There are 17 rare earth minerals witch are vital to the production of every high tech piece of hardware in the world. The biggest manufacturer of those by far is China which in 2010 controlled 93% of world supply. As former Chineese peoples workers party first secretary., father of mnodern chineese capitalism Deng xiaoping famusly said: “Middle east have oil, china have rare earths”. But does the leverage on this market really make as influencial political weapon as oil does?
Rare earth minerals in contradiction to what the name suggests are not that rare. Average abundance in the earth’s crust of rarest thallium and most wiedly used in manucturing, Neudimium and cerium are: 0.52 ppm (parts per million), 41.5 ppm, and 66.5 ppm respectively. Comparing this to more widely used elements like silver 0.075 ppm and coper 60 ppm, we can see that scarcity is not an issue. Problem lays in the way taht REE’s are distribiuted troughout the earth’s crust, they dont occur in concentrated easly minable deposits like other minerals, in the result process of extracting those minerals requires extensive usage of strong chemicals severly polluting the enviroment around the mine. Beacuse of this reason China beacme the biggest fish in the market as western countries care about eviroment to much grater extent.
China Started extracting REE’s only in 1980’s when liberalisation of economy under already mentioned Deng xiaoping presented oportunity to dissrupt global supply chains by undercuting exsisting competition with low operationg cost due to lack of enviromental regulations and cheap labour. Up to this point most of world supply came from single mine in mountain pass california which is still exploited on and off to this day but struggles financialy and holds only fraction of previous market share.
As tensions between China and the West rises, and world is inevitably heading towards new cold war, it beacame clear that after decades of chineese dominance in this key area poses a serious problem to the wesatern nations. But quickly after first usage of this dominance by chineese rest of the world acknowleged issues posed by this situation and started implementing mesures to reduce their dependence on chinnese resourcess.
Sourcess:
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2014/3078/pdf/fs2014-3078.pdf
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/europe-races-fix-its-rare-earths-import-dependency-andy-home-2021-10-08/https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/europe-races-fix-its-rare-earths-import-dependency-andy-home-2021-10-08/
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/business/global/23rare.html
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/clean-energy-transition-to-fuel-growth-for-china-s-rare-earths-sector-in-2022-68604096
Chinese companies currently dominate the global REE market. It may not be far-fetched to assume that the PRC will soon implement a complete export embargo on these metals given that it has drastically reduced the export of rare earth minerals. Rare earth supply disruption will have an impact on the production of vital assets, including defense systems, electronics, and batteries.
Nevertheless, depending on the reporting source, China continues to supply 70 to 77 percent of the world’s REEs in 2021, so other countries should take action.
Super interesting! I didn’t know anything earlier about this topic, even though, as you said, rare earth minerals are crucial to high-tech hardware production. I’m curious how the situation will evolve with the current political changes because China currently has almost monopolized this sector and has strained relations with some countries. Maybe, on the other hand, this will cause advancements in material engineering and be a great opportunity to find substitutions for those rare minerals.