Gracelin Baskaran:
We’re probably not going to decouple any time soon. We have been mining rare earths for some years in the United States, but we have never built separation facilities that are — and so, even though the U.S. government has spent over $400 million through the Defense Production Act over the last five years, these facilities are not ready to go.
And when they are online, they’re only going to be able to produce a small fraction of what China produces. Ultimately, for the U.S., what determines whether the U.S. fails or succeeds here is twofold. One will be, can we get these facilities online quickly? And the second is, at the end of the day, geology is where geology is. And we have less than 1.5 percent of the world’s rare earths here at home in the U.S.
So there’s going to be a need to link this up to our foreign policy to secure rare earths from other countries. We have seen it feature quite prominently in the discussion in the last few months in the context of potential engagement with Ukraine and Greenland. There are many other sources of rare earths.
And as we have seen, even with the Chinese president in Vietnam and Malaysia, they are looking to do the same thing to cement a certain dominant. So there’s a larger strategy that’s needed. And there’s no doubt the Department of Defense recognizes this as a critical vulnerability.
They have prioritized what we call the mine-to-magnet supply chain and building it here at home by 2027. But it takes time, it takes capital, and it takes a lot of willpower.
