Precious metals that could save the planet

Rare earth elements are driving a revolution in low-carbon technology. Cahal Milmo reports on the commodity that has become the new oil

Baotou was of little interest to the outside world for millennia. When one of the first visitors reached its walls in 1925, it was described as “a little husk of a town in a great hollow shell of mud ramparts”. Some 84 years later, this once barren outpost of Inner Mongolia has been transformed into the powerhouse of China’s dominance of the market in some of the globe’s most sought-after minerals.
The Baotou Rare Earth Research Institute is home to some 400 scientists whose work has put China at the pinnacle of research into a group of 17 metals which sound as if they were dreamt up as poisons for superheroes – yttrium, promethium, europium – but whose unique properties make them indispensable to technologies worth trillions of pounds.

The development of Baotou into the global capital of rare earths, which occupy their own obscure corner of the periodic table, is due to two things: its proximity to the Baiyunebo mine, a vast open pit that is the world’s largest rare earth mine, and Beijing’s deliberate policy of at least two decades to turn this “Mother Lode” into a stepping stone towards status as an economic superpower.

As a result, Baotou has rapidly become of great interest to the outside world. China, which by accident of geography holds about 50 per of the world’s rare earth deposits and currently produces 97 per of global supplies, has made no secret of the nature or scale of its ambitions, summarised by former premier Deng Xiaoping when he said: “The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths.”

The Independent