The Mad Hedge Funder reports via  Zerohedge on the tight supply/demand situation in rare earth elements (REE):

Interest in Rare Earths is starting to heat up in a dramatic fashion, and it something you should keep on your radar. So named because they were hard to get in the 18th and 19th century, these once obscure elements have suddenly become the focus of several converging trends in the global economy, as they are the key ingredient of magnets. There are 17 in all, divided into light (cerium, Ce, lanthanum, La, and neodymium, Nd) and heavy (dysprosium, Dy, terbium, Tb, and europium, Eu).

It turns out that you can’t build a hybrid or electric car, a wind turbine, thin film solar, LED’s, high performance batteries, or a cell phone without these elements. One Prius uses 25 kilograms of the stuff. You also can’t fight a modern war without rare earths, being essential for radar, missile guidance systems, navigation, and night vision goggles.

That’s where things get interesting. China now produces 97% of the world’s rare earth supplies, much of it coming from small mines operating by criminal gangs where it is safe to say, concerns about environmental considerations are nil. Last year China announced that it may start restricting rare earth exports, possibly banning several, it is thought, in order to force foreigners to buy more of their downstream electronic products. Such a ban could begin as early as 2012.

The world market for rare earths is tiny now, amounting to only $1.4 billion a year. But Toyota intends on doubling its production of  Prius’s from one million to 2 million units in the near future, while China and South Korea want to boost their combined electric and hybrid production by 1 million units by the end of next year. Demand for wind turbines is going off the charts, thanks to massive government subsidies in Europe and the US… (cont.)

Read the article in its entirety here, or try a search for companies with rare earth elements (select “REE”) or heavy minerals (select “heavy minerals”) using the Minerals filter.

A quick search of database shows 25 companies with REE or heavy minerals. They include, off the top of the list in alphabetical order:

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There are a bunch more… just filter the database yourself to see.

Here’s the list of companies who’s resource, production and financial data we’ve just updated and put online in the past few days, bringing the running total to 550. We are also revealing full property-by-property tonnage & grade and production data for all companies later this week.

We’ve added the full data for a few dozen more companies for free public viewing during the beta stage. We now have BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Southern Copper, Freeport McMoran, Barrick, Teck, Lihir and virtually all other miners with multi-billion dollar market caps.

Soon, when we put up the dedicated pages for each company, users will be able to view the full resource (tonnage & grade) and production data for every property in each company’s portfolio.

Until then, you can just see the company-wide totals in our datagrid. The totals are what you need for quantitative comparative analysis to sort the wheat from the chaff, what our datagrid was built for.

Also coming soon is a huge improvement to the filtration power of the datagrid — we are making each data column into a filter, in addition to the original six filters at the top of the page.

After you make a search in our database and generate a list of companies with their data, you can email a snapshot of what you’ve found. Just click the SHARE button, the little envelope above the grid to the left. Send the email to someone else who might have an interest or to yourself (while we’re in beta we don’t yet offer free accounts that let you save watch-lists, so this is a work-around).

The snapshot is taken of whatever you see in the grid, so if you want to send the resources data, make sure you are on the Resources tab when you click SHARE. If you want both resources and financials, for example, just send two emails. We don’t save the emails and will never spam.

Anyway, soon you’ll be able to create a free account and save your results here so you can come right back to them in the dynamic grid, but the email function will always be there.