Adamas Takes the Stage at the 27th REPM Workshop in Birmingham, England

Over 300 attendees and participants from all corners of the globe

Earlier this month, Adamas managing director Ryan Castilloux spoke at the 27th Rare Earth Permanent Magnet (“REPM”) workshop hosted at the University of Birmingham in the U.K.

The workshop, which first convened in 1976 in Dayton, Ohio, saw over 300 attendees and participants turn up over the week to listen, learn and share fresh insights with colleagues from all corners of the globe. The objective of the workshop is to bring together scientists and engineers working on rare earth permanent magnets and their applications and to facilitate the exchange of recent results and ideas on relevant topics.

Kicking off the event on day one was a keynote presentation from Masato Sagawa, the inventor of the sintered NdFeB magnet, titled “History of REPM and my Teachers in Permanent Magnets”. It was an insightful, inspirational talk – the kind where every word spoken was a key takeaway. However, one takeaway from his talk that did echo loudly in the Elgar Concert Hall that morning was that ‘NdFeB would be hard to replicate and even harder to replace’.

In the spirit of Mr. Sagawa’s outside-the-box thinking, our very own Ryan Castilloux delivered a presentation to follow looking at the outlook for global rare earths demand growth through the lens of China’s rare earth reserves base.

In doing so, he challenged the long-standing conventional wisdom that China is host to a near-infinite supply of rare earth elements with which it can monopolize global mine production indefinitely.

Among the key takeaways from Adamas at REPM:

• By 2035, the world will need nearly three-times as much freshly-mined NdPr oxide supplies annually as it did last year to produce magnets – supplies that some industry followers suggest China alone may look to monopolize given its notably large reserves base and extensive value chain.

• However, when we drill down on the nature of China’s reserves in detail – by region and type – and contrast those reserves with projected NdPr oxide demand growth, we see that China is on track to deplete most of its known reserves base within the next three decades.

• Consequently, it is Adamas’ view that China has no desire or interest in monopolizing global mine supply of magnet rare earth materials into the foreseeable future.

• Conversely, we see China actively working to secure access to foreign sources of rare earth feedstock – in Africa, Asia, South America and elsewhere – to preserve resources at home while sustaining its dominance downstream, from magnet to motor to finished product.

• As such – Adamas expects rare earth concentrate and oxide prices to sustain healthy levels on average over the medium- to long-term, encouraging foreign production for export to China, while prices of metals, alloys, magnets and other downstream products remain marginal in an attempt to discourage foreign downstream production outside the nation by design.

 

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