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Comment by gtvwill | Hacker News Reader

I could have sworn china only held 97% of the worlds current stock of processed rare earth minerals...rather than the actual deposits themselves. Not to mention the rarity of these processed minerals elsewhere is not due to the scarcity but rather due to the heavy processing & costs required to extract them...Which is why the mines that do so are rare in their own way.

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> Not to mention the rarity of these processed minerals elsewhere is not due to the scarcity but rather due to the heavy processing & costs required to extract them.

This distinction is only important if we consider a future where technological advances significantly bring down the cost of extraction. Here and now, the only thing that is important is the amount that is extractable for a reasonable price. (Or, more specifically, the shape of the supply curve.) If there were a trillion trillion tons of the stuff behind an invisible force-field that we couldn't get past, that would nominally remove the scarcity but it wouldn't practically matter.

True, but the barriers can also be of several types, which would matter when looking at how persistent they're likely to be. For example, if China dominates because its reserves are significantly easier to extract technically (e.g. closer to the surface, higher concentration), that would be a different situation than if it's more due to environmental or regulatory policies, or to labor costs.

Not so relevant, but as regards the huge amounts we can't reach: there is really. There's huge amounts of all sorts in the Mantle & Core, we just probably can't get there with current technology - or economically in the medium-term.

I was questioning that same statistic. I was under the impression that China had been buying up rare earth mines in South America and though mines do exist in China, that they do not possess the largest volume of rare earth minerals.

However, this bbc article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14114107 quotes that china 'supplies 97%' of the worlds rare earth minerals. I think China has managed to essentially corner the market.

97% of production is in China, mostly from Bayan Obo and illegal operations in the south. They're thought to have 30-40% of identified REE reserves because the cost to mine & process them is prohibitive. China fixes REE prices to keep competitors out of the market and promote domestic manufacturing.

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