GLG News by Mr. Jack Lifton, Co-founder and Director
GLG News is now G+ Insights
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G+ is a community for professionals, academics and entrepreneurs to connect through online discussions and in-person meetings. You will continue to see G+ Insights (formerly GLG News) here as well as on the G+ website, where you can share and discuss the G+ Insights you read.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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???
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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May 4, 2009
Mining: Lynas, Wpl, OZL, ILU | ibtimes.com.au
China's hunt for natural resources to feed its already substantial heavy industrial base and its growing consumer products industry is fueled by the size of the reserves of capital accumulated by the Chinese state and driven by the single-minded goal of China's government of full employment for China. America's more and more isolated response to this drive by China for natural resources is to ignore it and assume that America and the Western world will continue to follow the American model of myopic free market capitalism in which natural resources will always be miraculously made available to the highest bidder. American bankers like to say that the golden rule is that "Them thats got the gold makes the rules." They're wrong. The rule is "Them thats got the rare resources makes the rules." Its the last few minutes of the new "Great Game," and it's not looking good for the home team.
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May 1, 2009
Lynas Corp strikes $505m China deal | www.wabusinessnews.com.au
China today produces at least 95% of the world's supply of rare earth elements from its domestic mines primarily in Inner Mongolia. At the beginning of 2008 two very large Australian REE mines were well on the way to coming into production. Either one of them would eventually have been the largest single-point mine for REEs in the world. One of the Australian companies was also beginning construction of a REE refinery in Malaysia, which would have been the largest in the world outside of China. Control of the shares of both of the Australian companies is now coming into hands of state owned aggressive Chinese mining and trading entities. It has been predicted that Chinese domestic demand for REEs will exceed its domestic production in the next 2-4 years. That is precisely how long it will take for the two Australian mines and the Malaysian refinery to be brought into production. Three significant REE mining possibilities, only, now remain out of Chinese control.
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April 27, 2009
Obama promises major investment in R&D | finance.yahoo.com
It takes twelve to twenty years to find, select, encourage, test, and educate scientists, engineers, and medical professionals. By contrast it takes just a few minutes to select from a crowd those who will run for public office. Yet the future of innovation in America depends on this second class of selected individuals. It is always just luck that gets us progress with this polticized selection system for education. America can not depend on luck.
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April 22, 2009
Platinum Pollution Issue Gets Measured | www.nature.com
The ability of analytical chemists to detect low levels of metals in water has gone far beyond the ability of environmentalists to exercise common sense and good judgement.
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April 20, 2009
Molycorp Minerals, LLC Signs Letter of Intent to Acquire Controlling Interest in Great Western Minerals Group | uk.sys-con.com
What possible advantage can there be for MolyCorp, which was privatized in 2008 by a group of venture funds, one specializing in mining, and underwritten by Goldman Sachs, in acquiring the publicly traded Great Western Minerals Group (http://www.gwmg.ca)? It may be that GWMG's business model and operations contains something that completes MolyCorp's business model for its Mountain Pass, California, rare earth mine, so that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
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April 20, 2009
Hybrid Hummer Promises 100 Miles per Gallon | blog.wired.com
The celebration of the creation of sophomoric toys for elites with public money ignores the fact that the supply and demand of lithium is a zero sum game. When the demand for high end toys for people with unlimited discretionary spending ability is high the demand for practical devices for the person of average means will go unfilled. Each 53 kWh battery for a Hummer, for example, will, if a lithium-ion type, use 53 kg, or 116 lb of lithium; it will cost as much as $53,000 at retail just for this battery!
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April 13, 2009
No easy road for U.S. auto industry | www.latimes.com
It's been a common practice for carmakers to first introduce a new vehicle "type" in limited production as a marketing test. There have been, for example, the Corvette, the Thunderbird, the Aquacar, the Edsel, the Pinto, The Chevrolet Vega, The Cadillac Cimmeron, the American Motors Alliance, the Chrysler K-car, the Chrysler Minivan, the SUV, The GM EV1, the Toyota Prius, and so on. Few of the very, very, expensive marketing gambles for OEM auto makers have ever paid off, or even repaid their tooling costs, viz the second edition of the Thunderbird by Ford This explains why auto makers are reluctant to try out totally new car types or radical "under the hood changes" the benefits of which need to be explained to non technical customers. The reluctance of any major car maker to put a pure EV or a lithium battery using vehicle on any kind into even limited production is an old story not a new one.
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April 8, 2009
Oil Giants Loath to Follow Obama’s Green Lead | www.nytimes.com
The energy calculus that drives the creation of alternate sources of electricity is very simple: The world runs on the fuel that delivers the lowest cost per watt. The key problem today with the electrification of cars, by which I mean the change of power trains for private passenger carrying vehicles from hydrocarbon burning internal combustion engines, ICEs, to electric drive trains powered by batteries, is the initial cost of batteries that can replace the performance of ICEs. Lithium-ion batteries, though today they must be hand made and selected, can be used to manufacture high performance private cars with decent ranges, but the battery for the Tesla, which it is claimed will allow an electric vehicle, EV, to go up to 150 mph and have a range of 300 miles, costs nearly $40,000.00, and the Tesla equipped with this battery will cost around 125,000 at retail. No one today knows how to make EVs with a range of 300 miles and a top speed over 45 competitively with ICEs.
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