Economical Feasibility of Rare Earth Mining outside China

Abstract

Although rare earth deposits are found on all continents, China produces more than 90% of all globally used rare earth metals. Besides its economic dominance, China has also gained a monopolistic know how position in Rare Earth Elements process technologies. Based on China’s dominant position in rare earth markets, other countries such as the USA, Australia, Europe and Japan are increasingly concerned about a stable rare earth supply and their increasing dependence on China. In 2019 the new trade conflict blazed up between China and the U.S., and the threat of China to decrease or even stop rare earth supply to the U.S. is a new chapter in the trade war which shows that new means of supply must be found. The main focus of this paper is to evaluate and compare advanced rare earth projects outside China with a new holistic and objective method to get a detailed picture of possible rare earth mining outside China. In addition to the exclusively economic investigation, specific countries’ risk und price development scenarios are considered. This leads to an objective picture of rare earth mining outside of China, which is needed as a basis for discussions of secure rare earth supply for the western world. Building on this objective economic analysis, we can also add new supply risk due to new political situations. To this end, data is compiled on 14 selected focus projects with regard to the required investments, operating costs, and the potential revenues for each case. These data are used to develop a discounted cash flow model (with analogous assumptions and methods) for each project. This model enables the achievable net present value (NPV), the internal interest rate, and the static amortization period for each project to be determined.