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Makes sense.
Geopoliticts shifts, good idea to just stop, wait and see who's ready to be on friendly terms.
Particularly in Europe, the result is like a few election cycles out. Could go in like 5 different directions and is impossible to predict.
China is encouraging other countries to find new sources which exist on every continent.
They are not nearly as rare as the name implies.
The rarity is the ability to do it without caring about the massive environmental damage often caused while procuring the minerals.
Check my understanding here: It's not that they're scarce, but there's no geological process that concentrates them like copper or gold. There aren't any neodymium seams the way there are gold seams, there's a very little amount everywhere. So you might as well sift the entire Mojave.
Yeah there's a reason people were saber rattling over those offshore deposits Japan claimed, and it's not because undersea mining is cheap and efficient or "they're on every continent what's the big deal"
Finding the labor to mine and process it cheaply enough to maintain profit margins, while simultaneously deporting everyone, is what makes things rare.
As opposed to what the headline could make you think, it’s not a complete ban on all REE exports. A total ban wouldn’t make much sense.
The REE business is big, and China can’t keep stockpiling these metals for long. Also, REE production is integrated to the rest of the industry, so you can’t just switch those factories off and expect everything else to keep on chugging along as usual.
Looks like Australia will profit. We have a lot of lithium, and some of the others, china's been undercutting the price for a while.
Is it just that China doesn’t want them to go to another country and resold to the U.S. in another deal?
Western industries like to cry foul. But if they did not do anything since these bans started about 20 years ago it means that they are happy with it.