This is the best summary I could come up with:
The world’s two biggest rare earths companies outside of China are facing challenges turning rock from their mines into the building blocks for magnets used across the global economy, from Apple’s (AAPL.O) iPhone to Tesla’s (TSLA.O) Model 3 to Lockheed Martin’s (LMT.N) F-35 fighter jet.
Recent struggles by MP (MP.N), Lynas (LYC.AX) and other companies to refine their own rare earths highlight the difficult task the rest of the world faces to break China’s stranglehold on the key group of 17 metals needed for the clean energy transition, interviews with more than a dozen consultants, executives, investors and industry analysts showed.
Technical complexities, partnership strains and pollution concerns are hampering companies’ ability to wrest market share away from China, which according to the International Energy Agency controls 87% of global rare earths refining capacity.
To extract neodymium and praseodymium to build EV magnets, for example, MP must first remove the less-desirable lanthanum and cerium that compose about 83% of its California deposit in a process that relies on an intricate cocktail of acids, bases and other chemicals that are tailored to the mine’s geology.
In 2019, the pair agreed to build refining facilities near San Antonio, Texas and discussed with Trump administration officials their plans to be “the only large scale producer of separated (rare earth elements) in the world outside of China,” according to emails obtained by Reuters.
Are we really going to trust a LLM to summarize news for us accurately on Lemmy? I thought we were better than this.
I understand that, but people are going to trust this bot. And it’s in tons of threads now. I think it is a mistake.
