It takes more than being a China hawk to produce rare earth metals

It takes more than being a China hawk to produce rare earth metals

Posted: 30 Apr 2012 03:41 AM PDT

Twenty months after China began to ratchet down its exports of rare-earth elements, the first new Western-run mine is more or less ready to crank out refined metals used in high-tech products including wind turbines, electric cars and missiles. But a delay in Malaysian permission to start the refinery illustrates how the West got into this fix in the first place -- rare-earth mining is among the dirtiest and stigmatized enterprises on the planet.
Australian-run Lynas has been the most aggressive Western company working to pivot off of draconian export reductions imposed by China in September 2010. The result is its rare-earth operations in Malaysia. It has been mining tons of ore in Australia in preparation for refining in the Malaysian town of Gebeng -- it expects the ore to yield a relatively high 7.9 percent of rare-earth metals. But the refinery has been the subject of fierce public Malaysian protests (pictured above, a protest earlier this month), and government permission to open it has not yet been granted.
A mine in California called Mountain Pass used to be the world's biggest rare-earth mine -- until it was discovered that there had been enormous spills of radioactive waste-laced water into Ivanpah Dry Lake. The environmental backlash, in addition to plummeting global prices for rare-earth elements, resulted in the mine closing in 2002.
China picked up the slack. Since the 1990s, China had been on its own rare-earth mining buildup, and now it came to dominate the global industry. But in September 2010, China began a cutoff of rare-earths to Japan in a diplomatic spat over the East China Sea, and a general export reduction followed.
Part of Beijing's export reduction has been a tough-guy inducement for Western companies using the elements to relocate factories to China, where they are offered cheap and liberal allotments of rare-earths.