Speaker Highlights 

Cory Combs

The whole point of calling them as a group rare Earths for these 17 different elements is that they have very similar chemical properties. One of the side effects of that is they're extremely difficult to separate. You can't magnetize one and pull it out like a recycling stream. It doesn't work that way and so you have all these incredibly complex processes, like fractional crystallization. (...) Imagine doing that where the slightest change in PH will change the rate at which different minerals solidify out of the solution. That's the kind of sensitivity that we're dealing with in all the kind of extraction processes for the specific for Earth.  The ore itself isn't useful, you need the specific one for a specific process, and that is something that we see a lot of differentiation across localities. Which localities put their investments in education and skills training, to the point that Baotou now has the world's leading expertise and has scaled up those operations that other regions are struggling to.  

China state-owned mining companies are not exactly innovative. They tend not to spend capital very efficiently and so there are advantages to being more hands off. But what it comes down to is whenever you have a specific need, the markets very rarely are good at doing exactly the one thing the government wants at any given time. It's generally good at being more efficient about whatever it's doing, and I think that's kind of the trade-off that we're seeing right now when it comes to this geologically-focused competition.

Jessica DiCarlo

Something that’s been happening in the industry – a lot of consolidation of large SOEs. One large merger happened in 2021 and it was a merger of the “Big 6” REE SOEs [...] and that was a move to try to be able to control pricing. Part of it has come down to environmental reasons, and there's another push for consolidation to make a second larger rare earth group called the China North Rare Earth Group in 2023. [...] When we started looking at all these consolidation efforts, you can look at the high-level Beijing policies and discourse coming out and why consolidation is important, international competitive and pricing, etc. And that’s a part of this story, but when we started to dig into the more local policies, Cory and I became really interested in how new mining sites were being opened up through ongoing competition, through supposed singular entities now. We’re seeing that in Szechuan and the southern 7 provinces.  

There have been efforts to clean it up, [...] some companies are moving outside of China becomes it’s becoming cleaner or there’s more regulations that are being put in place, and some of those regulations are coming as a result of the consolidation we’re seeing. [...] Beijing’s desire to have more positive environmental conditions around rare earths, production, smelting, refining, etc. Have made it more difficult for some companies to produce at the same rates they were, so that’s made it more attractive go out to other countries where regulations are lower.  

In Myanmar, there’s this huge uptick in mines – Global Witness had reported in 2021 and 2023 there were an additional 300 mines in Kachin state ,and that’s the state in Myanmar that borders Yunnan province, and you’re seeing from there – heavy rare earth elements, and all of those are being exported to China. [...] The coup that happened in 2021 and the longer history of the relationship between resource extraction, mostly in the form of timber and rubber in the past, and conflict in the region, you’re now seeing moving towards rare earths. [...] Communities are really struggling with the environmental impacts of this, they’re feeling it – it's not a mine out in the desert, this is in districts where people are living.