Energy Secretary Chris Wright went to Wyoming last week to cut the ribbon on the first new rare earth mine in the U.S. since the 1950s. Telling the assembled guests and reporters that the “Brook Mine” is critical to breaking China’s “stranglehold on rare earth processing,” he hinted that it might be the first of several. It should be.
A few years ago, I visited Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar and when discussing the need for domestic production of vital minerals, he picked up a dark brown rock from the Mojave Desert, explaining that it was mostly composed of a “rare earth” element. He said millions of such rocks littered the desert in his district, yet the United States imported 100 percent of the mineral it contains. That situation has not changed since then, but maybe it soon will.
Many leaders have warned for years about America’s reliance on China for rare earth minerals, several of which are critical in the production of renewable energy, and high-tech equipment like cell phones, computers, MRI machines, and satellites. Most Americans don’t spend two seconds wondering where we get these elements with hard-to-pronounce names, like ytterbium, dysprosium, and praseodymium. But with China becoming an ever-increasing threat to U.S. security, a passing concern has become a crisis. Unnecessarily.
There is no good reason for the U.S. or its allies to rely on China in the first place. Western economies are heavily dependent upon energy and telecommunications, but nothing about that requires Chinese mining or manufacturing. America has always had its own plentiful supplies but decided decades ago to lock up some of its own most important natural resources.
In fact, the only thing remarkable about Congressman Gosar’s “rare earth” rock is that it isn’t rare at all. The term “rare earth” is a misnomer, applied to 17 specific minerals because they were once considered difficult to extract from the surrounding rock in which they are found. But supplies abound worldwide, including much of the U.S., where our known reserves are at least ten times the entire world’s production.
China now mines 80-90 percent of the world’s rare-earth minerals – and processes virtually all the rest – yet it has only about 37 percent of the world’s estimated reserves. Before the 1960s, the
U.S. supplied the world, mostly from one mine in California. Then, China started exporting rare earths, driving prices down and finally bankrupting that mine in 2002. The U.S. also had a national defense stockpile, but sold most of it in 1998, while the last American processing plant in Texas was closing.
During President Trump’s first term, he ordered a list of “critical minerals… essential to the economic and national security of the United States, the supply chain of which is vulnerable to disruption.” A recent executive order renewed that call for reducing American reliance on imports of critical minerals, by increasing domestic production. The new mine is part of that strategy, and as Secretary Wright said, it is a beginning not an end.
It is impossible to overstate how important such minerals are, not just on a macro-economic level, but in everyone’s daily life. Cell phones are so routine that we rarely ponder where they come from or what they are made of. They just look like glass and plastic, but their batteries are made of lithium, niobium, manganese, and tantalum. The screens and LCD displays contain aluminum. Besides silicon, microprocessors and circuit boards contain important components made from antimony, arsenic, and indium, soldered together with tin. Micro-capacitors are made of tantalum and platinum, the vibration motors have tungsten and neodymium weights, and the speaker magnets are made of arsenic and gallium. The outer casing is a carbon composite that includes magnesium. All those minerals have one thing in common – they are primarily produced in China.
Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman called the new mine “the dawn of a new era in American energy and national security,” adding, “We are reclaiming our independence by tapping into the vast reserves of rare earth elements right beneath our feet.”
The new mine will also eventually feature a processing facility for products like rare earth magnets and semiconductor chips, taking that monopoly away from China for the first time in generations.
The U.S. does not need a trade war with China over critical minerals. It does not require an agreement with Ukraine or anyone else for those minerals. It needs to produce domestically the products America’s economy and security depend on – which it turns out are not that rare.
