Planet Money - Battlefield rare earths: How the U.S. lost to China

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It all starts, as many complicated American sagas do, with prospectors looking for valuable stuff in the ground.

And they were actually looking for, radioactive materials, uranium in particular.

Mark Smith has worked for decades in the mining industry. And this origin story, this is before even his time. In 1949, the mountains between LA and Vegas.

So they were running around. Their Geiger counters started to click. But, you know, instead of, like, the really fast click like you get with something with uranium, click, click, it was kind of a click, click. Very, very slow, but they knew there was something there.

They had stumbled onto a huge deposit of what we now know as rare earths. Obscure metals with hard to pronounce names tucked down at the bottom of the periodic table.

Lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, prasiodinium. There was this 1 element called europium, and it provided Europium.

How do you spell that?

E u r o p I u m.

That sounds totally made up, like, from Avatar unobtainium or some nonsense.

Oh, it's way easier than I can hardly say the unobtainium, but I can say europium.

But, of course, europium, etcetera. None of these were the uranium the 1949 prospectors were looking for.

They had not a clue what any of this was. Nobody nobody was using any of this commercially at that point in time.

Yeah. Basically, no commercial use. Of course, today, rare earths are critical to making, like, everything from iPhones to fighter jets to microwaves. And now it is China that is processing about 90% of the world's rare earths, but none of that industry existed when those prospectors first heard their little Geiger counters click click clicking in that mountainous spot in the California Desert.

I wanna see what it looks like.

Me too. Let's look it up.

Yeah.

That is Emily Fang, NPR international correspondent. This whole episode brought to you by Emily and her her very excellent reporting on rare earths, the rise of Chinese manufacturing, and lots more. And, Emily and I are pulling up on Google Maps approximately where those prospectors went looking. We are zooming in on a spot just off an interstate highway on the border of California and Nevada. Here.

Let's go to satellite. How would you describe it, Emily?

It's kind of just like a giant hole in the ground.

Sure. Sure.

I wish I had a more technical description.

This giant hole is a mine. It's a dusty, deserty looking spot in between 2 mountains. It is called the Mountain Pass Rare Earths Mine.

Mountain Pass?

Mountain Pass, I think we can agree, is a rad name for like a mine.

I never thought about it that way. No? Maybe in an epic way, like you shall not pass Mountain Pass?

That's right. It feels like a a location on a fantasy map. The Mountain Pass. Okay. Well, radly named or not.

For decades, it was the world's biggest producer of europium and other light and heavy rare earth metals.

Mountain Pass was key to The United States building 1 of the most powerful industries in the world until we lost it all. Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone, joined today by our special cohost slash expert in residence, Emily Fang. And today on the show, we have a corporate saga made for prestige television about the elements that literally make prestige televisions or or at least they did at 1 point. And a single location and and really a single company tells the entire story of Rare Earths.

How after they were discovered at Mountain Pass, they they became so critical to the global economy, how China took the entire industry away from The US, and how The United States is desperately trying to take it back.

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That perplexing rare earth's discovery back in the California Hills in 1949 at Mountain Pass, well, by the 19 sixties, it had evolved into a very successful mining operation. You know, people were finding commercial uses for rare earths. Some could be processed into and and used to polish camera lenses and mirrors or to refine oil. And the company running that Mountain Pass mine, well, by the 19 sixties, they had made 1 of my new favorite, you know, like atomic age industrial videos with chipper narration about, chemicals and explosions and stuff.

That here is a business organization that can adjust itself to changing times.

We see some very grainy yellow footage of a of a politician or maybe a CEO standing in a lectern at the foot of some scenic hillside.

We can build attractive industrial establishments on the beautiful hillsides of America.

And, yes, that is the sound and footage of beautiful hillsides exploding. The story of Molly Corp, it says on the screen. What is Molly Corp?

Molly Corp is I feel like chat GPT.

Again, our cohost slash expert guide, Emily Fang. And the word we are saying, by the way, is Molycorp, m o l y corp, like corporation.

Molycorp was a big American company that used to run 1 of the biggest rare earths mines in the world. And its biggest mine was in California, Mountain Pass.

