Comment by seanmcdirmid
17 hours ago
I think Japan made their plans in the 2000s, maybe starting to gain traction in 2010, this is long before China became an EV power house or even had a dominant share of rare earth processing.
17 hours ago
I think Japan made their plans in the 2000s, maybe starting to gain traction in 2010, this is long before China became an EV power house or even had a dominant share of rare earth processing.
Independent of that. I'm saying there was some wisdom to continuing to fund it in Japan post-2010 as a hedge in case REEs were unavailable.
(Separate to whether the idea originally made sense back in the 2000s.)
Rare earths aren’t really that rare though. China has been the only country to invest in refining, sure, but any other country, including Japan or USA could have made similar investments and simply didn’t, because Chinese refiners were cheap and they couldn’t compete. Yes, the market failed to solve the REE problem at us, but it is not because we don’t have access to the inputs and we don’t know how to refine them.
Japan could have simply started their own refining business if they were really worried about REEs in 2010. Yes, it would take them until 2015 or so to ramp up, but that was still 11 years ago.