There's a big difference between the elemental rare earths and the end products. As noted in the intro to January's "Huge rare earth metals discovery in Arctic Sweden":
They aren't that rare. Just hard to find in the right proportions of the different rare earth elements. And in concentrations high enough to make extraction a paying proposition.
And requiring some technical expertise to fabricate into end products. It's not as if there are neodymium magnets just laying around....
And in 2022's "Huge rare earth reserve discovered in Turkey, but experts caution that ‘grade is king’"
Not just grade. The composition of a deposit, the amounts of the 17 rare earth elements is critical. As one example, the Mountain Pass mine in the U.S. despite its relatively high grade (8% REEs) is actually not as valuable as some lower grade mines with a more profitable mix.
Additionally, exploitation of a REE resource is highly dependent on processing and supply chain factors that can not quickly be brought into being, it's one thing to have the deposit, quite another to have, for example, the end product, a neodymium magnet.
We have some experience with this stuff, if interested see after the jump....
....(we've been tracking the doings of the big dog since 2009's "With a Name Like Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare-Earth Hi-Tech Co., it has to be good (600111:Shanghai)"
And the headline story from/via ZeroHedge:
If China thought trade war with Trump was bad, little did they know how much worse it would get under Joe "Big Guy" Biden.
As Rabobank's Michael Every wrote this morning, "don’t forget President Biden is already running a US trade policy far more protectionist than his predecessor’s" and the latest example of that came this morning when Japan decided to join United States and the Netherlands in restricting exports of chipmaking gear to China, as the
coldchip war between China and the west enters an exciting new phase.Of course, Beijing wasn't going to just sit there and do nothing as the US piled sanction upon sanction in hopes of sending China back into the stone age, and many expected that China would retaliate by squeezing the west where it had the most leverage, namely by limiting exports of another key tech supply-chain product: rare earth metals, and where China is the world's dominant producer.....*****....Well, it appears they were right because as the Nikkei reports, China is considering "prohibiting exports of certain rare-earth magnet technology in a move that would counter the U.S.'s advantage in the high-tech arena." To do this, officials will file amendments to a technology export restriction list, which was last updated in 2020. In total, there are 43 amendments or additions in the draft list first announced in December by the commerce and technology ministries. Officials have finished taking public comments from experts, and the changes are expected to go into force this year.The revisions would "either ban or restrict exports of technology to process and refine rare-earth elements. There are also proposed provisions that would prohibit or limit exports of alloy tech for making high-performance magnets derived from rare earths."....
....MUCH MORE