And critically, you may recall 1 of the elements discovered at Mountain Pass.

E u r o p I u m.

Europium. Yes. This again, longtime mining industry alum, Mark Smith.

The europium is what caused the red color in the colored televisions. And so for a period of time, every single color television that was made in the world had europium from the Mountain Pass deposit used to make that red color.

This is a huge deal at the time.

If you're looking for a moment where rare earths burst onto the scene, you could do worse than choosing this 1.

I think this 1 would be it.

Molly Corp with Mountain Pass had a rare earths monopoly by the 19 sixties. They were the world's provider of rare earths for years, for decades. And somewhere in that run, that is when Mark Smith becomes part of this story. When you join Mollicorp, you said 19 eighties.

Is that right? Think it was

about 8087, '88.

Where are things? Is it still the monopoly?

It it was still big.

And here, depending on how you see it, is where the cautionary tale begins. Because, spoiler, as rare earths became more and more critical to the world, Mollie Corp would not just lose its monopoly to China, it would go bankrupt, shut down Mountain Pass altogether, and Mark Smith would spend the rest of his life trying to warn people about the dangers of giving up control of the rare earths market. But, you know, that was years away. And when Mark first started working with Mollie Corp, he was there almost like a fly on the wall at first. He he was there for safety and environmental compliance stuff, but he'd still go to these meetings and he would learn stuff about the business situation, about products not selling at that point in the eighties the way that they used to.

I remember sitting in meetings, you know, strategy discussions where we're talking about, well, what do we do with all this cerium? What do we do with all this lanthanum?

These were rare earths that they used to be able to sell no problem, but not anymore?

These things were were stacking up, and people were starting to get worried about, you know, how are we gonna sell everything that we're making at at Mountain Pass.

So suddenly, you're like, People don't want our versions of these as much. Something's up?

Correct.

Mark had a suspicion of what was up, and it was that Mollicorp, after decades of monopolizing the industry, had competition. Those clients might be buying cheaper products from China, and this was the beginning of the takeover, at least the first moment Mark can remember. And what was wild is that it may all have been arguably Molly Corp's own fault because around the water cooler, on lunch breaks, whatever, Mark had heard this this pretty odd story.

It was just a casual conversation. It piqued my interest, and and I did talk to a few people about it, to find out more.

What Mark found out was before his time, like in the 19 sixties, the CEO of Mollie Corp had invited a whole bunch of people to come and see how the world's rare earth monopoly does its thing, how they mine the stuff at Mountain Pass, the elaborate processes of refining and turning it into useful stuff, and that group of visitors, all from China.

They could wander around, take pictures, and whatnot. They took all that information back, and they became, you know, what is today the world's best processors of rare earth materials in the world.

Knowing where this story goes, it is very hard to understand that decision. So can you try to make the case for why that might make some sense?

I don't know that I can make any sense of that. I don't I don't know what the right decision was at the time. All I know is what decision was made at the time, and now we are where we are today.

It looks bad now. But Emily Fang says, Mollicorp, you know, this huge, powerful global company at the time had invited in a very different, much less powerful China.

China back then was just starting out. It hadn't even economically liberalized. They were still under central state economic planning. There were no such things like private companies at that point. China was not the economic powerhouse that we think of today.

And I don't think that Mollie Corp saw them as a threat in any way.

And it's possible that China also did not fully understand how important rare earths were gonna be.

Not at first.

No. Not at first. But within just a few years, it seems they did. And for that story, for the the story of how China grew and then weaponized the rare earths industry, we turn to professor Rod Eggert. I am just now noticing, professor, that your your Zoom screen name says Rod Eggert dash mines, m I n e s.

Would you like to explain that? That's pretty cool. Yeah?

Well, it it it may be less cool than you think. It simply is the the preferred branding for Colorado School of Mines.

Rod is coauthor of a paper that really caught our eye. It's called China's public policies toward rare earths 1975 to 2018. And, you know, Beijing tends to be like a sort of black box of decision making. And Rod's paper, it tries to peer through the tiniest cracks and piece together a blow by blow account of how and why China completely took over the rare earths industry. Rod and his coauthors did this by simply reading every publicly available Chinese policy document they could get their hands on from the last 40 years.

