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Does China Dominate the Graphite Market?

In this InvestorIntel interview, Tracy Weslosky talks with Critical Minerals Institute’s (CMI) Co-Chairman Jack Lifton about “why graphite could be the next critical mineral to rise steeply in price” as it is a key battery mineral.

With the graphite market currently being monopolized by China, Jack says that until battery-grade graphite, of a particular purity and shape, is mined and processed in North America, the market is going to be dependent on China. He adds, “…that’s an area [graphite] that North America can probably succeed in becoming self-sufficient.”

Jack goes on to discuss the recent popularity of Lutetium, the heaviest rare earth element, that can potentially be used in making a room-temperature superconductor. Speaking about the rarity and limited production of lutetium globally, Jack explains why mass production of room-temperature superconductors using lutetium is improbable.

To access the full episode, click here.

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About The Critical Minerals Institute

The Critical Minerals Institute or CMI is an international organization for critical mineral companies and professionals focused on battery and technology materials, defense metals, and ESG technologies in the EV market. Offering a wide range of B2B service solutions, the Critical Minerals Institute hosts both online and in-person events designed for education, collaboration, and service solutions that address critical mineral challenges for a decarbonized economy.

To learn more about The Critical Minerals Institute, click here.




Lutetium’s Rarity Makes Mass Production of Room-Temperature Superconductors Improbable

This week the New York Times carried a story about what its “journalists” deemed a breakthrough in the development of a room-temperature superconductor, a material that could theoretically carry any amount of electricity without losses for any distance. Such a material, the holy grail of power distribution, has been sought for more than a century, since the discovery of this property, superconductivity, at near absolute zero temperature first in certain metal-based alloys and later also in certain exotic ceramics.

In fact, superconducting magnets expensively bathed in intensely cold liquid gases are used in the world’s most powerful particle colliders to control the intense high-energy beams of subatomic particles that these machines hurl into each other at fantastic energies to reproduce for a tiny moment the conditions at the beginning of our universe.

Pretty exciting, huh?

Not really, unless you’re a particle physicist, who doesn’t care about the costs or practicalities of distributing energy “cheaply” to the masses of humans who aren’t excited by the expensively explored mysteries of the subatomic universe.

But journalists and their political users love to hide the billions of dollars they pour into such experiments behind the rubric of the fantasized value of technological spinoffs, such as practical superconductors, which could maybe, perhaps, carry power produced cheaply on a sunny Spanish beach by wind or sun to remote Lapland in northern Europe without loss, cheaply.

This is just political bulls**t designed to cover a ridiculous immensely expensive prioritization of the exotic and glamorous over the practical and important in our daily lives.

Lutetium – A Heavy Rare Earths Metal but Truly Rare

The breakthrough touted by the New York Times would require large tonnages of the rare earth element, lutetium, the final and heaviest rare earth in the periodic table. No one really knows how much lutetium is produced annually, because that amount is trivial, perhaps a few tens of tons annually at the very most.

There is very little lutetium accessible to the human race’s mining technology because the higher atomic numbered rare earths, also known as the “heavy rare earths” are just a tiny fraction of the overall composition and thus of the production of the rare earths.

Lutetium is today used commercially only in specialized radiation detectors, each of which uses just a few grams of the extremely rare element.

The discovery of a room-temperature superconductor that critically requires lutetium is science, not technology because such material cannot be mass-produced, period.

Rare earth investors can safely ignore this “research.” Unless it leads to its implementation by the use of a common metal, any study requiring lutetium as a critical component is pure science not technology.