ARGUMENT: Rare Earths rivalryRare Earth Metals at the Heart of China’s Rivalry with U.S., Europe

What if China were to cut off the United States and Europe from access to Rare Earth Elements (REEs), 17 minerals with unique characteristics which are essential to electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, batteries, sophisticated military gear, and much more? This is a time of growing geopolitical friction among these three, and the United States and Europe want to change the current dependence on China, where, today, these minerals are largely extracted and refined.

“The expected exponential growth in demand for minerals that are linked to clean energy is putting more pressure on US and Europe to take a closer look at where the vulnerabilities are and the concrete steps these governments can take,” Jane Nakano, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, told AFP’s Ali Bekhtaoui.

Bekhtaoui writes:

In 2019, the United States imported 80 percent of its rare earth minerals from China, the US Geological Survey says.

The European Union gets 98 percent of its supply from China, the European Commission said last year.

Amid the transition to green energy in which rare earth minerals are sure to play a role, China’s market dominance is enough to sound an alarm in western capitals.

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This week the US Senate passed a law aimed at improving American competitiveness that includes provisions to improve critical minerals supply chains, following a similar executive order issued by President Joe Biden in February.

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The best hope for boosting American production can be found at the Mountain Pass mine in California.

Once one of the major players in the sector, the mine suffered as China rose and ate up its market share, aided by Beijing’s heavy government subsidies.

MP Materials relaunched the mine in 2017 and aims to make it a symbol of America’s industrial rebirth, saying the concentration of rare earths at its site is one of the world’s largest and highest-grade rare earth deposits, with soil concentrations of seven percent versus 0.1 to four percent elsewhere.

The company’s aim is to separate rare earth minerals from each other via a chemical process, and then by 2025 manufacture the magnets that industry uses—as market-leading Chinese firms currently do.

Europe, however, faces a more complicated path to achieving the goal of more REEs production, and the best hope lies with recycling, which, if scaled up, could provide 20 to 30 percent of Europe’s magnet needs by 2030.