GLG News by Jack Lifton, Managing Director
Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.
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Is The Rare Earth Supply Crisis Due to Peak Production Capability or Capacity
September 6, 2009
A Different Environmental Threat: Peak Rare Minerals, China, and Green Technology | michaelperelman.wordpress.com
The current "crisis" in the media in the supply of rare earth metals is most likely due to nothing more sinister than mining capacity in China, the country which today produces some 97% of the world's supply of rare earth metals. There is sufficient accessible by current technology rare earth mineralization in North America, Australia, Southeast Asia ,Viet Nam, and South Africa to not only make world industry independent of China, but, ultimately, and soon, to supply China's domestic shortfalls. -
Will The Chevrolet Volt Even Be Built as A Production Model? That's The Question
September 4, 2009
Audi U.S. president Johan de Nysschen addresses Chevrolet Volt is for idiots firestorm via Facebook | www.autoblog.com
The Audi USA president is simply vocalizing what is on everyone's mind in the OEM automotive world. His basic sentiment that the Volt is an idiotic concept is widely shared wherever in the world cars are designed , built, and marketed by existing mass producers. -
The Rare Earth Security of Supply Crisis in Simplified Form
September 3, 2009
China tries to calm unease over rare earths curbs | news.yahoo.com
China's domestic use of its domestic production of the rare earth metals used accross the board in and critical to many if not most green technologies has caused it to restrict exports of these rare metals for years. The economics of Chinese rare earth production caused all other world producers to cease mining them years ago. Chinese domestic demand is now approaching Chinese domestic supply. The sleepy world of natural resource use and finance now calls this hoarding.. The Chinese are not amused. -
Autoblog Misunderstood What Bill Ford Said About Batteries Used By Ford
August 20, 2009
Chevy Volt's 230 mpg rating, ad campaign comes under fire from Bill Ford, AdAge | green.autoblog.com
The Autoblog.com article I am analyzing is poorly edited, poorly fact-checked, and poorly written. William Clay Ford, could not have said what the article attributed to him in the context described. -
Is The Chevrolet Volt Only A Fair Weather Car?
August 12, 2009
How did GM arrive at 230 mpg for the 2011 Chevrolet Volt? | www.autoblog.com
All this nonsense about the Chevrolet Volt's fuel use and performance is just hot air until the car is on the road and its actual performance under real driving conditions and with ordinary drivers is measured. I propose a side-by-side test of the Prius and the Chevrolet Volt to settle which is the more practical and versatile car. -
Fast Charging EV Batteries Is A Problem Not A Solution
August 9, 2009
Electric Car Charge Stations: The Next Third Space? | www.thebigmoney.com
The cart is dragging the horse as the economically and electrical engineering clueless are now debating where to put the infrastructure for recharging (fueling) electric cars. All we have to do is change the transportation fueling, the shopping habits, and the daily routines we have built up over the last 100 years as soon as possible. Not quite. We' will also have to reconstruct our electric power distribution grid and avoid fast charging except in emergency situations. What was that? -
Is General Motors backing Off Of The Chevrolet Volt Type Plug-In Hybrid?