And and there is evidence that in the seventies and eighties, China did have its eye on rare earths.

I think some Chinese leaders at the time felt that or knew that China had some attractive geologic resources of rare and that rare earths had the potential to become important inputs to a number of engineered high-tech products.

But but the keyword there is inputs. Because what Rod's found is is that it doesn't seem like getting better at rare earths was some grand political scheme by China.

I think it was rare earths were part of a larger strategy and quite frankly, a very small part of a much larger strategy.

At that time, China was simply trying to transform its economy to become the world's manufacturing hub. And so that would require China to also have inputs for stuff, the kind of things that go into making other things. And on that long list of possible manufacturing inputs, China seemed to include rare earths.

They established the rare earth office maybe in 1975, so mid 19 seventies.

In my mind, a rare earth's office would be bejeweled with various rare earth examples. The door would be covered in beautiful rare earths, But I suspect that's not what I should picture here?

I I don't actually know, but my guess is that that's not what occurred, that that it was maybe 1 or 2 people in a nondescript office that were charged with undertaking activities and coordinating with other agencies to prioritize rare earth mining.

Yes. Do not be fooled by how official the office of rare earths sounds, says Emily Fang, not in the early 19 seventies stages of the rare earths industry.

In fact, it started out as just the most dirty, unregulated backyard kind of, like, side industry. The early stages were just people who realized they could make a lot of money digging holes in the earth, and they were responding to economic incentives.

So how then do we go from holes in the ground to global domination? Well, that is where a massive centrally planned government did come in handy. And by the 19 nineties

The incentives put in place within China made it difficult for non Chinese producers to compete.

What Rod and his coauthors found, going through all those documents, is that China implemented all kinds of policies that simply made it impossible to compete with China. Policies that, to me, read like a kind of supercharged industrial policy experiment. For 1 thing, there was, well, loads of cheap government money.

The Chinese government offered low cost or preferable financing.

Very useful for anyone looking to start a more advanced capital intensive rare earths mining and processing operation. And in fact, that seemed to spawn lots of rare earth companies in China.

We think of this as being a monopolistic activity. But in fact, within China, it's a very competitive space.

And that, Rod says, rapidly drives prices down, incentivizes innovation, plus

There's been a consistent focus on educating and training scientists and engineers who have expertise in rare earths. And so today, much of the world's expertise with respect to rare earths resides in China.

And this is huge because, really, just pulling rare earths out of the ground, that's not the hard part. The hard part is processing those into useful materials. And to make sure China also got an edge on the processing, Emily Fang says that Beijing managed to build these, like, policy walls.

So they said, okay, that rare earth ore cannot leave the country in large amounts. First, you've got to refine that ore in country, in China, into a usable product. And by the way, if you're a foreign company that wants to get in on the action on rare earths in China, there's a lot of bureaucratic hoops you've got to jump through and you have to set up all of your facilities in China as well. Move your supply chains to China. So they developed this entire supply chain from mining rare earths to refining it to then exporting it to the end customer.

China ends up doing all of that.

And so what happens is by the 19 nineties, China has taken virtually the entire rare earths industry away from Mollicorp and The United States. China is able to mine and process rare earths as well as The United States and at a cheaper price. The lower price, of course, is partly because of cheaper labor costs, cheap access to money, and in the beginning at least, because of lower environmental standards. But as the industry matures, Beijing starts to tend its overnight industry a bit more. It it works on cleaning the environmental stuff up.

It consolidates the industry into just a handful of state owned or state backed companies. And by the late nineties, China has gone from touring the Mollicorp facility to supplying the vast majority of the world's rare earths in just, 30 years. And Mark Smith from Mollicorp, he says that really who knows? Who knows if if that has anything to do with those Mollie Corp facility tours from the 19 sixties?

Knowing how good the Chinese were and still are at at taking a process and and just maximizing its efficiency and its throughput, I think they would have figured this out anyway.

