People seem to be to obsessed and deluded about rare earth

 Have you ever heard about stone age, bronze age, iron age? Yes, that what we name periods of human civilization. So what do we name our time? I suggest "rare earth age". Rare earth is now, no doubt, an important parts of our development. It appears in all electronic devices. Some people even emphasize that any nation that possess large reserves of rare earth, they hold the world future.

I sometimes encounter articles telling that somewhere people discover a mine of rare enough for the world for thousand of year or a nation stops rare earth export as a countermeasure in the trade war, etc. Newspapers seem to try to mislead the public to believe that rare earth is super important, without it the human civilization will come to an end and any news related to rare earth is really worth attention. Well, people seem to be to obsessed and deluded about rare earth.

First, rare earth is not rare at all, the global reserves are said to be more than 120 million metric tons distributed world wide. China has the most with 44 tons followed by Vietnam, Brazil, Russia with an approx. reserve of 21-22 million tons each. China is also the nation with the most production 168 thousand tons in 2021. Don't confuse the reserve and production. Reserve means how much they have in the nature while production means how much they exploit from that reserve during a period of time. Take USA as an example, US have an estimated reserve of only 1.8 million tons (rank 6th in term of reserve) but they produce 43 thousand tons in 2021 (rank 2nd below China).

Second, reserve is also a vague term. Let's make it clearer by distinguish the geological reserve  and exploitation reserve. Geological reserve means how much quantity there is in the nature. Many deposits are of low quality and are not profitable to be exploit. And even if being able to excavated out of the earth, of course we can not dig all them up, that's why we mention exploitation reserve - the quantity that we are really able to take. It depends on geological conditions, technologies applied. 

Last but not least, let's consider the content of rare earth in the ore. A large quantity of reserve means nothing if the content is to low.

Quangngai, November, 24, 2022