Rare earths that are not so rare
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky’s meets with the US President Donald Trump in Washington to sign an agreement that would give the US access to its deposits of rare earth minerals. According to Trump the deal would help American taxpayers “get their money back” for aid sent to Ukraine throughout the war.
In India, the Union Cabinet has recently approved a Rs 16,300 crore National Critical Mineral Mission aimed at boosting domestic production and exploration of critical minerals until 2030-31. The mission will see investments of nearly Rs 34,300 crore, with significant contributions from public sector undertakings. Import duties on critical minerals are eliminated, and new fiscal measures will encourage exploration and mining activities.
This shows the importance of the rare elements that are not actually so rare as the name suggests; but their importance to almost all modern technologies cannot be overstated. In the words of Julie Michelle Klinger, an assistant professor of international relations and an expert in the politics of development, environment, and security in Latin America and China: “Without rare earths, computers would be the size of classrooms instead of the size of smartphones.”
“Rare earths just change everything about automobiles; about green technology; about the accuracy of weapons systems.; and so, they have just become essential,” said Jim Kennedy, the president of ThREE Consulting, a rare earths consultancy. “You want a Prius? You need rare earths. You want a long-range Tesla? You need rare earths. You want a cruise missile that is accurate to 1 meter? You need rare earths.”
At the very basic level, rare earths are 17 metallic elements, located in the middle of the Mendeleev’s periodic table (atomic numbers 21, 39, and 57–71), fifteen of which are members of a group called lanthanides; the other two, scandium and yttrium, being located elsewhere on the table but share similar chemical properties. These peculiar properties make them unusually fluorescent, conductive, and magnetic, which, in turn, make them very useful when alloyed, or mixed, in small quantities with more common metals such as iron, copper, lead, etc.
Unlike minerals like copper and gold, which develop in rich deposits that can then be easily mined, rare-earth elements can be seen as “kind of anti-social,” says Ryan Castilloux, M. D. of the minerals consultancy firm “Adamas Intelligence”. They have certain properties that make them disperse throughout most rock types, instead of grouping together, and are rarely found in economically significant amounts for extraction and processing. “While they’re in the ground in appreciable concentrations, it’s really hard to find them in rich enough clusters to justify the mining and the processing and the production of them,” he said.
Geologically speaking, the rare earth elements are not especially rare inasmuch as their deposits are found in many places around the globe, with some of them in about the same abundance as copper or tin; but are never found in very high concentrations and are usually found mixed with one another or with radioactive elements, such as uranium and thorium. The chemical properties of the rare earth elements make them difficult to separate from surrounding materials and from one another. These qualities also make them difficult to purify. Current production methods require a lot of ore and generate a great deal of harmful waste to extract just small amounts of rare earth metals. Waste from the processing methods include radioactive water, toxic fluorine, and acids.
Although rare-earth deposits have been found all around the world, the industry has come to be dominated by China, which largely controls every step from the processing of ores to refining and magnet production. Such wasn’t always the case. Until 1980, the United States was a leading producer in rare earths. Now, that title goes to Beijing. “China began mining and mining in greater and greater volumes and flooding the world with low-priced rare-earth elements to the point that it ultimately pushed others like the U.S. out of business,” Castilloux says. “And in doing so, it kind of acquired this monopoly on [the] mining of rare earths.” China is currently home to the world’s biggest rare-earth reserves, holding roughly 37 percent of the global total. In 2017, China produced a whopping 80 percent of the world’s rare-earth minerals, although that number slipped to around 63 percent in 2019. As China cemented its influence over the market, the rest of the world grew increasingly reliant on Beijing’s steady supply. Between 2016 and 2019, even the United States imported 80 percent of its rare earths from China.
China has leveraged its rare earths supply to attract foreign manufacturers and strengthen its manufacturing power. Beijing’s influence has also fuelled fears that it’s absorbing high-tech industries from other countries - and that it will hold sway over shaping the future of the world economy and technological development. With rare earths, “[China] can take a very tiny commodity market and control global economics. … They’re bringing the whole world to their knees,” Kennedy says. “They control technology; they control where technology is going.” China’s virtual monopoly over rare earths has also raised concerns that it could use them as a bargaining chip. As long as countries remain reliant on Beijing’s rare-earth elements, “[they] will always remain at the mercy of China and its control on prices and its ability to stop supply should it decide to,” Castilloux said.
The global prospecting sparked by China’s export restrictions isn’t purely about national security - or even keeping the world’s cell phones and x-ray machines switched on - according to Klinger. It’s about power. Setting up large-scale mining in the Amazon, for example, would allow the Brazilian government greater control over land currently managed by a federation of 28 indigenous ethnic groups. The federation’s power—even the military has to ask permission to cross their land, says Klinger—is “seen as an affront to Brazil’s sovereignty Brazil’s sovereignty because there’s a perception among some, including in the Brazilian federal government and in the Senate, that indigenous people are the puppets of foreign governments because so much funding from northern non-governmental organizations has gone to supporting these indigenous people and their causes.”
“Given how important rare earth elements are to everyone,” Klinger says, “developing an environmentally and socially responsible means of producing them is something that we should really be working on together. And “if we find ourselves in a situation where we’re having conflicts over rare earth resources that look anything like the conflicts we’ve been involved in related to oil resources in the Middle East, it will have been absolutely and entirely avoidable—and absolutely and entirely of our own making.”
A first step to reevaluating the world’s approach to rare earths might be to simply stop calling them rare. “Looking at the different ways that rare earths have been used as a bargaining chip in international relations—say, between the US and India during the Cold War, the US and China in the US fight against Communism—calling these things ‘rare’ imbues them with this political charge,” Klinger says. Acknowledging that it’s just not necessary to drill the Milky Way to power our cell phones could help keep space exploration focused not on supplying Earth, but seeking worlds beyond it.
At the heart of the impending rare-earth deficit is yet another illustration of what is known as the tragedy of the horizon: a significant problem that today’s leaders show little urgency to address because its impact will mostly be felt by future generations. In this case, the dire outcome of a rare-earth shortage - worsening climate change - is given short shrift, in large part because rare-earth projects seemingly fail to meet the short-term financial-return objectives of investors. Meanwhile, governments are of little help because they often lack the political will or the policy savvy to jump-start these difficult mining operations, despite rare earths’ potential contribution to meeting Climate Change objectives. To be fair, though, some of the hesitancy to back mining projects is because of environmental concerns about the projects themselves.
Bhushan Lal Razdan, formerly of the Indian Revenue Service, retired as Director General of Income Tax (Investigation), Chandigarh. Post-retirement, he is actively associated with medical, educational, cultural and heritage issues and joined various societies and trusts to promote these objectives. Occasionally he contributes articles of contemporary relevance in Newspapers and Magazines. He is also the Chairman of Vitasta Health Care Trust.
