Mining is first and foremost a material logistics problem. If I need to study significantly more material to retrieve a economically viable amount of sight after elements it will be always a difficult proposition.
Years ago I attended a USGS talk about Critical Minerals. (it's archived somewhere...) The federal government (at least a competent one, not sure about the current status) tracks the stability of Critical Mineral sources.
Turns out (to no surprise) that it's to the US's advantage to outsource very polluting mining and processing of critical minerals. (Nobody likes open-pit mines, see people thoughts about the Permanente quarry south of Cupertino)
Of course it's a trade-off, as the US becomes dependent on an external source, and the cost of bringing up internal production increases as internal mining sources are shut down and potentially skill is lost.
This is actually super interesting to me. Given that the US is actually blessed with mineral concentrations, why is it so assumed that only China can produce rare earths? Is it the land opportunity cost? Is it the cost of labor? Is it the cost of regulation? And in the end, this is only a motor, or a battery, and the actual rare earth content is not very high. If the cost of rare earths was double or even triple the amount of sourcing them from China, how much does that actually impact the end price of a consumer good?
> why is it so assumed that only China can produce rare earths?
Pollution. The smokestack emissions are very toxic. The residue/slag is toxic and radioactive. One should remember that "rare earth metals" are not rare, they're the bottom 2 rows of the periodic table. They are rather hard to separate chemically and many people like to exclude the bottom row of the periodic table (the actinides) because that's where uranium and plutonium are located and those 2 elements terrify people enough to derail discussions about the materials.
I used to work on a DoD special project that required rare earths that we could only get from China and we had to write a monthly memo about the risk to our $10B program that China would just stop selling it to us.
The problem boiled down to the Chinese government buying out and shutting down any competitors anywhere in the world, plus Congress requiring the DoD to go with the lowest cost, which was always China. We knew what the problem was, we made the problem clear, no one did anything about it.
Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.
And some number of years ago, the government restarted a rare earth ore processing plant (somewhere in the west, like CO... I forget). Of course, after a year or two, the will to maintain it (because it was operating at a loss) evaporated and it went under.
Japan broke their habit of buying rare earths from China because of an extortion incident between the two... they process the ore in far off places (Australia and other places), before importing the final products.
The issue is that the US is (and has been for some time) mired in short-term thinking. The short term being how to win the next election, not how to solve problems. Of course, now, the problems being solved aren't really ones that people want, unless you are rich already.
tldr: Japan arrested a Chinese fishing boat captain in disputed territory. China responded by restricting exports of rare earth elements to Japan. Japan responded by forming a new partnership with Lynas Rare Earths which mines in Australia and processes in Malaysia. $LYS, up 150% YTD
> plus Congress requiring the DoD to go with the lowest cost, which was always China
Are second-sources no longer a thing? Going with the lowest cost is fine, but it used to be that every critical project lined up a second domestic source for its supply chain. A lot of prominent semiconductor companies (eg. AMD) got started this way.
Ten billion sounds like a lot, but it's not really for an organization like the DoD that has so many projects and so much money. I bet someone above you assessed the risks and decided your project was good to run for as long as it could, but wouldn't be a crippling loss if it had to shut down. It would be like Google having to decide to keep selling Chromecasts until they can't and just stopping, or buying up the entire supply chain to secure their ability to produce Chromecasts indefinitely.
I hear about something that does not seem to really be a problem portrayed as a problem.
China did not stop selling to USA before USA decided to introduce tariffs and stopped selling to China advanced tech like GPUs and NPUs.
In a sense, mutual economic dependency has worked in the past, would work in the present, but "blowing up the government" is leading to one strong-arm play after another — and really, it only leads to everybody being unhappier, and prices being higher for everything, yet the trade will continue very similar to how it did before.
And really, this trade inter-dependency is really the only guarantee (if there is such a thing) of no big military conflict coming out between the two countries. And I am pretty sure that's worse.
"Having" and "willing to use" are two things, right?
The problem is that the US, for the most part, no longer has any appetite for projects that leave the landscape scarred and the waters polluted.
In California, we prefer to go through annual cycles of water rationing rather than build new dams. I'm sure the mindset would change if things get sufficiently dire, but that threshold might be farther than we assume.
I recommend looking into the work of Vaclav Smil & Mark Mills. Vaclav is pretty well known & his work is pretty easy to find. Mark Mills was a physicist who started working at investment funds & energy research think tanks. He also has a lot of interesting things to say about the so called "energy transition"¹. In short, you don't have to take my word for it but the material reality & physics of the situation is much more complicated & dire than people realize. It's more than just a simple matter of "critical" minerals & metals.
Odd lots mentioned about this. Only a very small portion of our “rare earth” mineral domestically came from China to begin with. And a lot can be procured locally (for now) but at a higher price
There are multiple moves outside the US to address this, but the cost of setting up a refinery is at least USD1b.
Iluka (Aus) has a mineral sands stockpile from their zircon/rutile processing, and are constructing a refinery next to the heap to process the rare earth minerals. Plant is fully funded and should come online end of 2026.
Lynas (Aus) has two refineries (and one planned in the US with DoD funding) and is partnering with a Korean firm in magnet production. They are also the only commercial-scale producer of Dy/Tb outside of China and recently raised an additional AUD800m to fund expansion.
Jim Kennedy is an American miner who argues that the Thorium nuclear waste liability is a large part of what is hobbling the rare-earth industry in the USA.
This was already known due to old analysis. The problem with getting rare-earth minerals isn't that they are that rare, but that they are a pain to process.
If Trump needed further excuse for bloviating out some more pig-ignorant, economic wrecking ball bullshit with international trade "deals", here it is!
Rare earths are not rare. Of course the US has everything.
The problem always was the cost for managing the mining externalities in a developed society.