Marcus thought a lot about this because, you know, he was at Mollie Corp during a lot of this rise of China watching his company decline as a result. The whole American system, really, for rare earths was collapsing.

We lost. That's right.

And what was the moment you knew we had lost?

Molicorp actually shut down its Mountain Pass operation.

There were a number of problems with keeping Mountain Pass open, but China was a huge 1.

But, we shut down the operation at that point. We couldn't find enough, people to sell the products to. And then there was no question at that point. Right? Because there was no other production really in in the world other than China.

No other production really in the world other than China. And leaving this critical rare earths industry to a single country, to China. Well, honestly, for a lot of years, it seemed like the world was mostly okay with this until the fishing boat incident.

The broad sketches of this are China has a lot of territorial disputes with many of its neighbors, including Japan. And with Japan, they have been sparring diplomatically over this cluster of islands in the East China Sea. China calls them the Jiayu Islands. Japan calls them the Senkakus.

And it is amongst this cluster, the fishing boat incident occurs. The year is 2010.

There's a Chinese fishing boat captain who's sailing through these islands, and Japan claims that he ventures into their territorial waters.

There's a standoff. The Chinese boat captain ends up ramming a Japanese coast guard vessel.

They detain him. They end up arresting him, and it sparks this huge outcry in China. The protests have been scattered across several cities in Central China where there are many Japanese factories. There is a political decision made in China that they're going to make a stand on this, punish Japan over arresting their guy, and most notably, China, informally, quietly, just stopped selling all rare earth products to Japan.

So quietly, no rare earths to Japan.

Japan suddenly realizes that their car industry and their electronics industry is totally dependent on rare earth products.

Yeah. Because, like, everything has quietly become dependent on rare earth products. Just take, you know, that newfangled Apple iPhone that had just come out. Rare earths were used to reduce distortion in tiny glass camera lenses, to improve sound from tiny speakers, or or to make bright colors on a screen. And so Japan, famous for its high-tech manufacturing, losing its rare earth supplier, very bad.

So Japan certainly sits up and notices. And because they sell so many cars and I don't know what were we using then Discmans or whatever to the rest of the world? Don't know if I using Discmans

2011. What were we using? But it was a Sony. So yep.

So Sony for sure notices. Mitsubishi totally notices. And, yeah, the export ban hits hits, the global news.

And we all kind of have to learn about rare earths, I guess, for the first time.

For a short period of time.

Right. And if you were paying attention during this short period of time, there were 2 key lessons here. The world had become incredibly reliant on this weird class of metals, and China had a lot of power over the global economy as a result. Now in addition to blocking all of Japan's supply, China reduced the overall amount of rare earths it was exporting around this time, saying that they needed it for their own manufacturing industries. And so with the panic around rare earths from the Japan situation, plus a tightening supply of rare earths, it all causes a dramatic increase in rare earths prices around the world.

We've seen prices jump about 600 to 700% for these rare earth minerals.

And look, if you are a long time rare earth's evangelical, this could be what we like to call here at planet money, a problem tunity.

Some are saying that there's a bubble forming. What do you think?

I think that these prices are absolutely sustainable, and that's really based upon the very simple facts of supply and demand.

This is Molly Corp, Mark Smith on TV in 2010. You're on Bloomberg. You look younger, I may say.

I had hair. Yep.

You had hair. I wasn't gonna say that specifically.

For, like, 10 years, Mark had been keeping what was left of Molly Corp alive. He had, in fact, been named the CEO. So I guess CEO of a company with a boarded up rare earths mine essentially. But with those new sky high rare earths prices and the increasing demand

Mark sees an opportunity. The first decision he makes is to reopen the Mountain Pass mine. And

You shall pass. Yes.

Exactly. So the first phase of this whole project, which he gives the name Project Phoenix.

We can agree that is a rad name. Yes? At least?

I like that. Yes.

Okay. You're on

the shall pass, and we are going to rise. So Mark had a really good business case. High prices for rare earths, and look what they're doing to Japan. Let's boost our industry back home in The US.

