Don't expect anything materially to change in the right direction any time soon. China has built this position slowly over the last 3-4 decades.
The expertise, talent, and investment needed to bring that level of sourcing, processing, and refining to the West will also take decades.
In those decades, you will see governments in the US/West change several times, each with their own approach and policies. There will be no central, consistent policy further causing delays.
All the while China has all the leverage and the cards. Additionally, they have a lot of influence in every country with even remote levels of viable deposits.
Lastly you have the problem of greedy western corporations. Do you really think Rare Earths produced by US/Western firms will be sold at the same rates as the Chinese counterpart?
So to conclude, forget it. Just another smokescreen, like the tariffs.
We had Molycorp 15 years ago being run by a Canadian magnet company. It could have worked out, but the engineers were clueless about process scale up and sourcing the acids required for refining, which, they said, were being consumed by the fracking boom. In any case, the Mountain Pass site has a lot of light rare earths, but little of the heavy rare earths. The heavier rare earths come comingled with a lot of radioactivity. So the business ideally involves removal of the desired heavy rare earths, then disposing of the radioactive tailings back to where they came from. No doubt we have plenty of the heavier rare earths in tailing piles from the nuclear arms build up over many decades. It's a matter of good long term management.
Don't expect anything materially to change in the right direction any time soon. China has built this position slowly over the last 3-4 decades.
The expertise, talent, and investment needed to bring that level of sourcing, processing, and refining to the West will also take decades.
In those decades, you will see governments in the US/West change several times, each with their own approach and policies. There will be no central, consistent policy further causing delays.
All the while China has all the leverage and the cards. Additionally, they have a lot of influence in every country with even remote levels of viable deposits.
Lastly you have the problem of greedy western corporations. Do you really think Rare Earths produced by US/Western firms will be sold at the same rates as the Chinese counterpart?
So to conclude, forget it. Just another smokescreen, like the tariffs.
We had Molycorp 15 years ago being run by a Canadian magnet company. It could have worked out, but the engineers were clueless about process scale up and sourcing the acids required for refining, which, they said, were being consumed by the fracking boom. In any case, the Mountain Pass site has a lot of light rare earths, but little of the heavy rare earths. The heavier rare earths come comingled with a lot of radioactivity. So the business ideally involves removal of the desired heavy rare earths, then disposing of the radioactive tailings back to where they came from. No doubt we have plenty of the heavier rare earths in tailing piles from the nuclear arms build up over many decades. It's a matter of good long term management.