With the current setup we were getting a great deal because we’re were paying very low cost to get rare earths while shipping mining externalities and horrible working conditions overseas.
Of course the U.S and allies like Canada/Australia have all the critical minerals needed. But the U.S. does not have the ecosystem to mine and process it. The author suggests critical R&D but the administration is also waging war on the top universities (Harvard & co.), and generally looking down on what's coming from them. A good researcher is going to have a pact with the devil to agree to this, unless the administration throws money and brute force at the problem.
Having them is one thing, buying out from others as they sell cheaper and then still having your own after others depleted their stash and selling at premium - that’s the game.
The US is large enough to have basically every material resource it could need. The problems comes from the cost/pollution of mining and refinement and the cleaner you are the more costlier it gets, and actually possessing the equipment, processing facilities, and experienced workforce to utilize those resources, which we have a huge lack of because we spent decades outsourcing most of that work. Again because doing it cleanly costs more money, and investors won't get as good of a return on their investment so outsource it.
Nobody invests in operations that only make a token profit when they could instead invest it overseas and earn a substantial profit.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 58.0 ms ] threadThough it doesn't address the issue of waste from the refining process which currently looks like this: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...
Turns out (to no surprise) that it's to the US's advantage to outsource very polluting mining and processing of critical minerals. (Nobody likes open-pit mines, see people thoughts about the Permanente quarry south of Cupertino)
Of course it's a trade-off, as the US becomes dependent on an external source, and the cost of bringing up internal production increases as internal mining sources are shut down and potentially skill is lost.
Related link: https://www.usgs.gov/news/science-snippet/department-interio...
And here's the 2025 draft report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2025/1047/ofr20251047.pdf
Edit: here's the USGS talk, from 2017: https://youtu.be/N53Rm-aDCu8
Pollution. The smokestack emissions are very toxic. The residue/slag is toxic and radioactive. One should remember that "rare earth metals" are not rare, they're the bottom 2 rows of the periodic table. They are rather hard to separate chemically and many people like to exclude the bottom row of the periodic table (the actinides) because that's where uranium and plutonium are located and those 2 elements terrify people enough to derail discussions about the materials.
(And, you know, environmental regulations, so mining and refining sites don't turn into what's described in a sibling comment.)
The problem boiled down to the Chinese government buying out and shutting down any competitors anywhere in the world, plus Congress requiring the DoD to go with the lowest cost, which was always China. We knew what the problem was, we made the problem clear, no one did anything about it.
Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.
as long as if you're willing to ignore the people it will kill
Japan broke their habit of buying rare earths from China because of an extortion incident between the two... they process the ore in far off places (Australia and other places), before importing the final products.
The issue is that the US is (and has been for some time) mired in short-term thinking. The short term being how to win the next election, not how to solve problems. Of course, now, the problems being solved aren't really ones that people want, unless you are rich already.
It went bankrupt in 2015, but came out of it and is still operating today. $MP, up 300% YTD
The Japan incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Senkaku_boat_collision_in...
tldr: Japan arrested a Chinese fishing boat captain in disputed territory. China responded by restricting exports of rare earth elements to Japan. Japan responded by forming a new partnership with Lynas Rare Earths which mines in Australia and processes in Malaysia. $LYS, up 150% YTD
Are second-sources no longer a thing? Going with the lowest cost is fine, but it used to be that every critical project lined up a second domestic source for its supply chain. A lot of prominent semiconductor companies (eg. AMD) got started this way.
China did not stop selling to USA before USA decided to introduce tariffs and stopped selling to China advanced tech like GPUs and NPUs.
In a sense, mutual economic dependency has worked in the past, would work in the present, but "blowing up the government" is leading to one strong-arm play after another — and really, it only leads to everybody being unhappier, and prices being higher for everything, yet the trade will continue very similar to how it did before.
And really, this trade inter-dependency is really the only guarantee (if there is such a thing) of no big military conflict coming out between the two countries. And I am pretty sure that's worse.
The problem is that the US, for the most part, no longer has any appetite for projects that leave the landscape scarred and the waters polluted.
In California, we prefer to go through annual cycles of water rationing rather than build new dams. I'm sure the mindset would change if things get sufficiently dire, but that threshold might be farther than we assume.
¹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8Nz-4eEBTw
Iluka (Aus) has a mineral sands stockpile from their zircon/rutile processing, and are constructing a refinery next to the heap to process the rare earth minerals. Plant is fully funded and should come online end of 2026.
https://www.iluka.com/products-markets/rare-earth-products/
Lynas (Aus) has two refineries (and one planned in the US with DoD funding) and is partnering with a Korean firm in magnet production. They are also the only commercial-scale producer of Dy/Tb outside of China and recently raised an additional AUD800m to fund expansion.
https://thoriumenergyalliance.com/resource/jim-kennedy-rare-...
Its sounds plausible, but I'm not a geologist.
The problem always was the cost for managing the mining externalities in a developed society.
With the current setup we were getting a great deal because we’re were paying very low cost to get rare earths while shipping mining externalities and horrible working conditions overseas.
they are rare PER amount of earth
it's very labor intensive which makes it expensive to mine
which is why countries with oppressed labor can do it far cheaper than USA
ALSO it's extremely toxic with radioactive byproducts in the earth accumulated
which again why companies in USA didn't want to do it for little to no profit
But he's still going to invade Greenland, he's already got CIA mucking around there trying to get rid of opposition to forced annexation
The problem has never been availability of minerals.
It is the environmental damage from the polluting extraction process and lack of operational know how and trade secrets to do it efficiently.
An often overlooked competitive advantage China has is lack of environmental regulations
Nobody invests in operations that only make a token profit when they could instead invest it overseas and earn a substantial profit.