August 8, 2009
New Buick Plug-In Hybrid Due By 2011: Breaking News | www.popularmechanics.com
The new Buick "two mode" hybrid is not an evolution of the Chevrolet Volt power train as this article in Popular Mechanics implies; the Buick (mild) "hybrids rather a step back for GM, and I think, an admission that all is not right with the Chevrolet Volt either in performance and range to be delivered or in marketability. GM made a misstep listening to Rick Wagoner and Bob Lutz both say that there was no future to the full hybrid exemplified by the outstandingly successful Prius. -
Peugeot Expands Use of Rare Earth Based Batteries with First Diesel Hybrid
August 6, 2009
Peugeot preparing to launch its first diesel-powered hybrid | www.4wheelsnews.com
French car maker, Peugeot, has matched its long history of making and marketing diesel cars with the solid performance history of , reliable, and long lived nickel metal hydride battery packs, such as those made and used by Toyota in the Prius "full" hybrid, to introduce the first diesel hybrid powered car to enter the global marketplace in mass production. Did Peugeot engineers and marketers choose reliability over hype? -
Toyota Is Closing A Unionized Former GM Plant That Toyota Doesn't Need
August 5, 2009
In a First, Toyota Is in Talks to Close a Plant | www.nytimes.com
The reporting of this event completely misses the point. NUMMI, New United Motors, Manufacturing, was created when Toyota was much weaker and GM was strong. It was used by both companies to learn from the other's manufacturing engineering technology. Forty years ago GM decided and published a prediction that the US car market would grow to 28 million units a year by 2000. Then GM and the rest of the world's OEM automotive industry began to try to build the capacity to fit this fantasy. -
July 12, 2009
Strategies for investing as inflation looms | www.latimes.com
There are three material based technologies for the production of sustainable energy by the conversion of sunlight to electricity by thin-film photovoltaic devices: 1, Amorphous silicon, 2. Cadmium telluride, and 3. Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide There is no shortage possible of silicon, but there are limits to both the rate of production of cadmium, tellurium, indium, gallium, and selenium and the total amount of each of them that can be recovered altogether. Today we're going to look at The tellurium (Supply) Conjecture. -
July 10, 2009
GM petitions bankruptcy court to break contract with Stillwater Mining | www.helenair.com
The USA does not produce, nor does it have, sufficient resources of any of the platinum group metals, PGMs, to meet the demands of the American domestic OEM automotive industry for the catalytic converters that must, by law, be fitted on any vehicle or device utilizing an internal combustion engine fueled by hydrocarbons if the emissions from the operation of that device exceed a legally defined minimum. The only domestic producer of the metals palladium and rhodium is the Stillwater Mining Company located in Stillwater, Montana. The Stillwater Mining Company is owned by the Russian nickel and palladium producing giant, Norilsk. -
G.E. Follows Toyota and Nissan to Expoit Michigan's Strengths and Expose Michigan's Glaring Weakness
June 29, 2009
GE Picks Michigan for R&D Center | www.adnkronos.com
General Electric has decided to come to Michigan to employ out of work automotive manufacturing engineers and researchers at bargain prices. "GE said it is looking for specialists in developing composites, machining, inspection, casting and coating technologies for its aviation and energy businesses. The auto industry employed many engineers with expertise in these areas." The Michigan mainstream media seems to believe this will bring jobs for the daily growing army of unemployed low skilled automotive workers who haunt Michigan's I-75 corridor between Detroit and Bay city; there are 100s of thousands of such workers with at most a high school education. Michigan has no aviation and little energy business. GE's products would clearly be intended for other states and other countries, and few such businesses can be expected to come to Michigan to recruit low skilled workers. Will GE pledge to only hire Americans and to build manufacturing plants in Michigan also??? -
June 8, 2009
Toyota: Plug-in Hybrids Will Have Limited Appeal | wheels.blogs.nytimes.com
The numbers simply do not add up for the plug-in hybrid powertrain. It is too expensive for what it offers with today's technology: 1. Short driving range, 2. High cost, and 3. Unknown long term reliability, durability, and battery life. It is coming to market only to make politicians look as if they are doing something about dependence on imported fossil fuels and the reduction of so-called global warming carbon dioxide. -
June 4, 2009
EU worries about access to key raw materials | www.euractiv.com
A world wide competition for developing and owning sources of the technology metals is underway. The United States alone of the great economic powers is ignoring this competition. -
June 2, 2009
ANNOUNCEMENT——2009 International Workshop on Thorium Utilization for Sustainable Nuclear Energy (TU2009) | tu2009inbaotouchina.blogspot.com
