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China dominates the world's production and supply of rare earths - obscure elements that are vital for high tech manufacturing.
Rare earth elements (REEs) are a group of 15 elements referred to as the lanthanide series in the periodic table of elements. Scandium and yttrium, while not true REEs, are also included in this categorization because they exhibit similar properties to the lanthanides and are always found in the same ore bodies. REEs are key components in many electronic devices that we use in our daily lives, as well as in a variety of industrial applications, including electronics, clean energy, aerospace, automotive and defence.
The manufacturing of magnets represents the single largest and most important end use for REEs, accounting for 21% of total consumption.
Comment: There is nothing rare about rare earths, they are in everybody's backyard. The real issues are: 1) Finding them in commercially viable concentrations (>300 parts per million (ppm)), and 2) Environmental concerns from the dirty rare earth refining process. Just last month North Dakota announced a huge find of greater than 2,570 ppm in a state survey of coal seams that are no longer viable as an energy source.
And the North Dakota State Geological Department has only taken 1,700 samples from a fraction of its coal seams. The US could easily find it has more rare earth reserves than China once you start looking for them. As recently as the 1980s the US produced about 90% of the World's rare earths. The problem is that cost-wise in terms of mining, extracting, and refining them and it's hard to compete with China not because they have huge reserves, but because Chinese producers have extremely low environmental standards and virtually bottomless supplies of Chinese government financing. It was this cost advantage, not the Chinese reserves which all but shut down US rare earth mining and refining operations in the 2000s.
It should also be noted that the US is the second largest producer of mined rare earth products in the world after China. 43,000 MT vs 210,000MT for China in 2021. The irony is nearly all mined rare earth in the US are sent to China for the final refining steps (A new refinery in Mountain Pass, CA is just being brought online). So most of those Chinese exports to the US are actually US-mined rare earths that were sent to China for refining and then re-exported to the US, if the US refined the rare earth it currently mines it would largely be self-sufficient in meeting its needs.
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