Rare earths: Chinese dominance is reduced

Some time ago, the precious rare earths important in the production of microchips, electronics and electric motors came almost exclusively from China. However, as Statista's Katharina Buchholz explains below , several nations have resumed production in recent years as new players have entered the market, diversifying it at least to some extent.

Infographic: China's rare earth monopoly is waning | Statesman

Despite growing extractions in Myanmar and regions close to the West, politically, such as the southern sub-continent, China is still responsible for 60% of global production in 2021, according to the US Geological Survey. However, its mining dominance is declining.

All this is the result of an ever diminishing confidence in China's reliability as a world supplier, above all for geo-political reasons, which has led to the search for alternative sources and the reactivation of partially inactive mines. China also has the largest known rare earth deposits, but Brazil, Vietnam and Russia also have a lot of (largely) untapped potential in the sector.

The United States and Australia accelerated rare earth production after 2010 and, more recently, Myanmar and Thailand have begun to mine substantial quantities. As seen in our graph, the United States had previously mined and produced rare earths for military uses and re-entered the market as rare earths were becoming increasingly important as part of the implementation of crucial technologies. The problem, however, is now linked to the industrial capacity of processing rare earths themselves which, however, still for the moment, remains for the most part still in China.

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The article Rare earths: Chinese dominance is reduced comes from ScenariEconomici.it .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/terre-rare-si-riduce-la-dominanza-cinese/ on Sun, 13 Feb 2022 08:33:37 +0000.