According to a forecast by the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME), Brazil could become one of the top five producers of rare earth metals (REM) in the world in the coming years.

Restrictions on REM exports by China, which accounts for about 70% of global production, could spur the development of the REM mining sector in Brazil.

Brazil has the third largest proven REM reserves in the world (more than 21 million tonnes), behind only China (44 million tonnes) and Russia (28.5 million tonnes). The total number of reserves, however, could be more than 30 million tonnes, as the ion-adsorption rare earth deposits discovered in recent years are not currently taken into account. Nevertheless, the country is currently not a major REM exporter and its share in world production is less than 1%. The main REM deposits are located in the states of Minas Gerais, Goiás, Tocantins, Amazonas, and on the coasts of the Northern and North-Eastern regions.

According to the latest data published by the National Mining Agency (ANM), for 2023, the level of production of ‘monazite and rare earth metals’ was just over 4,000 tonnes. For Brazil, REM mining and processing is a relatively young sector of the mining industry, despite the fact that the first steps in this direction were taken since the 1940s. Nevertheless, the Brazilian government intends to actively develop this sector in the future.

As early as March 2021, Decree No. 10657 on the ‘Policy to Support Environmental Licensing of Investment Projects for the Extraction of Strategic Minerals’ was published, which defined the State’s strategy for REM and rare elements. Subsequently, Decision No. 2 of the National Secretariat of Geology, Mining and Mineral Processing of June 2021 classified REM (17 elements) and a number of rare metals (niobium, tantalum, thallium, lithium, tungsten, vanadium) as a group of minerals of importance in the field of high-tech production.

Currently, Brazil’s minor production of REMs comes from the mining of monazite sand, a primary raw material that is a phosphate of rare earth metals, thorium and uranium, with deposits in the states of Rio de........

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