This article is a collaboration between IEEE Spectrum, the flagship magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and Foreign Policy.

The global campaigns to break China’s dominance of vital rare-earth markets are shaping up into one of the signature geostrategic struggles of the early 21st century. Hundreds of mining companies, government agencies, and industrial facilities scattered across North America, Australasia, and Europe are striving to compete with Chinese firms, which control roughly 90 percent of the markets for rare-earth oxides and rare-earth metals.

This article is a collaboration between IEEE Spectrum, the flagship magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and Foreign Policy.

The global campaigns to break China’s dominance of vital rare-earth markets are shaping up into one of the signature geostrategic struggles of the early 21st century. Hundreds of mining companies, government agencies, and industrial facilities scattered across North America, Australasia, and Europe are striving to compete with Chinese firms, which control roughly 90 percent of the markets for rare-earth oxides and rare-earth metals.

These are the ingredients upon which vast and crucial manufacturing categories depend: semiconductors, LEDs, lasers, displays, metal alloys, optical lenses, and catalysts for petroleum and chemical processing. Most important, though, are permanent magnets. Essentially all powerful electric motors (and most high-quality audio speakers) are based on rare-earth permanent magnets. These motors are the heart of electric vehicles, heating and cooling systems, robots, appliances, tools, and military systems—from tactical drones to ballistic-missile submarines.

Succinctly put, any industrial power that wants to remain competitive in vital, high-tech industries must have access to a steady supply of rare-earth elements or products based on them. The traditional supply chain for these elements, originating in China, is increasingly fraught—so much so that some analysts are beginning to use the term “mineral war.” But the countries that are now scrambling to piece together alternative supply chains, whether by themselves or in cooperation with each other, face daunting odds. Putting aside the sheer momentum of the Chinese rare-earths juggernaut, few industries can match the rare-earths business for instability, risk, intrigue, and sheer frustration.

A worker processes minerals for export at a monazite ore plant in Jos, Nigeria, on March 5.Sodiq Adelakun/Reuters

This tumult notwithstanding, many rare-earth experts see a way forward, and it depends on a specific kind of ore, called monazite.

“The future is monazite,” according to Jack Lifton, an analyst and the co-chairman of the Critical Minerals Institute, an organization formed to promote the creation of a North American supply chain. Lifton, who has been studying the rare-earths industry since 1962, has seen countless trends, companies, and technologies come and go, and he is not given to sweeping statements. But on the subject of monazites, he’s unabashedly bullish. “Right now,” he said, “monazite is the most important rare-earth ore.”

A worker walks past the construction site for a Lynas Rare Earths Ltd. plant in Gebeng, Malaysia, on Feb. 1, 2012.Mohd Rasfan/AFP via Getty Images

The path forward with monazite isn’t going to be smooth or straight, Lifton and others are quick to acknowledge. Monazite contains not only huge amounts of valuable rare earths, it also typically contains radioactive thorium and, sometimes, uranium, which means its handling, storage, and processing is tightly regulated by government agencies.

Nevertheless, major investment is now flowing to monazite mines and processing technologies. In the United States, Energy Fuels, which operates the country’s only conventional uranium mill, has developed its own extraction process for both light and heavy rare earths, the latter of which are currently produced almost exclusively in China. The company has spent more than $200 million to secure monazite assets in Madagascar and Brazil, and is now embarking on a second phase in which it plans to scale its rare-earth production to higher commercial levels, at an estimated cost of $410 million.

Meanwhile, though, a government project in Saskatchewan, Canada, stands as a cautionary tale for monazite backers. After six years of construction and expenditures of more than 100 million CAD, a processing plant there has produced unspecified but relatively minuscule quantities of rare earths. The processing plant, built by the Saskatchewan Research Council, was supposed to be producing 40 tonnes of rare earths per month by the end of 2024. It didn’t happen. Then “full operation,” with production of 400 tonnes of metal per year was planned for “early 2025.” That didn’t happen, either. The organization is now targeting late 2027—by which time it will have cost more than 216 million CAD, according to the SRC CEO Mike Crabtree.

Outside of North America, major monazite projects are also planned by Iluka Resources, Tronox, Hastings Technology Metals Limited, Steenkampskraal, Astron Corporation, Sovereign Metals, and Mkango Resources, among others. Lynas Rare Earths Ltd., in Perth, Australia, the largest rare-earths company outside of China, is also pouring resources into expanding its monazite mining and processing operations, most notably at its mine at Mount Weld, one of the........

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