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Irina Slav

Irina Slav

Irina is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry.

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Can China’s Rare Earth Monopoly Be Broken?

A group of seventeen metallic elements whose names most of us have never heard recently came into the spotlight amid the latest trade tension escalation between Beijing and Washington. Rare earths, used in a myriad of products from electronic displays to lasers and electric cars, are currently the dominion of China and there is concern it could decide to weaponize this dominion. There is precedent.

Back in 2011, as a territorial dispute between China and Japan got rough, Beijing imposed a rare earths export embargo on its neighbor. The result: soaring prices as everyone started stockpiling in case things got even rougher until the World Trade Organization intervened and China lifted the embargo.

China is home to 85 percent of the world’s rare earths production capacity, and unlike other countries it has spend decades developing the most efficient technologies not just for extracting them but for processing these seventeen metals as well, as a recent in-depth analysis of the situation from the South China Morning Post noted. In short, China has the resources and the know-how to extract them. In a trade war this is a major advantage.

The U.S. imported 80 percent of the rare earths it used between 2014 and 2017, Reuters reported, as the topic garnered more media attention. There is only one rare earths mine operating in the country right now, the Mountain Pass in California, and it has only been operating for two years after MP Materials—a company with Chinese financial backing – bought it from Molycorp, which went under in 2015.

According to MP Materials, Mountain Pass produces a tenth of the world’s supply of rare earths… but there is no rare earths refining capacity on the site so everything mined at Mountain Pass is shipped to China for processing. The country has 220,000 tons in annual rare earths refining capacity. This is five times the combined refining capacity of the rest of the world. This is what can reasonably be called almost complete dependence.

The problem with shaking off this dependence is two-pronged. On the one hand, recycling is out of the question and will remain out of the question simply because rare earths are used in such tiny amounts there is not enough of them to recycle. Recycling companies don’t recover them at all when they separate materials from, say, electronic devices for recycling.  Few companies are collecting them for recycling and working on new recycling technology specifically aimed at rare earths—but there are some. Related: Another Beneficiary Of The OPEC Deal Emerges

Apple, for example, made a robot named Daisy that can recover 32 kilograms of rare earths per 100,000 iPhones recycled. Companies in Asia are also launching recycling plants for rare earths, but on a relatively small scale for now. It seems that mainstream recycling of rare earths will in all likelihood have to wait.

Alternative materials are also being researched with some success, but rare earths remain the dominant choice for electronics and various other products, pretty much like lithium ion batteries still dominate the battery industry despite the multitude of potential challengers.

MP Materials says it plans to reopen the refining facility at the Mountain Pass mine by the end of 2020. This would certainly be a start to reducing this uncomfortable dependence on China. Yet it will be just that, a start. An Australian company, Lynas, earlier this year sealed a deal with Blue Line Corporation in Texas to jointly build a rare earths separation facility on U.S. soil. That’s another step.

Shaking off China’s dominance in rare earths will take years, but it is necessary as the world’s demand for those seventeen elements will only continue to rise as we continue to increasingly depend on products that can’t work without them.

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By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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  • Johannes Meier on July 04 2019 said:
    Wh you are so concern about China's monopoly if country like USA could tell almost the whole world what to do and what not do do. No one is really complaining so far?
  • Mamdouh Salameh on July 05 2019 said:
    In theory any monopoly can be broken if there are the resources and the political decision to do so. After all, OPEC was founded in 1960 to confront the oil cartel of the so-called “Seven Sisters” (Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Gulf Oil, Texaco, BP & Shell) which monopolized global oil resources, production, refining and selling. China’s rare earth monopoly is no exception but with one difference. It will take decades to develop the resources and the recycling and refining technologies that China already possesses.

    China is not only home to 85% of the world’s rare earth metals’ production capacity but also the world’s most efficient technologies not just for extracting them but for processing them and also the will to weaponize them and use them to its advantage if the trade war with the United States escalates further. China did indeed use this weapon in 2011 against Japan when a territorial dispute with Japan got rough imposing a rare earths export embargo on its neighbour. The United States has been importing 80% of the rare earth metals in recent years.

    If President Trump continues escalating the trade war and tries to push China into a corner, he will find that China has very powerful weapons in its arsenal capable of inflicting real harm on the US economy and the dollar. Some of these weapons have been dubbed as China nuclear options.

    The first is for China to retaliate by offloading its holdings of US Treasury bills estimated at $1.3 trillion. That will immediately cause a steep devaluation of the dollar thus leading to a serious exacerbation of both the US budget and US outstanding debts.

    The second weapon is for China to impose an embargo on the supply of rare earth minerals to the United States. That could potentially cripple large swathes of US industry from smartphones, turbines, lasers, missiles, advanced weapon sensors, stealth technology and jamming technology to name but a few. By the time the United States has found alternative supplies, the damage would have been done.

    China gave two hints that if the trade war escalates further, it will resort to the nuclear options. The first was when Chinese President Xi Jinping visited an obscure factory of rare earth minerals.

    The other was when President Xi Jinping likened China’s determination to face down the United States in the trade war to the Red Army’s Long March which ended in the victory of the communists in China. What is President Jinping was telling President Trump is that China will never capitulate no matter how long the trade war takes.

    Dr Mamdouh G Salameh
    International Oil Economist
    Visiting Professor of Energy Economics at ESCP Europe Business School, London
  • Me Again on July 05 2019 said:
    To follow up on Ms Slav&#039;s article, I find the dismissive-ness of China&#039;s leverage on rare-earth, while trumpeting US leverage on semiconductor, nonsensical. Both US and China, if by putting their respective shoulder to wheel, can, over time, negate their respective foe&#039;s privilege position vis a vis RE and semi, but in term of economic value, RE production is a pretty petty mole-hill to the mountain that is semiconductor. The wealth distributed from producing RE commodities will never make America &quot;great again&quot; ESPECIALLY if it means giving up its supremacy in semiconductor.
  • Lee James on July 05 2019 said:
    Good to get this update on U.S. rare earths capability. I wondered what happened to Molycorps -- looked so promising at the time. China was still the friendly, up-and-coming economic giant with a relatively small military and not much acknowledged cyber threat.

    Maybe MP Materials will do what Molycorps set out to do.

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