Hsu, in a Scientific American article (2019) reports that the materials used in iPhones and Tesla cars need not become a long-term casualty of a U.S.-China trade war. As trade tensions rise between the U.S. and China, rare earth minerals are once again in the political spotlight. Today, Chinese mines and processing facilities provide most of the world's supply, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping has hinted about using this as political leverage in trade negotiations with the Trump's administration. But in the long run, many experts say the global market involving these materials would likely survive even if China completely stopped exporting them.
The 17 rare earth elements, which cluster near the bottom of the periodic table, play a vital role in several industries: consumer electronics including Apple AirPods and iPhones, green technologies such as General Electric wind turbines and Tesla electric cars, medical tools including Philips Healthcare scanners, and military hardware such as F-35 jet fighters. The U.S. government lists them among minerals deemed critical to the country's economic and national security, and the Trump administration notably exempted rare earth elements from tariffs it imposed on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods. On the other side of the trade conflict, Xi recently made a politically symbolic visit to one of China's main rare earth mining and processing facilities, and China used tariffs of its own to target a U.S. rare earth mine in California. Such political posturing on both sides, however, may overemphasize the world's reliance on China's supply of rare earth elements.
"Politicians get too alarmed or too wrapped up in the idea of political manipulation of markets," says Eugene Gholz, an associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. "There's a big difference between individual companies making or losing money, and the large-scale ability to get political influence in this particular market."
The "rare" in the name of this group of elements is actually somewhat misleading; the U.S. Geological Survey describes them as "relatively abundant in the Earth's crust." But extraction is complicated by the fact that in the ground, such elements are jumbled together with many other minerals in different concentrations. The raw ores go through a first round of processing to produce concentrates, which head to another facility where high-purity rare earth elements are isolated. Such facilities perform complex chemical processes that most commonly involve a procedure called solvent extraction, in which the dissolved materials go through hundreds of liquid-containing chambers that separate individual elements or compounds—steps that may be repeated hundreds or even thousands of times. Once purified, they can be processed into oxides, phosphors, metals, alloys and magnets that take advantage of these elements' unique magnetic, luminescent or electrochemical properties. The strong and lightweight nature of rare earth magnets, metals and alloys have made them especially valuable in high-tech products.
In the event of a longer Chinese supply interruption, the U.S. rare earths mine at Mountain Pass, Calif., would likely become the first place to step up production, Gholz explains. The mine's previous owner, Molycorp, spent approximately $1.5 billion building a new separation facility for producing rare earth concentrates. It did not, however, complete the downstream processing needed to produce purified rare earth materials before the company went bankrupt in 2015 because of Chinese competition. The mine's new owner, MP Materials, plans to reactivate and complete the mothballed facility for fresh operation starting in 2020.
Another alternative is Australian company Lynas Corp., the world's only significant rare earths producer outside China. It currently operates a mine at Mount Weld in Australia, and sends ores to a separation facility in Malaysia that can purify the rare earth materials—but a complication has arisen from the fact that some ores contain radioactive thorium. Environmental concerns about low-level radioactive waste from the separation facility recently led Lynas to announce it will move some some of the "upstream" processing (which involves the radioactivity) back to Australia, while keeping "downstream" processing in Malaysia. The company has also announced it will work with Texas-based Blue Line Corp. to build a new separation facility in the U.S. for operations starting in 2022 at the earliest.
Beyond existing mines, companies that mine for other resources might start extracting rare earth elements from deposits of different materials. For example, the U.S. could someday obtain these elements as byproducts from power plant coal ash and coal mining waste. And radioactive material mixed in with ores could end up being positive: If thorium-based nuclear plant designs prove viable, expanded thorium mining would also turn up usable rare earth minerals. [Phosphate mines are also a potential source of REE as by-products]. Researchers have even begun investigating a large concentration of rare earth elements in deep-sea mud from an ocean floor deposit near Japan.
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