Rare Earth Metals in Colorado

Role of Rare Earth Elements In Colorado

Rare earth elements are a group of 17 elements that are crucial for the production of many tech products that we use everyday. For example, neodymium is used to make strong magnets that are used in cell phones, computers, CD players and loudspeakers. Lanthanum is used in camera lenses and is also a key component in hybrid car batteries and other green technology. Color TV can be attributed to the rare earth element europium. National defense is very reliant on rare earth elements because they are used in airplane engines, bombs, and missile guidance systems. Medical procedures such as X-Ray and MRI scanning systems rely on gadolinium.1

Rare earth elements were first discovered by Swedish Army Lieutenant, Carl Axel Arrhenius, in 1787 when he discovered ytterbite, which was later renamed gadonlinite. Rare earth production was first commercialized with the development of the incandescent lamp mantle industry in 1884. The earliest rare earth commercial mining took place in Sweden and Norway in the 1880’s with the mining of the thorium phosphate mineral, monazite. Brazil began monazite production around 1887 and India in 1991, while monazite production began domestically around the late 1890’s in the Carolina’s.2 In the late 1940’s geologists were looking for uranium deposits at the Mountain Pass mine in California when they discovered a incredibly rich reserves of bastnasite, a mineral containing high concentrations of rare earth elements like cerium, lanthanum and yttrium. In the 1950’s mining began in the Mountain Pass mine and by the 1980’s the mine supplied 60 percent of world demands and 100 percent of US demands. China’s rising dominance as the world’s main rare earth element exporter forced market prices down and eventually forced the Mountain Pass mine to close in 2002.3

As the United States dominated the production of rare earth elements, officials in China began to realize the potential of their great reserves....