China has a near monopoly on rare earths, accounting for close to sixty percent of global mining and over ninety percent of processing.

And importantly, China is using its dominant position as a bargaining chip in their negotiations with the US.

When President Trump announced Liberation Day tariffs, China immediately retaliated by restricting supply of rare earths, causing companies like Forward to halt production.

The US has also issued several directives around rare earths, including an investigation that could yield more tariffs.

So what are these minerals, why are they so important to global trade and production?

And how did China come to dominate this space?

You're listening to Age Eccentric from Bloomberg Intelligence.

I'm John Lee in Hong Kong, and I'm Katydmitrieva, also in Hong Kong.

Here to discuss everything related to rare earths is Curtis More, senior vice president at Energy Fuels, a major uranium miner that also produces rare earths.

He's dialing in from Denver.

Curtis, Welcome to the show.

Hi, it's great to be here.

Curtis, give us.

A one oh one.

What exactly are rare earths.

Yeah, I'm happy to do so.

So, rare earths are essentially the second to last line on the periodic table.

It is a series of metallic elements.

It starts with lanthanum and goes through syrium and praiseodemium and neodymium, also including a yettrium and scandium.

And they have just a wide variety of important uses in a host of clean energy technologies, other advanced technologies, military and defense technologies, and other applications like that.

So what are they if you can just describe because my understanding is, you know, rare earths are critical minerals, but you know, rare earths are a bit of a misnomer because they're actually pretty widely available on Earth.

It's just getting to them and getting to them in large amounts.

Is that right?

Yeah, that is correct.

There's a lot of i'd say confusion between rare earths and critical minerals, and some people tend to use those two terms interchangeably.

That is not totally accurate.

One way to think about it is that rare earths are critical minerals, but critical minerals are not necessarily rare earths, And it's also correct that it's a misnomer that rare earths are rare in the Earth's crest.

They are actually quite common.

But finding rare earths and economically viable and accessible deposits is somewhat rare.

And then to actually extract those and process those minerals into usable materials and products, that's extremely rare.

And that is where China absolutely dominates the global market right now.

And how did China come to dominate this space, because from understanding, you know, the US used to mine and refine where Earth's maybe say twenty years ago.

So tell us the roadmap of how China came to be so dominant.

Well, again, I'm only speculating here, but I give China and Chinese companies a lot lot of credit.

I think that they saw the future about thirty years ago.

They saw an area where the United States was kind of stepping back from global markets, and I think a lot of Chinese companies realized that there was an opportunity there, a market opportunity based upon where certain technologies were headed at that time, and so there was a vacuum that got opened up by the United States, and Chinese companies smartly stepped in to fill that vacuum.

And so over the last twenty or thirty plus years, Chinese companies have expended a lot of resources and a lot of there's been a lot of training, a lot of technology development in rare mining and processing, and as a result, Chinese companies have really taken a dominant position.

I mean, I'll tell you the mining of rare this is kind of the easy part.

You know, digging rocks up out of the ground or extracting the minerals out of the ground, that's kind of the easy part.

But turning those minerals into you know, say separated rare earth oxides or rare earth metals or alloys or magnets or other advanced materials, that's really the hard part.

And that takes a lot of technical know how and a lot of capital to build the facilities that are needed to perform those functions.

And China has just really made it a priority and as a result, they hold a dominant position today.

Yeah, it really took decades, right, Like you had that component in particular, So it's the digging, it's finding it, and then it's refining it as well.

And they also happened to invest or have ownership over some of the world's biggest rare earth deposits.

So like in Inner Mongolia there's the world's largest rare earth deposit, and it's an autonomous region of China, and so they've got some control over it.

Like how much of this is just luck and you happen to have it in your own backyard?

And how much of it is actually investment in government sponsorship and going out and finding perhaps friend showing for example.

And I guess what I'm getting at is can other countries like the US replicate this.

I would not say it was luck.

I think it was foresight.

Honestly.

I think they saw this opening in the global markets, and they saw where a lot of advanced technologies were going, and so they made a concerted effort to go secure the resources to build out the refining and processing capacity, to make the investments that are necessary to create that capacity.

Education, you know, in training and workforce, you know, investments just across the spectrum.

You know, again, rares are not that rare.

You know, sure there's better deposits in certain areas, and yes, if you're blessed with a good deposit in your nation, that's I guess maybe that's a small amount of luck, but it takes more than luck to achieve a dominant position in this industry.

