Size of the Prize19 Sep 2023 15:32
Offshore wind turbines are an end-use market for steel that goes into foundations and nacelles (boxes for turbine elements), copper for cables, molybdenum for gears and neodymium for permanent rare earth magnets.
“The offshore wind industry consumes about a conservative 220 tonnes of neodymium-praseodymium oxide (NdPr) per GW of installed capacity,” said Anne-Marie Sylvestre, a sustainability consultant for the rare earths industry and former global lead sustainability at Australian producer Lynas Rare Earths.
Sylvestre estimates that NdPr content in the current installed 64.3GW is around 14,150 tonnes.
“If the GWEC’s estimate of 380 GW of new offshore wind installations by 2032 is correct, then the industry will require about 83,600 tonnes of NdPr over the next decade,” she added.
Brussels-based Rare Earth Industry Association (REIA) estimates that the industry would require an average of 30,000 tonnes of rare-earth permanent magnets per year, or a total of almost 290,000 tonnes between now and 2032, based on the GWEC report.
REIA’s estimate is based on capacity of 28 GW being installed each year from 2023 to 2027. This amount then doubles to approximately 52 GW per year from 2028 to 2032.
Current annual consumption of neodymium is around 60,000 tonnes, according to Fastmarkets’ estimates.
“The data indicates that the demand for these magnets will more than double every five years, not accounting for competing demand from onshore-wind installations and electric vehicle (EV) deployment,” REIA said.
Sylvestre also said that her estimates did not consider the additional demand from onshore wind turbines, which use neodymium magnets but in smaller amounts.
Rare earth magnet supply
“Apart from current expanding production capacity, I see recycled NdPr extracted from offshore end-of-life wind turbines as a significant NdPr source within a 10-year timeframe,” Sylvestre said.
She added that there is no reliable method to recycle these materials at present, mainly due to safety, economic, and technical hurdles in retrieving and reusing the magnets.
But recycling is a considerably faster approach compared to initiating entirely new projects, and new developments might potentially reduce the quantities of rare earths needed in magnets, Sylvestre said.'
https://www.fastmarkets.com/insights/offshore-wind-industry-in-need-of-rare-earth-magnets
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