Detailed explanation of global rare earth development pattern

[China Building Materials Network] "Now that it can replace rare earth, it should only be a means of negotiation."

"When Deng Xiaoping said in 1992 that 'there is oil in the Middle East and China has rare earths', we haven't felt that the rare earths are strategically high." Inorganic chemist and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Huang Chunhui said to "Oriental Weekly."

However, with the intensification of the rare earth dispute in 2010, even the most ordinary Chinese people have begun to pay attention to the word "rare earth." "In the past two or three years, the state has placed a greater emphasis on rare earths," said Liao Chunsheng, dean of the Minmetals Rare Earth Research Institute, Minmetals Corp., who told reporters that his experience as a researcher is relatively strong: Tens of thousands of research funds are not easy, and now a national project is tens of millions or even hundreds of millions.

Actually, according to the statistics of the Chinese Ministry of Commerce and the China Institute of Rare Earths, China currently has 30% of the world's rare earth resources, but it is already relatively scarce in terms of per capita resources. In this case, China has 90% of the world's output. Why is that?

Discontinued production of foreign rare earths From the perspective of industrial reserves of rare earths, rare earths not only exist in China but also have certain reserves in the United States, Australia, Vietnam, Russia, and the former Soviet republics. According to the statistics of 2009, rare earth reserves in the United States account for 13% of the world's total, while production is zero; Russia's reserves account for 19% of the world's total and output is zero; Australia's reserves are 5.4 million tons, and its output is also zero.

According to statistics, other countries that account for 70% of the world's rare earth reserves only exploit less than 10% of rare earth resources.

“Although rare earths are not China's unique resources, most of the world's rare earths have been supplied by us since 1995.” Xu Guangxian, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences known as the “Father of Chinese Rare Earths,” expressed to “Oriental Weekly”.

For example, in the United States, there is currently no rare earth processing plant in operation.

In fact, in the 20th century, the United States, Australia, and other countries also extracted rare earths, but a shock wave in the world of Chinese rare earth technology has changed this situation.

In the 1960s, the world’s largest rare earth mine—China’s Baiyun Obo began exporting rare earths abroad. At the time, rare earth mining was concentrated in a rare earth mine called MountainPass in the United States. The more advanced rare earth separation technology is controlled and monopolized by the French Rhodia rare earth plant.

At that time, China urgently needed to change from a rare earth resource country to a rare earth producer. To achieve this, the key is to develop advanced rare earth separation technology with independent intellectual property rights. In the late 1970s, China developed the "Rare Earth Extraction Cascade Theory."

Huang Chunhui recalled that under the guidance of this theory, the separation of rare earths can be carried out very cheaply and efficiently. “In the past, from a mine to designing a product, the process could not be completed in a year. Under the guidance of this theory, a new technology process It can be completed in a month."

In the 1990s, China's rare earth separation technology gradually took the lead in the world and formed a "China shock wave" in the world. For example, the United States Ames laboratory is the world's early institutions to do rare earth, from the 1940s began to rare earth separation. Its extraction concentration is one percent per liter. However, in China, extraction theory is used to extract concentrations of up to several hundred grams. The world began to realize that China has a very high purity of rare earths.

“The low-cost and high-efficiency application of China's rare earth separation technology has resulted in the production of a large number of single species of rare earths. On the one hand, it has formed a strong impact on foreign rare earth production. On the other hand, it has also promoted the rapid development of rare earth research and application in China and the world. Liao Chunsheng said.

With the clear path of rare earth separation technology, high profits of the rare earth industry have also begun to be discovered. “Separate single rare earth products are much higher than the prices that are not separated. In particular, some small yield elements are several thousand times more expensive than they are without separation. Xu Guangxian said that there are people saying that sending out a car of rare earth can open back to Santana.

From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, local rare earth plants and private rare earth plants came to the rescue. In China, nearly 100 rare earth plants emerged in a short period of time. At that time, the world's demand for rare earths was only 100,000 tons. China's rare earth separation capacity reached more than 150,000 tons and began to exceed demand.

Under China’s strong rare earth production capacity, countries no longer mine their own rare earths, and they all purchase Chinese rare earths. By the mid-1990s, the world's largest rare earth companies had closed their production lines, and the Rhodia plant in France and the Morlycorp plant in the United States had been suspended.