I mean, I would say that other countries like the United States and in Europe, Japan, South Korea, I think there is a roadmap there for those countries to follow, but it's also not going to happen overnight.

There's been a great deal of investment.

This has been a multi decade effort by China and Chinese companies, and I don't think other countries are probably going to solve that or achieve that level of success overnight.

So how many years are we talking about codis, you know?

I mean, I've often heard it said that the United States kind of globalized a lot of our supply chains over twenty or thirty years, and it may take twenty thirty years to completely deglobalize it on things like critical minerals.

Now, I'm not sure I totally buy into that timeframe, but it is a matter of years.

And there's been a number of challenges that Western rare earth companies have encountered.

There have been efforts to try to rebuild these supply chains over the last several years that generally have not been particularly successful.

Now we are seeing I think the level of support from the US government that is likely required.

There was the deal done with MP Materials a couple of weeks ago.

That's kind of the level of support that it's going to take to try to catch up.

I mean, one of the big advantages that Chinese companies have over US companies is that they already have their infrastructure.

They already have their refining and processing facilities and manufacturing facilities already built.

They've already got the vertical integration figured out, and really that's just a way to lower costs and to become more efficient, and so to be able to replicate that in the West is it's going to take a little bit of time and quite a bit of investment.

Now there are some again, some bright spot there, I mean MP Materials, they're on a great path.

I think energy fuels were on a good path.

But it's going to take a long time to be able to match what China has put together, just in.

Terms of the infrastructure.

I mean, we've seen the Trump administration take a number of steps the Section two thirty two investigation that might add more tariffs on critical minerals or rare earths.

We've also seen this push starting in March of this year to agencies to seek the development of this in the US.

What else does the US government kind of need to do to start this process of you know, what's the roadmap?

What do they need to do for companies like you and other peers to sort of start developing this within the US.

Well, I mean, again, I think the MP Materials deal that was announced a couple of weeks ago is a pretty good roadmap.

Some of the aspects of that deal were things like price floors to essentially guarantee that companies, especially in their early stage, are able to preduce use these advanced rare earth materials.

And again, this isn't just apply to rare it's I think this applies to all critical minerals things, you know, other things like you know, antimony and germanium and gallium and the whole spectrum there.

That's one of the challenges that Western companies have in trying to compete with much more mature industries like they have in China.

You know, typically when you're just starting out in an industry like this, your costs are just simply higher.

You haven't achieved those efficiencies and that those competencies that are required, so you know some of the price floors.

I think that's a good way to approach it.

You know, low interest loans, grants, you know, government funding to build out facilities, you know, government funding to help train workforce and to build up an industry.

And it'll probably take you know, at least five or ten years to build up a mature industry that can compete with Chinese companies.

I will say that those types of investments and those types of efforts in the West I think have not really occurred in the past.

But it sounds like Western governments are waking up to what is the magnitude of what is really required here.

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Curtis just for the benefit of the listener.

The US Department of Defense invested in MP Materials.

I think the figure was like four hundred million dollars, and this is the deal that we're referring to.

It became the largest sharehold of MP Materials, and let's be frank, it had an amazing impact on the share price of this company.

I think it almost tripled, and your company as well.

Your stock price really ramped up as well.

Is this what it takes?

Like, does it really need the government support to build up the US rare eers infrastructure?

You know, I'm not sure it takes actual government ownership.

I mean, I think it was just more the injection of capital into MP Materials.

And I think maybe the US government or the DoD was, you know, looking to maybe get a return on taxpayer money.

If you're going to invest, you know, hundreds of millions or billions of dollars into a company rather than just give a private company money, well let's see if the taxpayer can get a return on it.

I mean, again, I can't get into their heads.

I don't know what their thought was there, but that seems to make sense to me.

I have my concerns about government ownership or becoming a major shareholder in a company.

I'd prefer that to not be the case.

But again, you know, if that's the way to get the funding that the government has available, you know we as a company would certainly be open to it.

So MP Materials has the only active rare earth mind in the US.

It's really tough to build, as you said, build out the infrastructure in the US for this.

At the same time, this directive from Trump in March, this executive order to produce more domestically, I mean, is it possible to have more minds this of MP.

