“In a warehouse deep in Brazil’s savanna, machines churn through piles of red clay to produce chalky rocks packed with metals critical for making electric cars, smartphones and missiles. 

But what is particularly precious about these minerals is their intended destination: They are bound for the U.S., not China.

China mines some 70% of the world’s rare earths, the 17 metallic elements primarily used in magnets needed for civilian and military technologies. But its 90% share of processing for rare earths mined around the world is what really concerns officials from other countries working to secure their supply.

‘China is a formidable competitor,’ said Ramón Barúa, chief executive of Canada’s Aclara Resources, which is opening a rare-earths mine to supply a processing plant it plans to build in the U.S. Aclara said it plans by August to decide where in the U.S. to build its plant for separating rare-earths deposits into individual elements.

It also has a buyer lined up. Aclara signed an agreement last year to supply rare earths to VAC, a German company that is building a factory in South Carolina with $94 million in Pentagon funding to make magnets for clients including General Motors.

‘We’re seeing a tsunami of demand,’ Barúa said.”

From Wall Street Journal.

Summary: In response to President Trump’s tariff hikes, China threatened to restrict exports of rare-earth metals—reviving anxieties about US dependence on these critical materials. While China dominates production and processing, a similar episode in 2010 revealed that market forces, innovation, and diversification can quickly undermine its leverage. The “rare-earth crisis” serves as a case study in how flexible supply chains and resilient global markets can neutralize resource-based economic coercion.

China responded to President Trump’s tariff hikes with a series of retaliatory measures. On April 4, among other moves, Beijing suspended the export of some of the 17 rare-earth metals and magnets that are vital to American defense, energy and automotive industries.

The commentary that ensued revealed profound anxieties about alleged Western vulnerabilities. The New York Post accused the Chinese of “kneecapping US industry.” The BBC declared that the communist nation had dealt “a major blow to the US,” while the Economist warned that China’s control of rare earths was a “weapon that could hurt America.”

These commentators have a point. According to the International Energy Agency, China produces about 61% of rare-earth minerals, and it processes 92%. The anguished reaction from the American press, however, revealed a measure of obliviousness. The reality is that America has been here before.

Fifteen years ago, following a dispute with Tokyo over contested waters, China imposed a rare-earth embargo on Japan, while cutting its rare-earth export quotas to the rest of the world by 40%. Beijing’s actions rang alarm bells across the industrialized world. Prices of the rare-earth metals spiked, with cerium soaring from $4.15 a kilogram in January 2010 to $150.55 in July 2011. American defense analysts warned that Beijing was exploiting a strategic vulnerability. U.S. manufacturers scrambled for alternatives to the minerals, which play a crucial role in everything from wind turbines to precision-guided missiles.

The panic seemed justified. At the time China controlled 93% of global rare-earth production and more than 99% of the most valuable heavy rare earths. Congress convened a hearing on China’s rare earths monopoly, with Rep. Don Manzullo (R., Ill.) saying that Beijing’s action “threatens tens of thousands of American jobs.”

The narrative was compelling: An authoritarian power was wielding its mineral wealth as a geopolitical weapon, putting a resource-hungry West at its mercy. Yet few people remember this supposed strategic calamity today.

Market mechanisms undermined China’s attempt at resource leverage. In the early 2010s, supply growth outside China accelerated. Projects already in development by Molycorp in California and Lynas in Australia ramped up, adding tens of thousands of metric tons of production capacity. By 2014 China’s market share of rare earths had fallen from more than 90% to about 70%.

China’s export quotas also proved surprisingly porous. Producers exploited loopholes by shipping minimally processed alloys exempt from restrictions, while an estimated 15% to 30% of production was smuggled through neighboring countries. Beijing’s inability to police thousands of small miners fatally undercut its embargo.

Manufacturers displayed remarkable adaptability. Refineries temporarily substituted alternative catalysts, and magnet producers optimized alloys to use less rare-earth material, some even switching entirely to new technologies. This “demand destruction” blunted the crisis’ effect even before new supplies could fully come online. Prices that had spiked in 2011 quickly retreated to pre-crisis levels.

The 2010 episode revealed fundamental constraints on attempts to use raw materials as geopolitical weapons. While China retains significant market share, the U.S. defense industry has reduced its reliance on rare earths to a minimum (the equivalent of less than 0.1% of global demand), and weapons programs maintain inventories to buffer temporary supply disruptions.

Despite their name, rare earths are quite abundant. Cerium is the 25th most common element on Earth. At 68 parts per million of Earth’s crust by weight, it is more abundant than copper. Rare earths are “rare” because of geochemical dispersion. They tend to remain evenly mixed rather than found in their pure form. They also pose extraction challenges, since they are usually bound up in a handful of mineral hosts that often contain radioactive thorium or uranium. That is what makes rare-earth deposits relatively scarce.

That can sometimes translate into environmental challenges when it comes to teasing out the needed elements. But such concerns must at times give way to national-security considerations. Similarly, free trade and friendly relations with allies who produce rare earths at scale, such as Canada, should be a higher priority than unrealistic and counterproductive spats over national sovereignty and illegal border crossings.

More broadly, as the U.S. navigates new supply-chain anxieties in semiconductors, critical minerals and pharmaceutical ingredients, we should remember the rare-earth crisis that never was—a testament to the resilience of global markets and human innovation in the face of attempted economic coercion.

This article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal on 5/12/2025.

“A startup using AI to guide geologic exploration believes it has found a major Australian deposit of indium, a rare metal used in solar panels, LCD screens and semiconductors…

The company, which recently raised a $20 million Series B round, told Axios exclusively that it located signs of a deposit on an outcropping roughly 310 miles northwest of Sydney.

Some assays show up to 117 parts per million and multiple samples show over 20 ppm.

‘Ore grades for Indium typically begin at 1 ppm In, underscoring the high-grade nature of this outcrop,’ the announcement states.”

From Axios.

“The dream of seventeenth-century alchemists has been realized by physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), who have turned lead into gold — albeit for only a fraction of a second and at tremendous cost.

The not-so-mysterious transmutation happened at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory, near Geneva, Switzerland, where the multi-billion-dollar LHC smashes together ions of lead for a portion of each experimental run.

Early chemists hoped to turn abundant lead into precious gold. But differences in proton number between the elements (82 for lead and 79 for gold) made that impossible by chemical means.

CERN researchers achieved the feat by aiming beams of lead at each other, travelling at close to the speed of light. The ions occasionally glance past each other, rather than hit head on. When this happens, the intense electromagnetic field around an ion can create a pulse of energy that triggers an oncoming lead nucleus to eject three protons — turning it into gold.”

From Scientific American.