Friday, March 29

the ace in China’s sleeve that the world despised


The architect of the reforms has already clarified, Deng Xiaoping, black or white, cats had to catch mice, and if Middle East had oil China had rare earths. The second is less remembered being as insightful as the first. He alluded to praseodymium, neodymium, gadolinium, samarium, holmium… and so on until 17 minerals that most people have never heard of but essential in the everyday technology. China maintains the quasi-monopoly Four decades later and the European Union (EU) has discovered with Ukraine that a supplier does not guarantee peace of mind. Gas is urgent; the rare minerals, the important.

Rare minerals are ubiquitous in telephones, headphones and televisions. Also in hospital equipment MRIs and nuclear reactors. The energy transition rests on them: wind turbines, electric cars and solar panels. And also the military industry: fighter jet engines, submarines, guided missiles, radar and sonar systems… The present and even less the future cannot be understood without rare earths.

China has 44% of the world’s reserves and last year concentrated 85% of global supply, followed by the rest of Asia (13%) and Europe (2%). Annual demand reaches 125,000 tons, double that of 15 years ago, and will be 315,000 in 2030. Chinese exports ride on that demand and in January the elephant plant emerged China Rare Earth Group after the merger of three large mining conglomerates and two research institutes. It will be under the direction of the Council of State and will concentrate 70% of the national production.

“The Chinese Perils”

Fear underpins the new regulations of the European Commission announced by its president, Ursula von der Leyen enthusiastic troubadour of Chinese dangers. She intends to promote the chain of supplies in all its stages (extraction, processing and recycling) to reduce the dependence from Peking. The measure has been received in the sector as more media than effective and a German analyst dismissed it as “excessively theatrical”. Between the plan and its execution there will never be less than a decade and the need is urgent. “The policy is not realistic in the short term but with a substantial investment in processing facilities could be achieved in 10 years,” estimates Kristin Vekasi, a professor at the University of Maine and a researcher in the geoeconomics of rare earths. It turns out that European demand will have quintupled by 2030 and there will be no green transition without them.They will soon be more important than gas and oil,” warned Thierry BretonEuropean Commissioner.

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a look at Ukraine, in any case, mitigates the risk. If China hasn’t sent a canteen to Russia’s troops in seven months to preserve its sympathy with Brussels, it’s hard to imagine it punishing it on a major issue.

The rarity of minerals ends in their name. The rarest of them – thulium – is a hundred times more common than Prayed, are considered “moderately abundant” by the US Geological Survey and are spread over much of the globe. But the Gordian knot is not its extraction but its processing. They are not isolated, like other metals, but in amalgams. Separating them is a torture that requires continuous acid baths and filtering in processes of hundreds of repetitions. It is not about extracting the rare minerals from the mixture but about removing everything else. It is expensive, difficult and dangerous because it frees radioactive substances linked to pancreatic and lung cancer.

Europe gave up the business

So the West, when China got into it in the 1980s, closed its mines and processing plants and gladly gave up the business. only their low wages Y lax environmental regulations and of job security allowed their profitability. All these indicatives have improved a lot in the last decades in China but they are still without competitors.

“Over the past four decades, China has invested heavily in intellectual property needed to get to the forefront in the rare earths industry,” says Vekasi. “Their advantage in the separation and refining phases helps them and that’s why we see countries that have returned to rare earth mining, like the United States, they continue to send them to China for processing. The vertical integration, which we have seen with the creation of the China Rare Earth Group, gives them a decisive advantage,” he adds.

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The Mountain Pass mine in California was the largest producer of rare earths half a century ago until it found that sending those toxic conglomerates to China saved it a lot of trouble. Washington, like Brussels, has been rushed and these days is busy with incentive laws. It is paradoxical that the US Army depends on Chinese rare earths when it flirts with the conflict and its Bookings would run out in three months if Beijing cut off the supply. Rare earths are another reality check against the economic decoupling of China defended by the hawks in Washington.

The position of strength that rare earths grant China today is a poetic revenge against a world that for decades disdained their prosecution. The West has enjoyed them to a ridiculous price while China paid the painful environmental and health bill. It has taken him a war to understand what Deng already knew four decades ago.


www.elperiodico.com

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