Rare Earth Markets and Their Industrial Applications

Continuous discoveries of the unique chemical and physical properties of rare earth elements (REEs) throughout history have had a major impact on their industrial applications. Although their first popular use can be traced back as early as 1885, it is in only the 1970s that diversification of uses truly emerged, coeval to the expansion of mining production levels. Thanks to continuous technological progress, REEs have since enabled significant advances in numerous industrial applications. Through an historical perspective and illustrative examples, this chapter shows that two main trends are at the root of such an evolution: (1) the search for substitution technologies following the evolution of consumer’s demand and (2) the fact that REEs are geologically found and extracted as aggregate lanthanide elements. The latter has often led to seeking new applications to by-products in order to maximize economic benefits from their extraction, sometimes bringing key technological breakthroughs along the way.