Well, first you need deposits, right, I will say, and this may be somewhat controversial statement, but the US has okay rare earth deposits, but not not exceptional rare earth deposits.

And there's a variety of efforts to try to build out these minds in the United States.

But the truth is is that I think we can take a page out of China's book, and you know, you don't have to produce everything in country.

It's okay if you're importing minerals or raw materials from other countries, just like China does.

Right, And you're right, MP Materials has I'd say kind of the main rare earth mind in the United States.

You know, our company, we're actually receiving rare earth ores from Florida and Georgia.

In the United States, we're actually approaching rare earth production from a quite different standpoint.

We're looking to actually obtain rare earth minerals from other minds that these are rare earth minerals that are produced as a byproduct of other mining, primarily type tenium mines actually, which is a different way to look at it.

And actually, you know, China does this.

Chinese companies do this.

We estimate that probably ten or fifteen percent of China's rare earth industry is supported in the same manner that we're going about this, where we're getting these monozite and xenotime minerals from heavy mineral sand operations.

I mean, that's kind of one of the dirty little secrets I guess I could say about rare earths is that not only are they not rare, but they're actually already mined all over the world as a byproduct of other mining.

And honestly, rare earth minds that are just single commodity rare earth mines where all they do is rare earth honestly at a bit of a competitive disadvantage versus other minds that maybe produce a number of commodities from the same deposit.

And you're getting these U said, from Florida and Georgia.

Yep.

Yeah, So these are essentially titanium and zircon mines is what they are.

Now.

Most titanium and zircon, i'd say, are kind of boring industrial materials.

I mean, I don't want to minimize them.

And of course there are high tech and very critical uses for titanium and zircon and zirconium and things.

But you know, most titanium goes into paint and pigment and you know, mix your your paper white and things like that.

Most zircon goes into just you know, ceramics, you know, like tile in your kitchen and things like that.

And there's a, you know, a robust global market for titanium and zircon and those types of minerals.

But right alongside those titanium and zircon minerals are other minerals that are full of rare earths, primarily monozite and xenotyme, and those are some wonderful rare earth minerals because they have really good concentrations of the light, the middle and the heavy rare earths.

And you hear a lot about those categories in the rare earth industry.

And that might be another rare earth one on one lesson here, But whenever you hear about light rare earths, people are primarily talking about neodymium and praiseodemium or ndpr.

Those are the light rare earths that are used in magnets, and these magnets are used primarily in electric vehicles, in hybrid electric vehicles, advanced robotics, certain wind energy technologies.

Of course, military and defense.

You'll also hear about heavy rare earths.

There's two main magnet heavy rare earths, that's urbium and dysprosium.

That's TB and d Y and again you create these very powerful magnets, neodymium magnets.

They are used in those applications.

There are other heavy rare earths, you know, things like lutetium and yetrium and others that have important military and defense technologies, and those are the ones that are on the export control list that the Chinese government put in place.

That's urbium and dysprosium and yttrium, samarium, gadolinium.

Those are kind of the middle rares, sometimes categorized as heavies, but yeah, the main uses are magnets and some other applications and Curtis.

When China restricted some of the supply of the rare earths, we saw companies hope production and it was notable that Ford had to cut back production in one of their plants.

How much supply does the US have right now and how quickly will it run out if China were to say, you know, tun off the taps.

You know that.

I don't know.

I know it's not infinite.

As an American, I know I hope that the US military has enough.

I presume they have enough foresight to have stockpiles to get them through.

But in terms of like a Ford or a General Motors, or even a Kia or Hyundai or Mercedes, yeah, I don't know.

But again, the fact that Ford had to shut down a plant, that's very telling.

I do know that there is a lot of effort out there by these companies to try to procure rare earth materials that don't come from China, And honestly, the sources are very limited.

I mean you have you know, MP Materials, which is producing DPR oxide that's the light magnet rare earth oxide.

And I think they're up to two thousand or twenty five hundred metric tons of NDPR oxide per year.

And just for context, a typical electric vehicle needs an additional say half a kilogram to kilogram of NDPR oxide per vehicle, you know, so if you're producing say two thousand tons of dpr ocid, that's enough for say two to four million evs per year or hybrid evs per year, just kind of for context.

And so Linus is a company out of Australia that is the largest non Chinese producer of rare earth oxides in the world.

They mine in Western Australia.

They do some early processing also in Western Australian.

