Prompted by the headline
but let’s not get into Trump and politics if we can avoid it.
As I understand it, the ‘rare earth’ elements are not really that rare in terms of absolute percentages. And surely in a country as large and geologically diverse as the US, there must be viable sources of them?
So why isn’t the US extracting these domestically?
We are – the U.S. is the second-biggest extractor of rare-earth elements, after China (see the bar chart at the bottom right of the graphic below).
However, my understanding is that, as a group, rare-earth elements are not evenly distributed geographically. This article indicates that something like three-quarters of the total reserves of rare-earth elements are believed to be located in four countries: China, Vietnam, India, and Brazil.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/rare-earth-elements-where-in-the-world-are-they/
There’s an economics thing to it - if a resource can be purchased as an import at a sufficiently low cost, it makes sense to use up everybody else’s supply before your own.
Also the names of these elements need sorting out. Yttrium, Terbium, Erbium and Ytterbium are all named after the village of Ytterby in Sweden, but it’s a bit silly.
They aren’t incredibly rare in existence on earth, but they are costly to mine and refine. In addition to limited locations where they are found in reasonable quantities they are widely dispersed in the ground like gold so that many tons of material must be mined followed by expensive refining techniques. Until the relatively recent demand for neodymium and others use in powerful magnets the market didn’t justify the process here in the US. There have been efforts in recent year to extract these elements here. Greenland is also a possible major source.
They are also an ecological nightmare to mine cleanly and produce into useable products. Which is why China is the largest supplier, they dont give a damn about pollution.
But given that they are not actually ‘rare’ in absolute terms, it seems a bit unlikely to me that they would be concentrated in just a few parts of the world? What geological processes would cause that?
Possibly ‘known reserves’ should perhaps be revisited as ‘known discovered reserves’?
For a minor nitpick, yttrium technically isn’t a rare earth (at least where the common definition of rare earth is synonymous with the lanthanides). Same with scandium. From an actually doing things with them point of view, they are.
That may have a lot to do with it. Though is the mining process much more polluting than, say, iron or copper, which are extracted on a much larger scale?
They have some other uses besides magnets. Luminescent materials, quantum dots, things like that. And the classic MRI contrast agents.
Especially since nobody really cares about heavy metals in your quantum dot TV (CdSe/ZnS) but do for applications like bioimaging.
But yes, still easier to source from China for smaller quantities. At least for now.
I think a lot of heavy elements are concentrated in a few locations on earth. Gold is everywhere, but in minute quantities. You can find gold in a bag of play sand from the Home Depot but not enough to make it worth extracting. Other elements are far less abundant like platinum. Tin is also found only in a few locations world wide.
Not so much the mining process, though neither copper nor iron are mined domestically in the USA in ginormous amounts, but what really pollutes is the chemical separation of Yttrium, Terbium, Erbium, Ytterbium, Neodym, Dysprosium and whatever they are called. They tend to come all together (well, not all, but usually several) and are chemically similar, so that it is a PITA to obtain them in the required purity for many uses.
China does not care very much for the environement, it seems, and has been flooding the market with dumping prices for years, probably for geopolitical reasons. Ramping up production in the rest of the world takes time and a lot of investments.
Any place that is far away ( → NIMBY) and thinly populated is good for that kind of mining. I believe Australia is a good candidate to step in if China makes too much trouble, but it will take time.
In my experience most rare earths are eventually supplied as either the nitrate or the oxide, though some have other ligands. Large amounts of nitric acid is not exactly friendly, and here is a document on separation. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1363891
I understand that the separation is difficult because of the chemical similarities.
But in terms of overall quantity of produced pollution, how does this compare with other industrial processes of much larger scale materials? I’m still a bit puzzled why the US doesn’t just become independent for these elements?
I don’t really know how to answer that. Environmental considerations aside (and have you ever seen the damage from any form of mining?) why use up your non-renewable resources when you can trade other goods or money for them?
That is the way capitalism works: as long as it is cheaper and it is not forbidden it will be done and dependencies ensue. China has flexed its muscles with rare earths sales bans recently, it is one trump (ha!) card they have when the tariffs get rough.
Refining rare-earth elements apparently produces some very nasty by-products:
But to try to help answer a question on sourcing, there are multiple companies in the US and Europe that actually do the manufacturing work. And yes, they source from China but also from other countries and at least some of them with an eye to reduce China sourcing. Obviously it’s hard to get any specific information on a company’s supplier from outside and I’m guessing based on public information as regards to products and reported capabilities.
I believe that company did get that expansion up and running.
Also don’t forget about the labor costs. Labor is much cheaper in China than in the US.
Bottom line is that we could produce all we need; it’d just cost way more than what we get from China. It’d probably still cost more than what we get from China, even with heavy tariffs on the Chinese product.
This is a very old and dim memory, but I seem to recall that at one point the US did have a refinery and it was sold lock, stock¸ and barrel to China because it was much cheaper to operate there. There may also have been environmental considerations.
Yes, it was the GM division called Magnaquech back in the late 80s in Anderson Indiana. I worked on scaling up the prototype chemical reactors that refined the ore into ingots of Fe-Nd-B that could then be remelted and formed into powder for magnets into full production capacity vessels They used vacuum chambers and a lot of molten calcium chloride as part of the reaction purification process. The waste product from this was toxic due to heavy metals.
The team I was working with went to China to observe how they produced it and were in shock. They described it as a controlled explosion that just released toxic waste into the atmosphere and ground water. Their report back to GM management was that they could not compete with this, and the recommendation was to sell their business to cut their losses.
They sold the refining process and the HIPA magnet production presses to China, and it ended the USAs involvement in mass-produced rare earth magnets. To this day, I could still build a factory line to refine the ore, a line that would lose money that no one wants.
Back then no one imagined that China would be the power house they are today