There are 0.15 grams of palladium in an iPhone, 472 kilograms of combined rare earths in an F-35 fig15 Sep 2020 11:42
There are 0.15 grams of palladium in an iPhone, 472 kilograms of combined rare earths in an F-35 fighter jet and four tonnes in a Virginia-class submarine. "[With] some of these things, the government stockpile levels are very, very small in terms of weight," says federal Resources Minister Keith Pitt. "They are kilos compared to tonnes. That is how rare the element is."
Europium oxide, which is used to produce the colour red in household TVs, comes from a global europium stockpile of just 20 tonnes. Stock of ferro dysprosium, used in some magnets, is less than 500 kilograms.
But it is graphite, a key component of the lithium-ion batteries in phones, laptops, military and medical equipment and electric cars, that has sparked the most heated minerals race. Turkey, China, Brazil and Mozambique have the world's largest graphite reserves but only China has the technology and scale to purify the mineral into graphene and other battery anode compounds to make it useful. The government has committed $125 million to exploring two 2500 kilometre-long corridors in the hope of hitting another rare earths payload. One stretches from the Gulf of Carpentaria down to the border of NSW, South Australia and Victoria. The second runs from Darwin to the Great Australian Bight. The government has also invested $4.5 million in critical mineral research and development through the CSIRO and Geoscience Australia but industry figures say it is not enough. Losic says the cost of starting up a single graphite processing plant is $60 million.
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