Meanwhile, the demand for magnets embedded in carbon removal tools, such as cars and wind turbines, is growing. Currently, 12 percent of rare earth elements go into electric vehicles, according to Adamas Intelligence, a market that is just getting started. At the same time, rare earth prices have been declining recently due to internal Chinese markets and political interventions that outside companies cannot always predict.
All in all, if you work for a company where you can do alternative work, it probably makes sense to do so, says Jim Chelikowski, a physicist who studies magnetic materials at the University of Texas, Austin. But there are many reasons, he says, to look for better alternatives to ferrite rare earth magnets. The challenge is to find materials that have three basic qualities: they need to be magnetic, to maintain this magnetism in the presence of other magnetic fields, and to withstand high temperatures. A hot magnet ceases to be a magnet.
Researchers have a pretty good idea of what chemical elements would make good magnets, but there are millions of possible atomic arrangements. Some magnet hunters have taken the approach of starting with hundreds of thousands of possible materials, discarding those with defects such as containing rare earths, and then using machine learning to predict the magnetic qualities of those that remain. Late last year, Chelikowsky published the results of using the system to create a new highly magnetic cobalt-containing material. It’s not ideal, geopolitically speaking, but it is a starting point, he says.
Often the biggest challenge is finding new magnets that are easy to make. Some newly developed magnets, such as those containing manganese, are promising, but also unstable, explains Fichina of Uppsala University. In other cases, scientists know the matter is extraordinarily magnetic but cannot be created in large quantities. This includes tetratinite, a nickel-iron compound known only from meteorites that must cool slowly over thousands of years to neatly arrange its atoms into the correct state. Attempts to make it faster in the lab are ongoing but are not yet bearing fruit.
Niron, the magnetic startup, is a little further, with iron nitride magnets that the company says are theoretically more magnetic than neodymium. But it is also a capricious material that is difficult to make and maintain in the desired shape. Blackburn says the company is making progress but it won’t be producing magnets strong enough to transform electric vehicles in time for the next generation of Tesla cars. The first step, he says, is to put the new magnets into smaller devices such as audio systems.
It’s unclear if other automakers will follow Tesla’s rare earth swap, Cromer says. Some might stick with baggage-laden materials, while others would use induction motors or try something new. Even Tesla, he says, will likely have a few grams of rare earth sprinkled into its future vehicles, dispersed across things like automatic windows, power steering, and windshield wipers. (In a possible sleight of hand, the slides that contrast the rare earth content at a Tesla investor event actually compare an entire current-generation car to a future engine.) Despite workarounds like Tesla’s, rare earth magnets sourced from China will stay with us – Elon Musk included – especially as the world pushes for decarbonisation. It might be a good idea to replace everything, but as Cromer says, “we simply don’t have the time.”