People are under the impression that solving rare earths is as easy as signing a few extraction and processing agreements when that's literally less than 0.01% of the effort.
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1982766231079051531
What a ridiculously deluded post.
People are under the impression that solving rare earths is as easy as signing a few extraction and processing agreements when that's literally less than 0.01% of the effort.
The real hard part, which took China 3 decades to achieve - at Chinese scale, efficiency and speed (!) - is building the complete industrial ecosystem needed to actually process these materials at scale - the factories, the energy infrastructure, the millions of trained workers, and the entire supply chain that makes it all economically viable.
I wrote a complete analysis of what it would take to process just 100 tons of gallium (one of 21 elements on China's export controls list), which is just 17% of what China produces: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/how-long-can
Read it to understand the immense challenge at play: to produce gallium at scale, one first needs to build an entire aluminum industry since gallium is a derivative of alumina at ridiculously low ratios (you need to 120,000 kilograms of alumina to get a single kilogram of gallium). Problem: China has a dominant global market share in aluminum production so your first step if you wanted to take over gallium from China would be to somehow build an aluminum industry that rivals China's - which itself requires massive energy infrastructure (think multiple nuclear plants), tens of thousands of trained workers, and supporting ecosystems that take decades to develop. And that's before you even get to the gallium part (and incidentally doesn't answer the question of how you'll ever be economically competitive with China).
All in all my estimate is that arriving at gallium production levels of 100 tons a year (which is just 17% of China's) would cost minimum $140 billion and would take at least 15 years.
And that's just gallium: again China's export controls list includes 21 chemical elements, each with their own industrial prerequisites and dependencies. And that's not all, it also includes downstream products like lithium-ion batteries and superhard materials.
In other words, posts like this 
that speak of a "72 hours checkmate" by Trump are pure fantasy: they make it sound like he solved the rare earths challenge with some announcements but that's living in an alternate reality where industrial capacity magically materializes from press releases, rather than from decades of focused industrial capacity building that China has already completed.
that speak of a "72 hours checkmate" by Trump are pure fantasy: they make it sound like he solved the rare earths challenge with some announcements but that's living in an alternate reality where industrial capacity magically materializes from press releases, rather than from decades of focused industrial capacity building that China has already completed.
posted by Satish Sharma at
01:39
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