Wyoming’s REEs | Deep See as a Source of REEs | Electric Vehicle & National Security, and more

Could Wyoming Supply the U.S. with Rare Earth Elements?  (Nicole Pollack, Casper Star-Tribune)
Beneath Wyoming’s surface lie a bounty of resources most of us haven’t thought about since high school chemistry.
None of the increasingly sought-after rare earth elements — neodymium, dysprosium, praseodymium, another dozen lanthanides and a couple of others — are household names. On the periodic table, they’re housed mostly in the block of outliers relegated to the place where Alaska and Hawaii sit on U.S. maps.
But many of those elements are household staples. They’re what let smartphones glow and ring and buzz. They make fridges cold, lightbulbs bright and TVs vibrant. And their uses elsewhere run the gamut from oil refineries to hospitals.

Why Electric Vehicle Manufacturing Is a National Security Imperative  (Major General John Wharton, International Business Times)
President Joe Biden addressed an audience on May 22 in Seoul, South Korea, to celebrate Hyundai’s decision to build electric vehicles in Georgia. Biden observed that “electric vehicles are good for our climate goals, but they’re also good for jobs, and they’re good for business.”
But the importance of U.S. investment in EVs and EV supply chains is broader than climate goals and jobs. EVs are critical to the future of transportation, mobility, and the future of national security. Mobilizing the auto manufacturing industry to further embrace EV development will bring tactical and operational advantages for the U.S. military on a changing battlefield. It can also serve as a catalyst to break reliance on China’s dominance of the supply of materials vital not just to EVs, but also to a range of defense capabilities and activities. 

Britain’s Electric Dreams Will Never Come True While China Has a Materials Advantage  (John Naughton, Guardian)
Rare earth elements hold the key to a carbon-free future, but a new report reveals the UK’s shortcomings and vulnerabilities.

Exploring The Deep Sea as a New Source of Rare Earth Elements  (Quick Telecast)As concerns about the environmental impact of REE extraction and supply chain vulnerabilities grow (China dominates the REE market, accounting for 57.5% of production in 2020), researchers are looking to new sources of REEs.
Pelagic, or deep-sea, sediments are now being explored as a significant potential source of REEs for future exploitation. In a recent paper published in the open access journal Chemical Geology, a team of Chinese and German researchers extracted, analyzed and quantified REEs found in the pelagic sediments of the Tiki Basin in the Southeast Pacific and the Central Indian Ocean Basin.

Pro-China Agents Posed as Activists to Protest US, Canada Mines  (Margi Murphy, Bloomberg)
Pro-Chinese agents posed as concerned local residents on social media to try and spark protests over the opening of rare earth mines in the US and Canada, cybersecurity researchers said in a new report.
The fake Twitter and Facebook accounts were created to give China, the largest producer of rare earth minerals, a competitive advantage, cybersecurity research company Mandiant disclosed on Tuesday.