Why everyone wants to ramp up rare earths production

It’s almost exactly one year since President Trump’s ‘liberation day’ announcement, when he imposed a raft of tariffs on imports and kicked off trade wars with nations around the world. Of all those battles, the fight he picked with China was perhaps the most damaging – it escalated rapidly and the US found itself locked in a months-long standoff after China retaliated by applying its enormous leverage in the supply of rare earth materials. The countries finally reached a détente in October last year, and despite the victorious tenor of the announcement, it was widely regarded as a stalemate, if not an outright win for China. And it seems that Trump doesn’t want to find himself in that position again: in February this year, he US announced Project Vault – a $12 billion (£9 billion) fund to create a US stockpile of critical materials such as rare earths.

Project Vault’s coffers are effectively underwriting the risk of going up against a competitor with a decades-long headstart 

Demand for rare earth elements has been growing for years. They have applications in a variety of sectors, and the neodymium magnets used in electric vehicles and wind turbines are prized in particular. China’s dominance in the supply chain has therefore been viewed as a strategic risk by many governments – in recent years the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act and the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, for example, both sought to diversify supply chains and rebuild domestic production capacity for critical minerals. The elements once regarded as boringly indistinct have now ascended to being instruments of geopolitical power. 

Who shares the rare?

Despite their name, the problem here is not really one of scarcity – rare earths are fairly abundant in the Earth’s crust. But it is hard to find them concentrated in one place, and they are typically bundled together with their pals from the periodic table (usually with some radioactive ones too) which means challenging separation and purification steps are needed. So, finding large enough deposits to make the extraction and processing economically viable is the challenge. Yet while China does boast the largest deposits of any single country, its geological share of around 30% is vastly exceeded by its share of global extraction and refining. 

China has attained its position thanks to a deliberate, strategic effort. For much of the 20th century, the US was the major producer of rare earths – all of it from the Mountain Pass mine in the Mojave desert, though back then the demand was for europium and yttrium for colour TV sets. In the 1980–1990s, the mine’s environmental damage and ensuing fines – along with emerging competition from China – forced it to wind down and it was effectively shuttered. In the meantime, China devoted itself to developing its technical ability, infrastructure and an economic ecosystem built around rare earths. It now accounts for over 60% of the mining supply and has an effective monopoly on processing – accounting for almost 90% of the refined supply. 

Circular solutions

So new, more efficient and cleaner methods for processing are very much in demand. As our feature explains, ionic liquids, electrochemical methods and easier routes to metallisation are all being investigated. Yet those are still years away from being used on an industrial scale, and have yet to prove they can be as robust, cheap and scalable as the incumbent tech. There are also societal factors to address. Attempts to secure supplies of critical minerals such as rare earths in Greenland and a lithium mine in Serbia have run into strong public opposition. 

The geopolitical shifts are therefore providing a greater motive to develop more sustainable approaches to obtaining the minerals we need. For example, chemical and biological methods can recover metals from the mineral wealth that is accumulating in discarded electronic devices – various pilot scale projects are currently in operation around the world to recycle rare earths from e-watse. And a study in Science last year estimated that the unrecovered material in waste from US mining projects could meet the country’s needs for 68 critical minerals. These recovery and recycling technologies still require huge amounts of energy, and we don’t yet have the infrastructure to make them work, but they must be a part of supplying our materials needs.

Rare earths are central to enabling the transition to a more sustainable global economy. Chemistry can ensure that their supply chains are sustainable too.