Two thirds of all rare earths are produced in China and urgently needed worldwide. Why does the West not open up its own occurrence?
On the passage through the wide steppe in the far north of China, where there are significant occurrence of rare earths: there are many wind turbines on the left and right of the street. The path leads to Baotou, a city in the part of the country inner Mongolia, which calls itself the “capital of the rare earths”.
There is a “rare earth street” and an official “rare earth” with a monument to the former party leader Deng Xiaoping. This had initiated significant economic reforms in the 1980s and, among other things, geared strategically for rare earths. “The Middle East has oil, we have rare earths,” Deng Xiaoping is said to have said in 1987. Since then, many high-tech companies have settled in Baotou.
A lot of things have changed, says a pensioner: “Sometimes I see the young people in the work clothes of the magnetic factories how they drive to work by car. I’m kind of proud of her.”
“You could have learned from previous conflicts”
In Baotou there are more than 100 manufacturers for special rare earth magnets that are used, for example, in electric motors-essential for the automotive industry. The state and party leadership has already demonstrated several times with export restrictions, most recently in the tightened trade dispute with the USA how much China can use its power over the raw materials.
The recent negotiations between the two largest economies in the world were less about tariffs and more about China again delivers rare earth. Companies in the United States and Europe had already raised the alarm due to delivery bottlenecks.
“As you can see at the moment, it also seems very strong that not only German industry, European industry, but actually the global industry depends on rare earths from China”, “ says Martin Erdmann from the Federal Institute for Geosciences and raw materials. “Actually, you could have learned from previous smaller conflicts. For example, China has already imposed an export ban from rare earths to Japan in 2010. The Japanese learned from it and diversified supply chains.
A mining machine in the Bayan OBO mine in the inner Mongolai in China. It is considered one of the most important mines for rare earths worldwide.
Quasi-monopoly of the Chinese
China reduces around 70 percent of the rare earths worldwide and processes even more – namely about 90 percent. China has a quasi-monopoly. Germany imports two thirds of its rare earths from China.
There are also German occurrences, such as in Saxony. However, the question is whether it is economically worthwhile, according to Jana Rückloss, a research assistant at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration: “In addition to the labor costs, our rightly high environmental standards prevent the mining, and there are also lengthy approval processes, which increases the risks for investors.”
Most rare earths occur relatively often in the earth’s crust. But they are not so easy to win. They are finely scattered, often in connection with other metals or minerals from which they need to be solved. This is often expensive and is at the expense of the environment. Many countries have therefore left the dismantling for a long time.
Patents for the Further processing
“Basically, we always only get sporadic insights into the concrete working conditions and mining conditions on site,” says Rücklos. “We know that when breaking down it is often worked with highly toxic acids, on site on site. The acid is pumped in to swut these rare archoxides.
There is also a great dependence on China for other raw materials. The European Commission has classified 34 raw materials as critical. China is the most important – and even the only EU supplier for some fabrics.
In addition, China holds many patents on the technologies for further processing and also imports raw materials or preliminary products from other countries and further processes them; For example cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is the country with the world’s largest cobalt occurrence, and the People’s Republic has secured shares in cobalt production in the past ten years, which further strengthens China’s supremacy in raw materials.
G7 countries want to secure their own supply chains
The European industrialized nations and the United States have just decided at the G7 summit in Canada to become less dependent on authoritarian states such as China. They want to secure their own supply chains for strategically important raw materials such as lithium, cobalt or rare earths. But that takes time, says Martin Erdmann from the Federal Institute for Geosciences and raw materials. The dependence on China in critical raw materials cannot be reduced overnight.
“New deposits outside China would have to be opened up, and above all the further processing outside of China would have to be set up,” says the expert. However, this is not possible in the short and medium term; There is also a lack of know-how. “The construction of a system alone lasts five to ten years, and mining stations take even longer.”