China is soon holding the first public workshop on the utilization of a non-proliferative thorium fuel cycle in civilian nuclear reactors since the late 1960s. Now as in the 1960s Atomic Energy of Canada's exisitng CANDU reactors are being tested, both by AECL and, apparently, by Chinese users of the CANDUs, to see how they would perform if retrofitted to use a thorium fuel cycle. Norway, Russia, and The USA are also looking at thorium fuel cycles and designs for reactors based on them. Some of these studies are continuations of ones that were first performed in the 1960s. The USA, for example, had several experimental thorium fuel cycle utilizing reactors then. China has a substantial amount of thorium produced annually as a byproduct of her global-class rare earth production in the Inner Mongolian Bayanobo region. China currently imports uranium for her existing and planned new power reactors for civilian use. China would have no import reliance at all for thorium. -
May 25, 2009
Toyota denies report on possible GM hybrid deal | www.forbes.com
The Japanese press is reporting that Toyota is studying the idea of licensing its current (full) hybrid power train to collapsing General Motors. I'm sure that this supposition is true, but would such a move be possible? As the supply situation for the critical rare earth metals, lanthanum, neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium stands today, with all of them coming only from China, the answer is an emphatic "No!" The proven, durable, reliable, long lived nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries used by Toyota and manufactured in-house by Toyota depend critically for their operation on the above named metals as do the brushless DC electric drive motors also used by Toyota to construct the Prius hybrid and the Toyota and Lexus hybrids it makes today. There would be only one way for new supplies of the critical rare earth metals to be generated, but it would take a political act of courage by the Obama administration. -
May 20, 2009
Volt Birth Watch 141: Toyota Laughs at the Volt, Indirectly | www.thetruthaboutcars.com
Toyota has been working on the electrification of mass produced cars through the use of hybrid power trains and the in-house development and manufacturing of batteries for at least fifteen years. Toyota adopted the nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) battery and the hybrid power train using it in the late 1990s after the NiMH battery had been in development for a decade by its original inventor, Energy Conversion Devices, Inc., and by nearly all of the Japanese battery makers, such as Panasonic and Sanyo. Toyota entered into a j/v with Panasonic to manufacture and continue the development of the NiMH battery as it, Toyota, began to manufacture the Prius NiMH using hybrid and let the market beta test the power train. The Prius was so successful that Toyota bought out Panasonic's interest in the j/v and took it in-house to preserve competitive advantage. GM rejected the hybrid concept and watched as Toyota swept the field to become the "green' car maker. -
Rare Metals Investment News Updates, Today's Edition (RareMINUTES) 050709 NEODYMIUM
May 7, 2009
Windpower to overtake nuclear in China by 2020 | www.proactiveinvestors.com.hk
If China commits to producing 100 gigawatts of wind generated electricity by 2020 it will place this goal in its next two five-year plans as part of the official statement of the goals for the Chinese utility industry. If this happens then China's recent takeover of the Australian rare earth mining industry makes perfect sense. \ The Chinese, you see, like to make long term plans not only for economic goals but also for implementing the necessary steps in the value chain to achieve them. -
May 5, 2009
Buffett Sees Massive Inflation to Handle Staggering Debt | moneynews.newsmax.com
China is buying natural resources at bargain prices. There are two reasons for this: 1. China needs to have access to as great a volume of energy and the less common metals used in high technologies possible, and 2. China's horde of dollar denominated paper will never again have as much value as it does today nor is much more of it it likely to long remain available to China at anywhere near the value it has today. -
May 4, 2009
Study: Electric cars not as green as you think | news.cnet.com
Working with their blinders on, the activist environmentalist movement has managed to get politicians to waste vast amounts of capital, and even vaster resources of time and human endeavor, on the development of electrified cars using untested battery systems. Using current and reasonably predictable technology electric cars add almost nothing, nothing, to the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, and cost much more to produce than equivalent internal combustion engine powered vehicles intended for the same use! In a debt burdened world it is a tragic misapplication of brainpower and labor to continue to invest billions of dollars for marginal increases, if any, in movement towards the goal of an electrified global fleet.
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