An indication of the growing strategic significance of rare earths is their role in one of the long-running insurgencies by minority peoples within Burma.
One key element (so to speak) in U.S. efforts to end its reliance on China for the supply and processing of rare earths and other critical minerals will, surprise, surprise, be deregulation, whether with regard to the mining of new supplies or their processing. Scrabbling around in the back of the couch is also to be encouraged.
The U.S. Interior Department on Thursday took steps to increase recovery of critical minerals, used in everything from electric vehicles to high-tech weapons, from mine waste, coal refuse, tailings and abandoned uranium mines.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum directed his department to streamline federal regulations on the recovery of the minerals such as rare earths, lithium and cobalt from the waste.
In addition, mine waste recovery projects may become eligible for federal funding. Presumably some of this will come via the Defense Production Act, a law passed during the Cold War years. As Reuters reported in March, the president invoked the DPA when signing an executive order to provide financing, loans and other investment support to encourage domestic processing of a range of critical minerals.
The reserves involved may be significant.
Reuters:
Research by the USGS and state geological surveys has identified sources of minerals like zinc, germanium, tellurium and rare earth elements in shuttered and current mines. . . . In Utah’s Bingham Canyon, tellurium, vital for defense technologies, can be extracted from tailings created during copper mining.
Germanium also has defense applications (among others), including its use in optics and infrared sensors. It is telling that China has been controlling (and, at times, banning) its export, even if some supplies have been getting through by more circuitous and, by definition, less reliable routes.
The processing of rare earths has typically been a messy business (China’s lack of fussiness about such matters helps account for its dominant position in this market). The development of U.S. expertise in this area will thus be strategically, commercially, and (inevitably) environmentally valuable.
Writing about this topic earlier this month, I noted reports of an “enormous cache” of rare earths within coal ash, which may represent a significant source of supply without the need for new mining. That too is worth exploring.
It is an indication of the growing strategic significance of rare earths that they are now playing a role in one of the long-running insurgencies by minority peoples within Burma (Myanmar), the world’s third largest source of rare earths after China and the U.S.
Last year, the KIA (Kachin Independence Army) took Pangwa, near the Chinese border. As Bloomberg’s Timothy McLaughlin noted in a recent report:
Nearly all of Myanmar’s rare-earth mines are in Kachin State, mostly clustered around Pangwa, and the KIA now appears to control every one of them — supervising large teams of informal laborers who perform dirty, dangerous work with next to no protection. . . . Moreover, the KIA has no capacity to process the elements mined within its territory; all must be sent for refining to Chinese plants and onward to manufacturers globally.
How long that situation will continue given the stakes (and shifts in the relationship between China, the Burmese junta, and the KIA) is anyone’s guess, but:
[T]he KIA’s role in the production of rare earths, and especially of dysprosium and terbium, is now significant enough that millions of consumers worldwide will soon be using products that contain material mined from their territory, in a violent enclave of a country at war with itself.
Dysprosium and terbium are essential for electric vehicles (green!), wind turbines (green!) as well as, inevitably, high tech military equipment and are, another surprise, among the rare earths subject to Chinese export restrictions.
Signs of warmer ties between Beijing and the KIA may signify the importance that China attaches to maintaining its grip on the rare earth supply chain.
It should also signify the importance to the U.S. of a rapid expansion of its domestic rare earth sector. The administration is on the right track.
Faster, please.