News

On February 8, 2018, Umicore reported a net profit of 267 million euro in 2017. Concurrently, Umicore announced an investment of 660 million euro to ramp up the production of battery (cathode) materials for a.o. electric vehicles.

The Critical Materials Institute, a U.S. Department of Energy Innovation Hub led by the Ames Laboratory, has announced that one of its industry associates, Momentum Technologies, Inc., has entered into a letter of intent with Wistron GreenTech Corporation, Texas, pertaining ...

Join us in Leuven on February 21 for a unique Symposium on the Social License to Operate for mining of critical metals. The Symposium is part of the Arts festival “Artefact 2018: This Rare Earth – Stories from Below”.

When BMW AG revealed it was designing electric versions of its X3 SUV and Mini, the going rate for 21 kilograms of cobalt—the amount of the metal needed to power typical car batteries—was under $600.Only 16 months later, the price ...

ETN DEMETER, which investigates how to extract and recycle rare earth magnets from electric vehicle motors, features on the EC website in the series "Success Stories". Prof. Binnemans (coordinator DEMETER) outlines the challenges.

The EU FP7 EURARE project team has published a concluding project brochure, explaining how Europe can create a sustainable European rare-earth supply chain. A must read!

DEMETER contribution: 1st Place Award in the TOP STARS 2017 – Innovation challenge in Raw Material framework – BioTechNO3 team The TOP STARS 2017 EIT RawMaterials Winter School introduces PhD students to entrepreneurial thinking and behavior, business and innovation processes, ...

Gwendolyn Bailey, a KU Leuven researcher in the EU H2020 DEMETER project, presented her work at the high-level 7th Trilateral EU-US-Japan Conference on Critical Materials (October 12, 2017) in Pittsburgh, USA.

As part of “Artefact 2018: This Rare Earth - Stories from Below”, a unique symposium on the Social License to Operate with respect to the mining and recycling of critical metals is taking place on February 21, 2018 (Leuven).

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have developed a new, more efficient permanent magnet that removes the deficiencies of conventional samarium and neodymium magnets.  The proposed magnet stems from the well-known samarium and cobalt (SmCo5, CaCu5-type structure) magnet, but goes a step further ...