So Mark, Mollie Corp, they announce what Emily and I agree is the radically named Project Phoenix.

The first phase is is small, just to, like, start mining and processing some of that ore.

It's a big step for domestic industry to get back into this.

So It's a big step, and it gets a lot of buzz. Like, he gets a lot of news coverage.

Right. Like, you know, going on Bloomberg.

The Chinese are only exporting 30,000 tons of material to the rest of the world right now. The rest of the world needs 50,000 tons of this material a year. If anyone has taken economics 1 0 1, what's going to happen? And that is prices are going to go up.

What are you feeling in those interviews?

Absolute optimism because I I I was naive.

Because here is what happens. Mark and Mollie Corp, they start working on that first phase, which is, you know, construction, whatever. And Mark starts to wonder, maybe there's an even bigger opportunity here.

We started to take a look at what the cost would be to undertake a phase 2 and double the capacity of the facility.

To double the amount of rare earths pulled out of Mountain pass. And and, actually, given high prices, the math worked out. Back on Bloomberg. Tell the world, Mark.

Mark, you told my colleague, Pym Fox, in a radio interview last night that you made double production targets for 2012 to 40,000 tons. How feasible is that? Can you get it done?

Oh, well, we can absolutely get it done. Although the decision to do so needs to be made very quickly.

So If

you could imagine young Mark on Bloomberg, really optimistic, like, just selling the hell out of Phoenix, what would you tell him now?

I think about that almost every day of my life, Kenny. What could I have done differently? And I think what I should have been was satisfied with phase 1, getting really good at what we did, worry about the expansion later.

Because all of Mark's announcements about reopening the Mountain Pass mine, you know, that small first phase, that had all been going great. It was only after he announced this doubling of rare earths that things changed. That is when he says China seemed to really take notice and use its control of the rare earths industry against him.

Very quickly, China released a bunch of rare earth products on the global market. And the price for rare earth products, the exact kind that Mark was going to refine, the price for those drop.

They sent a very strong message. You are not going to produce that much rare earths in today's market.

You know this for fact or is this just another allegation? What

is it?

It's nothing more than an allegation, but I I don't think there's anybody in the rare earth world that would, suggest something other than what I just suggested.

Whatever the suggestion, China unleashed a ton of supply, the price of rare earths cratered, and it was very bad for Mollie Corp and Mark.

And that that, ultimately was the demise of Mollie Corp.

There's no smoking gun to say that China and these Chinese companies sold a bunch of product globally just to undercut Mark. But it is undeniable that they are able to coordinate their rare earth industry to a high degree of coordination because most of everything is state owned in China.

When you talk to Mark Smith about all of this, it sounds like there are any number of lessons he has maybe taken away. Did his phoenix fly too close to the sun perhaps? Was it in the end a slow and steady wins the race situation? Possibly. But, really, there is 1 thing Mark learned for sure, something he has been trying to get people to take seriously, and that is that the more important rare earths become to the global economy, the more risky it becomes to be completely dependent on China for those rare earths.

I was certainly 1 of few who understood what what that could could ultimately mean if they wanted to use it as a political card.

That's about 15, almost 20 years of you knocking on doors, being the Cassandra. I don't know if you were you were you a popular dinner party guest constantly warning people of the danger of being dependent on rare earths?

Rare earths market again. Oh.

And and, Emily, I didn't do it in a, the sky is falling way. And I spent a lot more time at the dinner parties talking about the goodness of rare earths, not not the downside. But I I talked to every person that sits next to me on either side on the plane. I will talk to people in the airport. I will talk to everybody to educate them on what these issues are and why they are important.

When we first started talking to Mark about all of this stuff, almost a year ago, actually, he told us it was it was still hard to get people's attention about this stuff. And then suddenly, it wasn't. So you would say things have changed a bit?

A lot since we last spoke.

Okay. The US government, maybe, maybe takes a page from the Chinese policy playbook after this break.

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And we're back. So The US is more than a decade after China first flexed its rare earth power against mark, against Japan. The US is really taking rare earths seriously. And what, you may ask, precipitated this wake up call? Well, apologies if you've heard this before.

