Rare Earth Minerals and The Cost of Hard Drive Space

After watching this great and informative BBC video on the importance of rare earth minerals and Chinese, almost complete, dominance in their mining and export, it made me think of this post I´d seen on Carpe Diem´s about about how “The Cost of Hard Disk Space Has Decreased by Almost 1.5M Times Since 1980” - see graph below.

Perhaps one of the many reasons costs have fallen so much is because one of the rare earth minerals required in the production of the hard drives, Neodymium, and mined in China where labour costs are low and where fewer environmental restrictions exist (according to the video “mining rare earth minerals is difficult, toxic and sometimes radioactive”) and so costs and prices are minimised. The US used to be a big producer of rare earths but has been forced to close many of its mines, thanks to Chinese competition. I blogged about China´s control of the rare earth market two weeks ago and how we are becoming increasingly dependent on China for rare earths in the production of electric cars amongst other things. Now, according to the video, it seems China is reducing it´s supply of rare earth exports by 22% ostensibly to “protect the environment” although clearly this will have an impact on the price.