There are a number of diaries here and articles elsewhere on the predicted End of the World (or Domination by the Communist Chinese) because of the demand for rare earth elements that only China can currently supply without caring about things like pollution and such. (Not that pollution isn't happening in China.)
There's a possible way around this, at least where energy generation is concerned: The cerium solution. If NASA and JPL hadn't been starved three-quarters to death over the past few decades, we'd already have it up and running by now with JPL's bidirectional fuel cell, as Ondelette mentions here. As it is, unless somebody like Google decides to dump a ton of money at it, we're about ten to fifteen years away.
More after the jump.
Here's the deal:
Cerium "is chemically similar to what we call the rare earth metals, but it turns out not actually to be rare," says Sossina Haile, a professor of materials science and chemical engineering at Caltech. It's about as abundant as copper, and is quite useful.
Haile has been experimenting with cerium because, at the right temperature, it can turn carbon dioxide and water into energy-rich fuels.
But there is one hang-up: "The catch is certainly that the temperatures have to be high," she says. Really high — nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Obviously, this process would be utterly useless if you had to use an energy guzzling furnace to make fuels.
But it turns out you don't need to use an energy-guzzling furnace: Concentrated solar power will do the trick.
A simple reactor that mimics plants by turning sunlight into fuel has been demonstrated in the laboratory, boosting hopes for a large-scale renewable source of liquid fuel.
"We have a big energy problem and we have to think big," said Prof Sossina Haile, at the California Institute of Technology, who led the research.
Haile estimates that a rooftop reactor could produce about three gallons of fuel a day. She thinks transport fuels would be the first application of the reactor, if it goes on to commercial use. But she said an equally important use for the renewable fuels would be to store solar energy so it is available at times of peak demand, and overnight. She says the first improvements that will be made to the existing reactor will be to improve the insulation to help stop heat loss, a simple move that she expects to treble the current efficiency.
Hey, Eric Schmidt! Throw a few billion CalTech's and JPL's way, OK?