I think they do the separations in Malaysia where they also produce NDPR oxide.

I saw that they recently started production of d y oxide or disprosium oxide, which was a big achievement for them.

We're going to be producing a pilot scale d Y oxide here in the next few weeks.

That's a big deal.

It's a big accomplishment because China really has dominance in the heavy rare earth market, which is what disprosium oxide is.

It's one of the heavies.

But besides that, you get down to processing.

You know, you have you know, companies like Neo Performance Materials.

They're a Canadian company that has a processing plant in Estonia, and some other plants in Thailand, I believe, and ownership and some Chinese plants.

There's Japanese and Korean companies that do a rare earth metallization and aling and magnet making for their customers.

But it's still a bit of a nation industry at this stage.

When you get down to the especially the oxides and the rare earth metals and alloys and magnets and that sort of thing.

Again, that's really where China has the dominance.

Yeah, Curtis, you make several good points.

I mean you're really underscoring some of the issues here, right because critical minerals rare earth's quite dispersed.

I mean, yes, China has the monopoly, but you know there's Canada, there's Greenland, Australia, other places that are producing this stuff refining it.

Southeast Asian countries that are also there's mines there the DRC of course with mines.

Now, by twenty thirty, the US is projected to hold less than two percent of global critical minerals, and that compares to thirty one percent for China.

So it's not clear that the US at this point can really ramp up their own production of this stuff.

So how important is it that the US really tries to as opposed to maybe like ramping up production at home, also does things like friend shoring or forming those kinds of trade deals to try to get the rare earths from friendly countries, because that seems like important, but it's kind of the opposite is being done now with tariffs.

Yeah, no, I one hundred percent agree with you.

Look, you know, the United States is blessed with a lot of minerals, but we don't have the best deposits of every critical mineral in the world.

And frankly, some of the efforts to say produce like rare earth's out of say like coal waste or something I think is frankly stupid.

Wait why is it stupid?

It would be insanely expensive.

You know, So you run coal, you know, you know, you burn coal on a plant, and yeah, you have coal ash and coal waste, and yeah, sure there's rare earths in it, but it's wildly expensive to try to extract those trace concentrations of rare earths out of things like coal waste.

I think again, you know, rares aren't rare, but to be able to find a deposit that's that's even remotely competitive globally.

That's what's hard.

I mean, look, if you have unlimited money, sure you can produce rares out of probably seawater, but that doesn't make any sense.

And again, at the end of the day as well, these end users, whether you're a Ford or a GM or a Mercedes or a Hyundai or whoever, I think they're willing to maybe pay a little bit more for non Chinese wearers, but you know they can't pay three, four, five, ten times more for their wearers than they could otherwise get from China.

I mean, they have their own competitive pressure points, right.

You know, they can't start paying more for all these components in their vehicles, they will rapidly become uneconomic.

So again, I think it's very important for the United States to mine our good deposits.

We do have good deposits of rares in certain critical minerals.

But we also have to recognize that we don't have everything here, and yes, we do need to do more friend shoring and mining and processing, you know, with our allies, not using our allies, but partnering with our allies.

And you know, President Trump has been really focused on where It may be a reason why he's shown so much interest in Greenland because he doesn't have enough of reserves in rares.

Well, look, earths are not rare.

I'm sure Greenland has rare earths, but I don't think Greenland is going to be producing rare earths anytime soon.

Now, maybe in twenty thirty forty years.

That could be you know, a place that's a source of a good source of rares.

But there's better, i'd say, more accessible deposits.

You know, Greenland has very little infrastructure.

It'd be pretty expensive to produce rares up there right right now.

Anyway, you mentioned the infrastructure, the high costs, and one other thing that we haven't really talked about is the environmental impact and the quality of jobs.

It just strikes me that you know, there's been a shift in manufacturing, for example, to hire higher skilled manufacturing.

A lot of it has become less dirty, more clean, But mining, especially mining of rare earths and critical minerals, is not one of those.

I mean, the reality is you have to dig for them.

I wonder if it makes sense for the US to prioritize opening more of these kinds of minds and creating these kinds of jobs, you know, is it something that people want to do?

Look, mining, no matter what you're mining, you're digging it up out of the ground.

It's just the nature of mining.

Now there's some efforts to maybe try recycling and all that, but honestly that's quite expensive as well.

Though I think it'll get better traction as the years go on.

