Rare Earths Crisis in Retrospect

By Marian L. Tupy of Cato.

"On April 10, a team of 21 Japanese scientists discovered a 16 million ton patch of mineral-rich deep sea mud near Minami-Tori Island, which lies 790 miles off the coast of Japan. The patch appears to contain a wealth of rare earth elements, including 780 years’ worth of yttrium, 620 years’ worth of europium, 420 years’ worth of terbium and 730 years’ worth of dysprosium. This find, the scientists concluded, “has the potential to supply these materials on a semi-infinite basis to the world.”

The happy discovery provides us with an opportunity to revisit the last crisis over the availability of natural resources and recall the ingenuous ways in which humanity tackled that particular problem.  

In September 2010, a Chinese fishing trawler and a Japanese coast guard vessel collided in waters disputed by the two countries. The Japanese detained the captain of the Chinese vessel and China responded by halting all shipments of rare earths to Japan. The latter used the imported metals in a number of high-tech industries, including production of magnets and Toyota Priuses. At the time of the embargo, China accounted for 97 percent of rare earths production and a large part of the processing business. Predictably, global panic ensued.

In the United States, which uses the rare elements in its defense systems, wind turbines and electric cars, the great and the good rang the alarm bells. Writing in The New York Times, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman opined,

“You really have to wonder why nobody raised an alarm while this was happening, if only on national security grounds. But policy makers simply stood by as the U.S. rare earth industry shut down…. The result was a monopoly position exceeding the wildest dreams of Middle Eastern oil-fueled tyrants. Couple the rare earth story with China's behavior on other fronts — the state subsidies that help firms gain key contracts, the pressure on foreign companies to move production to China and, above all, that exchange-rate policy — and what you have is a portrait of a rogue economic superpower, unwilling to play by the rules. And the question is what the rest of us are going to do about it.”

The U.S. Congress convened a hearing on “China’s monopoly on rare earths: Implications for U.S. foreign and security policy,” with Rep. Donald Manzullo (R-IL) declaring, “China’s actions against Japan fundamentally transformed the rare earths market for the worse. As a result, manufacturers can no longer expect a steady supply of these elements, and the pricing uncertainty created by this action threatens tens of thousands of American jobs.” Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) argued that “Chinese control over rare earth elements gives them one more argument as to why we should kowtow to China,” while a report by the Government Accountability Office warned that “rebuilding a U.S. rare earth supply chain may take up to 15 years.”

So, what really happened?

In a 2014 Council on Foreign Relations report, Eugene Gholz, an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, revisited the crisis and found that the Chinese embargo proved to be a bit of a dud.  Some Chinese exporters got around the embargo by using legal loopholes, such as selling rare earths after combining them with other alloys. Others smuggled the elements out of China outright. Some companies found ways to make their products using smaller amounts of the elements while others “remembered that they did not need the high performance of specialized rare earth[s] ... they were merely using them because, at least until the 2010 episode, they were relatively inexpensive and convenient.” Third, companies around the world started raising money for new mining projects, ramped up the existing plant capacities and accelerated plans to recycle rare earths.

Source.

The market response, then, diffused the immediate crisis when prices of rare earths, which spiked in 2011, came down again. In the long run, as the Minami-Tori find suggests, future supply of rare earths seems promising.

The broader lesson from the rare earths episode is this: human beings are intelligent animals who innovate their way out of shortages, real and imagined. We have done so many times before. In some cases, we have relied on greater efficiency. An aluminum can, for example, weighed about 3 ounces in 1959. Today, it weighs less than half an ounce. In other cases, we have replaced hard to come by resources with those that are more plentiful. Instead of killing whales for lamp oil, for instance, we burn coal, oil and gas. Finally, we have gotten better at identifying natural resource deposits. Thus, contrary to a century of predictions, our known resources of fossil fuels are higher than ever.

As such, there is no a priori reason why human ingenuity and market incentives should not be able to handle future shortages as well."