US works on reopening rare earth mine

Image via CrunchBase

Guardian:

It's a deep pit in the Mojave desert. But it could hold the key to America challenging China's technological domination of the 21st century.

At the bottom of the vast site, beneath 6 metres (20ft) of bright emerald-green water, runs a rich seam of ores that are hardly household names but are rapidly emerging as the building blocks of the hi-tech future.

The mine is the largest known deposit of rare earth elements outside China. Eight years ago, it was shut down in a tacit admission that the US was ceding the market to China. Now, the owners have secured final approval to restart operations, and hope to begin production soon.

"We will probably never be the largest [mine] in the world again. It will be hard to overcome China's status in that regard, but we do think we will be a very significant supplier," Mark Smith, chief executive of Molycorp Minerals which owns the mine, told reporters during a tour of the site.

So far as the Obama administration is concerned, the mine can't open soon enough. A US department of energy report warned on 15 December that, in the absence of mines such as this one, America risks losing control over the production of a host of technologies, from smart phones to smart bombs, electric car batteries to wind turbines, because of a virtual Chinese monopoly on the rare earth metals essential to their production.

China controls 97% of global rare earth metals production. Such total domination of a strategic resource became impossible to ignore in October when China cut exports of rare earth elements by more than 70% over the previous year, disrupting manufacturing in Japan, Europe and the US. Prices of even the cheapest of the 17 rare earth elements rose 40%.

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China appears to be operating like a classic monopolist. So far the Democrats have not threatened them with an anti trust suit the way they have oil suppliers in the past. It is not clear why it takes so long to reopen the mine. At this point they do not have to content with environmental lawsuits that would delay their opening.

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• Rare Earth Element Mining is Re-Starting in the U.S. to Break China's Near-Monopoly (treehugger.com)
• Undermining China's Monopoly on Rare Earth Elements (technologyreview.in)
• Molycorp Scores Another Rare Earths Pact (MCP, SSUMY, HTMLF, CEO, REE, QREDF) (247wallst.com)
• Undermining China's Monopoly on Rare Earth Elements (technologyreview.com)
• Molycorp (MCP): Speculating on Rare Earth Elements (bloggingstocks.com)