The U.S. Defense Department requested federal funding to support the ramp-up of several American rare earth element mines after China threatened an export ban.
The Sino-American Trade War raged this week with a series of back and forth retaliations. With China generally being unable to gain advantage by pressuring the Trump administration over the risks of higher import prices key component interruptions, Bloomberg reported that Beijing’s leadership has a plan to restrict export supply of the 17 so-called rare earth elements that are crucial to the U.S. production of military jet engines, satellites and lasers, plus consumer products from iPhones to electric cars.
The Government Accountability Office in 2016 reported that the United States represents about 9 percent of world demand for rare earth elements, with the Defense Department accounting for 1 percent of demand. But 15 or the 17 elements are key inputs across most of America’s high-tech weapons systems.
From the 1950s through the mid-1990s, California’s Mountain Pass Mine supplied most of the world’s demand for rare earth elements, including europium for color TVs. But China targeted domestic production and export supply of rare earth elements beginning in the late 1990s as a pathway to enter the Western world’s high-tech supply chain.
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