Both this article and its source are misrepresenting the actual quote. Its seems to be about rumors that rare earth minerals are being sold now.
>Responding to the allegations that 'rare earth elements are sold to the USA', Bayraktar said that there is absolutely no such thing. Bayraktar said, "The agreement we made and signed in America was also a nuclear-related agreement. If we had done it about rare earth elements, be sure, they would have declared it too, we would have declared it," he said.
Please stop. Erdogan is not in charge of what things are called in English, and Turkey has been called Turkey for hundreds of years. Calling it "Türkiye" would be as silly as switching to calling Germany "Deutschland" tomorrow because it tickles Friedrich Merz's nationalist pride.
It's unrelated, but this spelling of Turkey makes me irrationally angry. I don't see why I should be expected to change my language to suit the whims of nationalists when they don't call Greece "Ellada" or Armenia "Hayastan" in Turkish.
Every country has rare earth elements. Just google "X discovers rare earth" where X is your country of choice and you'll find articles about how they have huge deposits. The underlying problem is the processing. China has figured this out and has cornered the market. Until other countries figure out how to process these materials, China will be able to leverage this capability to their advantage.
Not every country has economically extractable heavy rare earths, resource =/= reserve. X discovers rare earth is the same as X discovers plants, and then assume every country can build a robust biofuel economy. Reminder PRC has the MOST shale deposits in the world, they're just buried very deep and economically AND technically not productive to extract at scale.
PRC's main choke hold is HeavyREE, more specifically processing of ionic clays that is GEOGRAPHICALLY SCARCE like economically extractable oil deposits, which enables economic leeching of heavy strategic rare earth AT SCALE. Think hunting whales for blubber vs drilling oil, supports entirely different tiers of proliferation and use. At scale is key, west never used HREEs at scale until PRC commoditized them by exploiting specific geology mostly limited to south PRC, Myanmar, parts of Brazil but deposits now also found in Australia because Australia has everything. So the real question is can long will it take AU+co to discover and build the entire HREE infra based on deposit types only PRC has real experience with.
Off-Topic: Why Türkiye? Why not keep using Turkey in English?
I know they changed their name to Türkiye, but why would we change it in our languages? We still use Germany instead of Deutschland, India instead of Bharat, and Italy instead of Italia.
Funnily, the actual pronunciation is easier now, and it (to me) sounds 99% close to Turkia. I don't get why they went with such complicated letter sequence for such a straightforward word. Though both languages are not native to me, so I may be wrong. But I was baffled this year, after discovering that incomprehensible Türkiye is actually Turkia.
Arguably, the northern parts of Iraq, where the Kurds live, was ours to partition after Saddam Hussein’s fall. But Turkey doesn’t want a Kurdish state on their border, and the US wants good graces with Turkey for their anti-Russian missile silos.
as stated many times before, rare earth mining isn't a major issue, capacity to process into something useful which requires tons of water and toxic chemicals is the real issue for the US since China controls lion's share of the market.
In the English language, we need to stop spelling Turkiye as Türkiye. Note that I did not revert to the old spelling of Turkey. English does not have ü as a character. We spell all other countries using the A-Za-z character set, and no exception should be made for Turkiye. It doesn't matter how they want it spelled. If tomorrow they want it spelled Ṫüřḳïýe or Ĵăƥȃn̈ or Ǥëŗṁāņẙ, we should not have to oblige.
If they don’t even have the refining infrastructure built yet what do they have to offer the US ( or any other nation) that we can’t get from China? Rare Earth isn’t actually rare, what’s rare is the ability to refine it into pure elements.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 44.4 ms ] threadAnyone know if that is correct?
>Responding to the allegations that 'rare earth elements are sold to the USA', Bayraktar said that there is absolutely no such thing. Bayraktar said, "The agreement we made and signed in America was also a nuclear-related agreement. If we had done it about rare earth elements, be sure, they would have declared it too, we would have declared it," he said.
Please stop. Erdogan is not in charge of what things are called in English, and Turkey has been called Turkey for hundreds of years. Calling it "Türkiye" would be as silly as switching to calling Germany "Deutschland" tomorrow because it tickles Friedrich Merz's nationalist pride.
PRC's main choke hold is HeavyREE, more specifically processing of ionic clays that is GEOGRAPHICALLY SCARCE like economically extractable oil deposits, which enables economic leeching of heavy strategic rare earth AT SCALE. Think hunting whales for blubber vs drilling oil, supports entirely different tiers of proliferation and use. At scale is key, west never used HREEs at scale until PRC commoditized them by exploiting specific geology mostly limited to south PRC, Myanmar, parts of Brazil but deposits now also found in Australia because Australia has everything. So the real question is can long will it take AU+co to discover and build the entire HREE infra based on deposit types only PRC has real experience with.
I know they changed their name to Türkiye, but why would we change it in our languages? We still use Germany instead of Deutschland, India instead of Bharat, and Italy instead of Italia.
So why make an exception for Turkey?
PS: I'm going from this this video as a basis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYjVIaZA14c