But yeah, I mean, I think in the United States there is an openness to having you know, mines open at certain locations where the minerals are.

You know, there are good jobs.

There are people here that are willing to do those jobs for sure.

I mean, you know, look, we're a miner of uranium, for instance.

We have a good skilled workforce.

It's a very good paying job to be a minor in the United States.

How much is it, like, how much could I make if I if I joined your company and started mining.

You know, six figures, including you know, health insurance and deafists starting plan and all that.

Yeah, and some of our miners are highly educated, but some of them don't have a high school degree.

So I mean it's it's a good job.

Now again you get paid a lot because it's very difficult work and it's dangerous.

Look, I mean mining is dangerous.

I mean it's a lot safer than it used to be.

But that's something that people need to recognize as well, that the mining of today is not the mining that was done one hundred or two hundred or even thirty years ago.

Right, it's constantly improving.

Health and safety and environmental standards are better today than they've ever been.

And you know, mining can be done very responsibly and very you know, relatively safely.

So there's certainly an openness in the United States to do more.

Of it, Curtis, just to pursue what Kati was mentioning.

There's this perception that mining and processing where earth is very dirty is not very environmentally friendly.

And that's also this perception that that's why China has been successful because I've got a lower standards environmentally than say the US.

Do you agree with this narrative.

Somewhat.

I would say that many of the videos and pictures I've seen of let's say, modern Chinese rare earth production, it looks quite good and it looks quite clean and safe.

Now again, if you go back thirty forty fifty years, I'm sure it was less so.

Well, it was probably less so elsewhere in the world too, when it comes to rare earth processing.

Now, look, mining is essentially digging rocks up out of the ground, and that is what it is, right.

You know, you can reclaim it and it's fine, and it's it can be done completely responsibly in an environmentally friendly manner.

The processing, you know, you're having to use chemicals and other reagents and things like that to purify and refine and extract these elements.

I think some of the older practices were quite damaging.

I do know that there is some that goes on today in certain parts of the world that is not very good, but it's not inherently damaging to the environment or dangerous or toxic.

You know, for instance, everything we do at our processing facility in the United States, it's done in a contained plant.

There's all kinds of protections to ensure there's not leaks or you know, exposures of any kind to our workers.

We have state of the art, say tailings facilities where the waste goes.

These are triple lined with leak detection and groundwater monitors to make sure that there's not any sort of pollution to the surrounding environment.

Again, you can do it in ways that are not environmentally friendly or in ways that are unhealthy and unsafe, but you can also do them in very clean and protective ways.

And could us just before I let you go, you know, rare earth has really come to the forefront of you know, especially like media Attenson.

I'll be frank, I don't even think I realized what rare earths were like, say two years ago, Like is this a growth industry?

Like what's the demand outlook like for rare earth producers and refinance like yourself over the next few years.

Oh, it's pretty exceptional.

Actually, Again, as we see more electrification happening around the world, whether you know, in mobility electric vehicles now like in the United States and Europe, I think electric vehicle consumer adoption has been a little slower than what people would have expected, so that has not grown as quickly as some may have thought, but for instance, hybrid electric vehicles, those need just as many rare earths as a pure electric vehicle.

These rare earths are used actually in the drive trains, essentially the motors that provide power to the wheels in these vehicles.

It's not used in the batteries or anything like well, summer used in the batteries, but the main use is in the drive trains.

That's seeing good growth.

I think that once we have a couple more technological breakthrough and battery technologies, I do think that evs could see real good consumer adoption because at that point, I think you could see performance of evs be the equivalent of internal combustion engines in terms of power and range and towing capacity and hauling capacity and that sort of thing.

Another big growth industry is robots and advanced robotics.

What creates a lot of those very fast, precise and strong movements and robots is rare earth magnets, and some forecasters projected that advance robotics is going to overtake evs and hybrid evs and mobility in the next say five to ten years.

In terms of demand, I think that the demand growth picture is extremely strong for rare earths, so it's an exciting place for us to be in energy fields right now.

Curtis, it was a great discussion.

Thank you so much for joining us.

You're very welcome.

Thanks for having me.

You've been listening to Asia Centric from Bloomberg Intelligence.

I'm Katidomitriva in Hong Kong.

I'm John Lee, also in Hong Kong.

This podcast was produced and edited by Clara Chen And You can listen to all our episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Ready Listen.

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