How to beat China's Rare-Earths Blackmail

India can both develop new supplies of rare earth minerals and mass produce reluctance motors that dispense with rare-earth doped permanent magnets

The rare-earths scarcity is an opportunity for Indian engineering

In every challenge, there is an opportunity – sure, that is a tired old cliché, but China’s decision to weaponise its near monopoly over the supply of rare-earth bearing permanent magnets has converted the cliché into an electrifying engineering opportunity. It arrives precisely when kinks and bends develop, thanks to Artificial Intelligence, in the stem of the traditional funnel of information technology through which India’s engineering colleges pour their fresh graduates into the job market.

Solving for the global shortage of rare-earth spiked permanent magnets to drive motors big and small — from the motor that drives an electric car to the motors that make windows go up and down or assist the steering wheel or the brakes — is the giant opportunity that has opened up. China, obviously, has no interest in creating this solution, and so the terrain is virtually uncontested for India, except by high-cost economies or smaller ones that lack the scale and quality of engineering talent that India has at its disposal.

The most obvious solution to China’s control over the rare earth supply chain is to build alternative supply chains. Indian Rare Earths Ltd is a public sector unit that has been in operation since 1950, when it was set up to process the monazite sands on the beaches of southern Kerala. The ilmenite sands contain the ore for Titanium, which is used separately.

While the focus of monazite separation and refining was Thorium, the potential starting material for wholly indigenous nuclear power generation, other rare earths have been mined, too. IREL has another facility in Orissa. The Northeastern mountainous landscape also potentially holds rare earth hoards, waiting to be tapped.

Developing India’s own rare earth potential is the right thing to do. For that, India has to develop capabilities in prospecting, mining, and metallurgy. Separating usable rare earths from their native mineral form is a tedious, and potentially polluting activity, which is why the rich world gave up their refining to China, even in the case of their own local rare earth deposits. China now controls 90% of the rare earth supplies.

Some rare earths are used in electronics, as phosphors in LEDs, as colour accuracy enhancers in screens, to tune the wave lengths of lasers as they move through optical fibre cables. These do not have ready substitutes.

However, a large use case for rare earths is in magnets, especially those used in motors. Electric motors, big and small, play a vital role in the physical build-out of what we understand by modernity, whether planes, trains, cars, fans, factories, airconditioners, or the cooling fans inside notebook computers.

We rarely concern ourselves with what kinds of motors surround us. Those who have a vague idea of such things know that rotation in a motor is created by the interaction of magnetic fields in a stator, which stays put, and a rotor, which moves. The magnetic fields can be created by permanent magnets or electromagnetic induction.

Induction motors are simple to design and make, but are less efficient than the ones that make use of permanent magnets. It is in the making of high-quality permanent magnets that rare earths play a role. A neodymium magnet, made of an alloy of iron, boron and neodymium, with dysprosium also going into the mix, is 12 times as powerful as the ferrite magnets that are commonly used for quaint defacement of the household fridge. Semarium-cobalt magnets are eight times as powerful, and can operate in a temperature range from -273 degrees C to 350 degrees C. These are the magnets that China monopolises and blackmails the world with.

Equally efficient and powerful motors can be built without using permanent magnets, making use of a property called magnetic reluctance. Reluctance motors have been available since the late 19th century, but these were difficult to control, till the arrival of modern microelectronics in the 1990s.

Various kinds of reluctance motors are available in theory and have been developed in practice. Tesla’s Model 3 uses a permanent magnet motor in combination with a reluctance motor to achieve superior efficiency.

The challenge is to develop microelectronics to control and maintain the speed of reluctance motors and develop algorithms to operate the microelectronics. If this can be achieved for motors that differ in size, power, use case and production batch size, Chinese rare-earth blackmail would turn from a dragon into an earthworm.

Can Indian engineers pull this off? They are doing all kinds of R&D for Fortune 500 companies at 1,700 global capability centres. What they lack is not ability, but the cultural affinity, besides capital, to risk failure pursuing the solution to a tough problem.

Let one or more public enterprises, at the central and state levels, compete with startups that receive seed capital from the government and raise venture funding on their own, to tackle this challenge. Let electrical, electronic and software engineers form teams at IITs and other colleges, and work on the problem.

Young engineers of India, unite. You have nothing to lose but your reluctance to venture, and a world to win – one alit with the power of magnetic reluctance.