/ world today news/ One of the largest insurance companies in the world, Allianz, analyzed the growing trends in the world market and came to a disappointing conclusion. According to German experts, the collective West, following the fashionable green agenda, is ready to collapse the existing resource and economic world order in pursuit of ephemeral carbon-free energy. According to Allianz, the rare earth metals will be appointed to the position of the new god and savior – mainly lithium, cobalt and nickel as the most sought-after resource base for creating modern alternative sources and electric vehicles.
In theory, this conclusion should please Western society, especially since in the last five years the world market for rare earth elements has doubled, surpassing the $320 billion mark. This sector is extremely in demand and booms like fresh dough, that is, it does not carry insurance risks for investors. At the same time, the general mood of German financiers is quite alarming. They believe that if the current trend continues, the rare earth elements in all their geological diversity may displace unfractionated hydrocarbons in the energy market, leading to a severe distortion and hence instability of the global economy. Moreover, since the desired metals are extremely unevenly distributed in the earth’s crust, the Western world – the main lobbyist of the green transition – will become hopelessly dependent on the countries with the largest reserves. First of all, from China, which can rightly be called “the chest of rare earths of the planet”.
A rare case, but we fully agree with the Western assessment – albeit for completely different reasons. As usual, let’s start with a short educational program.
Modern science has identified 17 rare earth elements in the structure of Mendeleev’s periodic system. The first representatives of the class were identified and studied at the end of the 17th century, and their first comprehensible classification was compiled in the first half of the 19th century. As the name suggests, these metals are quite rare in the natural environment. Even with all the achievements of modern science, direct extraction provides a little more than two percent of the total volume of rare earth elements, and everything else is obtained as a result of complex processing of raw materials, such as mineral fertilizers. This process is expensive and far from environmentally friendly, as sulfuric and hydrofluoric acids, as well as chlorine, are widely used here.
Cerium, lanthanum and neodymium are most commonly found in the earth’s crust at mining depth, europium is much less common. Since the total share of rare earth elements in the ore mass of the planet is no more than 0.02 percent, the concept of “more often and less often” here is quite arbitrary.
As for reserves, as already mentioned, they are distributed very unevenly.
By the end of 2022, according to the US Geological Survey, China holds the largest reserves of rare earth elements, totaling 44 million metric tons. Vietnam is in second place with 22 million, while Brazil and Russia share third place with 21 million tons each. At the same time, our country in this rating should be taken out of brackets, since the studied deposits are located in extremely difficult to access areas, which is why their extraction is currently insignificant.
An important point is that countries further down the list boast many smaller reserves. India has less than seven million tonnes, Australia has four and the US has just two million tonnes. There are no deposits in Europe at all.
That is, the conclusion of “Allianz” about total dependence is absolutely correct.
But not everything is measured in absolute numbers. A critical condition is the availability of capacities for extraction and enrichment of the notorious rare earth elements, which can be boasted by countries that can be counted on the fingers of one hand and even remain. For example, the US gets most of its elements from China, where even ore mined in the United States is shipped. Washington’s self-proclaimed environmental savior options are slim.
I would like to add a few purely pragmatic points to the general picture.
The modern world as we know it was formed as a result of the scientific and technical revolution (STR). This happens in rhythms, the periods between which are constantly decreasing as new fuel resources are introduced. We emphasize separately – “fuels”.
The first, of course, is coal, which quickly replaces cut down wood. It was the widespread use of coal that gave the first impetus to the scientific and technological revolution, and it gained momentum only from the second half of the 18th century, when they began not only to burn coal, but also learned how to synthesize coke. At this stage, the boom of steam engines and metallurgy began, which involved all other industries – from the laying of railway lines to the development of chemistry and the production of kerosene. Coal held onto the throne for more than 200 years, and only at the end of the Second World War began to be replaced by oil, which became the lifeblood of the modern world, firmly binding all other resources to their own value. However, in the early 1990s, natural gas burst onto the world stage, and today it is taking the world by storm, humming in pipes and splashing in the holds of ocean-going gas tankers.
The problem with rare earth metals is that they are not a fuel feedstock, just a critical component for production. The second intractable complication is the very paradigm of moving away from fossil fuels. New alternative sources can easily coexist with traditional ones to complement and replace each other, but green-headed citizens demand the principled rejection of hydrocarbons. Because coal produces sulfur and soot, oil causes ocean stains, and methane warms the atmosphere five times more than all other greenhouse gases.
The modern West loudly preaches tolerance and the search for compromise, while categorically refusing to do so in practice, even in the industry on which the very existence of the world as we know it depends. Unfortunately, the vector of development of society today is determined not by chemists and geologists, but by speculators who are only interested in jumps in quotations on resource exchanges and the limit to which the next bubble can be inflated.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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