Gell Mann Amnesia, Hayek and rare earths for electric vehicle batteries

Gell Mann Amnesia is where you read a newspaper article on your own subject of expertise and note that they’ve managed to entirely cock up the sophistications and subtleties of the area to the point of being wildly misleading to completely wrong. You then turn the page to a piece outside your own area of direct knowledge and believe everything they say.

This always does happen.

Hayek’s point about trying to plan the world is that knowledge is local, no one ever does, or can, gain the necessary information to be able to plan everything in any detail.

Colin Brazier on GBNews gives us an example. This is not to attack this specific outlet, these mistakes are more general that that, this is an exemplar.

The subject is rare earths to make the batteries for electric vehicles. The claim is made that neodymium is used to do so. It isn’t. Nd is used in magnets, electromagnetism means that you use Nd to turn movement into electricity - in a turbine say - or electricity into movement - in an engine. You do not use it in a battery. You might well use lanthanum but that’s a different element, even if it is still a rare earth. The other metals mentioned, cobalt, lithium and so on, aren’t even rare earths.

Yes, this does matter because the supply problem with rare earths - a different one from many other metals - is not going mining for them. This is between relatively and entirely trivial as an exercise. There are plenty of sources, for example, in the waste streams of other mineral activities. We - we meaning any combination of the UK, US, EU and so on, whether separately or in combination - can gain access to mixed rare earths at the drop of a hat.

The problem is that “mixed” bit. The difficulty is in separating the 15 lanthanides out into their individual elements. This requires a plant that costs some $1 billion using the current technology. There is a proposal for a mini-plant to be built upon Teesside which would cost £200 million - and do about a quarter of the job, extracting only a few of them from the mixed source.

If, and we do insist upon that if, there is to be some intervention from the centre into this industry then good logic would suggest it should be in solving that separation problem, not the mining one. Good logic because the mining part isn’t a problem while the separation is.

It is even true that there is a potentially - potentially! - viable alternative technology, vacuum distillation of metal halides, which would solve that separation problem. As it happens the UK is one of only two - and of the two the better one - global centres of excellence in the basics of this technology.

Guess what isn’t being discussed as a potential British solution to this rare earths problem? Which is where that Hayek part comes in. Because the British government does think it would like to solve this problem. It’s willing to spend considerable sums on doing so too. But it doesn’t have the knowledge to have identified what the actual problem is therefore isn’t trying to solve the actual problem.

The Gell Mann part is how - we all do get our information outside our own areas of technical expertise from the media - the general conversation gets things wrong. The Hayek part is how government does. Even when there is a problem to be solved government does the wrong thing.

Which is just another reason why we’re not in favour of that government involvement in the economy, in that idea that planning will be the solution to our economic woes. Observation of that reality outside the window tells us that the information to identify problems is lacking thus solutions never are funded.

Of course, there’s always the opportunity for the government to prove us wrong here but we’ll not be holding our breath……