Rare Earths In Abundance (resourceclips.com)
Commerce Finds Up to 44 Pounds per Ton at Eldor
By Ted Niles
The phrase “more of the same” has an uncharacteristically positive implication when applied to Commerce Resources Corp’s TSXV:CCE Eldor project. In 2010, when analyst John Kaiser of Kaiser Research Online called Eldor “the most important new grassroots rare earth discovery since market interest in rare earths took off in 2009,” the assessment was based on the discovery hole. Since then, much has occurred to vindicate Kaiser’s claim. “Every time we’ve started a new program,” President Dave Hodge remarks, “we had to bring in a different drill, one that would go deeper, because the deposit just seemed to keep going and going. This drill program was no different.”
Commerce acquired Eldor—located in northern Quebec’s Labrador Trough—in 2007 with a focus on tantalum and niobium. In the process, says Hodge, “[We] discovered what we believe will be one of the world’s largest resources of rare earths in a small portion of a very large carbonatite complex.” This is small only relatively—given Eldor’s 19,006 hectares—and is called the Ashram deposit. On March 3, Commerce released an NI 43-101 inferred resource estimate for Ashram of 117.34 million tonnes grading 1.74% total rare earth oxides (TREO) at a 1.25% cut-off. This was based on Commerce’s 2010 12-hole drill campaign, consisting of 3,300 metres.
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Note too that June 28 Commerce reported a result of 2.1% TREO over an impressive 586.9 metres. “These numbers just get silly. That’s 44 pounds of rare earths per ton!” Hodge told Resource Clips at the time, continuing, “[Eldor] stands to be the largest, richest, rare earth deposit in the world; second only to Baiyun Obo, which is the Chinese deposit that is currently controlling the world.”
Controlling the world now, yes, but not for long. Until recently, China has been the producer of 97% of world supply, but it announced in September 2010 that it would be cutting exports by as much as 70%. The news was met with consternation and saw rare earths prices soar this summer. While prices have since settled (but remain considerably higher than mid-2010) the crisis in supply remains. Indeed, recent news that Baotou Steel—producer of nearly half of the world’s supply of rare earths—has been barred from exporting by the Chinese government suggests the crisis is only now really beginning to manifest itself. With the market for rare earths projected to as much as double over the next five years, alternatives to China are becoming a matter of some urgency
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more: http://resourceclips.com/2011/12/19/rare-earths-in-abundance/
I can't vouch for the reliability of this source, but I thought some of the background info re. China was worth reading. Most of the recent news in this area comes from company press releases and finance/stock market publications, some subscription-only.
There seems to be a lot of recent activity in exploration for rare earths, tantalum, and niobium. Worth a Google. Niobium has been located in NE, for example, and niobium, tantalum, and REO deposits in BC, Australia, and Greenland.
Rare earths are vital for the production of high-intensity magnets for efficient electric motors, and tantalum (aka columbium by some -- hence the name "coltan", from columbite/tantalite for Ta ores) is used in very compact capacitors for electronic devices, with cell phones being especially dependent on them. Most of the world's suppy of tantalum comes from deposits in the Congo, and coltan mining is fueling a bloody war there -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1468772.stm http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15537682
