in
Lithium-ion battery’s technology in our electric cars in five years
time on a truly mass market scale with penetration more then 5% Lithium supply must be doubled. Time is today to develop the new secured
resources for strategic commodities of the nearest future”“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus
, commander of the
United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There
are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely
significant.”The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries.more
