What Opportunities and Challenges Are Buried in Russia’s Wildcard US Rare Earths Partnership Idea?

Russia has massive untapped reserves of all 17 of the rare-earth elements, the US “needs them all, and with each passing year demand will only grow,” Mining Industrialists of Russia Association president Valery Yazev told Sputnik.

Extracting rare earths from the red mud and phosphogypsum waste products accompanying production of metals like aluminum and titanium is “a whole art form” unto itself, Yazev explained, highlighting the difficulties of their extraction.

From neodymium and praseodymium used to produce super-strong magnets for electric motors, wind turbines, microelectronics, and aviation equipment, to scandium, added to aircraft-grade aluminum alloys to improve weight and strength characteristics, Russia’s rare earths potential is endless, according to the observer.

"If, notwithstanding all our disagreements, conflicts of interests, etc., we unite [on rare earths production, ed.], it would create a powerful impulse on the global level ensuring the transformation of global energy - where critical rare minerals are in great demand, and all other equipment, the structural elements for a new technological platform," Yazev said.

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Challenges

But there are major issues to overcome to turn that potential into reality, says Peter Arkell, chairman of the Global Mining Association of China.

Pointing to the US’s desperation after China, the world’s premiere rare earths producer, slapped bans on some rare earths’ exports in response to US tech restrictions, Arkell explained to Sputnik that the US will naturally “be keen to find sources of these restricted minerals.”

“However, it is not sufficient to have access to the raw material required to produce the rare earth elements required for semiconductor or battery production,” he stressed. “China’s success is built not only on its access to the rare earths, but essentially its ability to refine and produce these elements for the inputs to these highly technical products.”

This capability took China 25 years and huge R&D investments to create, along with “extreme environmental risks,” according to Arkell. Such success “cannot be replicated without enormous investment of capital, time and talent.”

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"America will need to be prepared to not only invest in the very expensive processing plants, it will also need to be prepared for the significant environmental risks. There may be communities that are not prepared to have those risks within their towns, counties or states. These processing plants are not huge employers, so there would be marginal benefit for the environmental cost. The Americans might see benefit to not import the raw material mined in Russia, but to then have much of that risky processing take place in Russia," the observer added.

“Of course, while disrupting China’s dominant position might have some appeal” for the US, “the economic and political risk would remain that a change of attitude in Russia would see supply chain disrupted again,” Arkell emphasized, referencing the fickle nature of Western countries' economic and investment cooperation with Russia.

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