Developing Rare Earth Processing Hubs: An Analytical Approach
This is a very big deal. China has asserted sweeping control over the entire global semiconductor supply chain, putting export license requirements on all rare earths used to manufacture advanced chips. If enforced aggressively, this policy could mean "lights out" for the US AI boom, and likely lead to a recession/economic crisis in the US in the... See more
Dean W. Ballx.com"They put a lot of state resources behind building processing capabilities, such that the minerals come from different places and then they get sent to China for refining," Baskaran says. "What China has been extraordinarily good at is connecting their foreign policy to secure rare earths from around the world."
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Not only are rare earths hard to mine, but refining them is also an expensive, lengthy and environmentally harmful process that few countries want to host.
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mmediately after its stand-off with China, Japan’s government passed a ¥100bn ($1.2bn) supplemental budget for rare-earth supply chains. It also developed a national strategy for breaking China’s chokehold on the materials. This involved finding alternative sources of rare earths, reducing their overall use, and stockpiling them for the next... See more
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Brent Elliott, a research associate professor of geology at the University of Texas, estimates the U.S. has sufficient resources to meet demand. "It's about the extraction potential and the logistics of getting it out of the ground in a way that is environmentally sensitive but also socially responsible," he says.
Partly because it is... See more
Partly because it is... See more