My fellow Americans, this is liberation day waiting for a long time.

Ah, yes. April 2025. President Trump announces loads of liberation day tariffs, including humongous tariffs on Chinese goods. And Emily Fang says not long after, China, once again, flexed its rare earth power, not banning exactly, but, you know, very noticeably limiting the export of some critical rare earths The US needs.

The defense department, department of war, however you wanna call it in The US, realized that they didn't have any replacement for some of these magnets and products that China was making in their defense equipment. And it was it was a punch that The US did not expect.

It's almost as if everyone forgot China did this 15 years ago to Japan.

Almost. Right?

That that seemed to be the wake up call. And over the last year, The US has made a remarkable effort to resuscitate its own rare earths industry. The federal government has started to pour billions of dollars into companies developing mines and refining facilities. There have been grants and loans. The US has even bought into a handful of American rare earths companies.

The US is even trying to get Mexico and Europe and Japan to agree to a rare earths price floor so China cannot, like, crater the price again.

And what really strikes me is this is a state driven effort. This is the US government coming in and trying to set a price for rare earths, investing money in companies, even buying stakes in them. And, Kenny, this is this is how China dominated the rare earth sector.

It does.

This is what The US is now doing.

Let's say rhyme with with what we heard in China. Yes. It rhymes with that kind of central planning. And you will never guess who is this time on the receiving end of some of this central planning. That's right.

Mark Smith. He's he's at a different company now. It's called Niocorp, and they're they're still trying to get their rare earths mine up and running in Nebraska.

We do have to get a little scrappier, and we have to figure out how to pay the bills and keep the lights on.

A far cry from the days of Mollie Corp as the world's rare earth monopoly. But, you know, the whole American industry is a far cry from all that. And Mark's company has gotten millions and millions of dollars in government loans so far. No direct government ownership yet.

We are meeting with the Department of War. We're meeting with the Department of Commerce. We're meeting with the Department of Interior. We're meeting with the White House. We're we're in line to let the the government know what we can do for them to help this situation in The United States.

And if we are, you know, lucky enough to be 1 of those chosen, wouldn't that be wonderful?

If the US government came to you and said, we want 10% of your company, but we'll give you a huge amount of money.

You know, can I talk like a CEO again?

I mean, I think it's all we're gonna get from you, Mark.

It is it does come kinda natural after this long, but, I can't think of of a better equity partner to have in a in a company like that than the US government because now you have wherewithal if projects, go awry. So I I think there's good pluses, good minuses. Overall, I think the pluses win.

So, yes, CEO answer to that. But overall, Mark seems to be relieved that The US is finally taking the rare earths thing seriously.

I think probably also he's a bit cautious because he's been burned before. And it is still going to take, most analysts would estimate, at least 5 years, maybe up to a decade, to really get the American rare earth industry back on solid footing.

Now 1 final note. If you are wondering what happened to Good Old Mountain Pass, where the uranium prospectors arguably accidentally started all of this with with all that lanthanum and cerium and maybe it was europium and what is what what's your favorite rare earth at this point, Emily?

I think terbium or yttrium. I just like yttrium because it's it's spelled weird. It's y t t r I u m.

I feel like I just lost spelling bee, but, Mountain Pass. Emily says there is an amazing ending for the American mine that arguably started this whole industry because after the Mountain Pass mine was boarded up and shut down, it gets sold.

It gets sold to a company called MP Materials, and then a Chinese 1 of the Chinese state companies buys a stake in MP Materials. Up until last year, MP Materials would send their rare earth ore to China to get refined and processed.

That's wild.

But then last year, the Department of Defense took out a 15% stake in NP Materials as well, and it's looking to refine everything in The US now.

So, yes, the Mountain Pass rare earths mine, now partly owned by a state backed Chinese company and the government of the United States of America. Shareholder meetings gonna be fascinating. This episode was produced by Emma Peasley and edited by Marianne McEwen. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Sina Lofredo and Jimmy Keeley. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer, and a very, very, very special thanks this week to Emily Fang.

Her work is incredible. I'm Kenny Malone. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

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