Albanese’s ‘critical minerals’ bid to curry favour with Trump

Anthony Albanese’s latest bid to approach US President Donald Trump ahead of their planned meeting next week was to portray Australia as the savior in the race to free renewable energy and defense supply chains from China’s dominance of rare earth elements (REE). This is part of a proposal to reduce tariffs on copper and aluminum and extend the emerging tariff. critical minerals strategic reserve It received a $1.2 billion commitment in the May 2025 budget.

The latest trigger to support the idea came last week when China’s Ministry of Commerce expanded previous export controls by ruling that any company in China or abroad must obtain permission from China to export certain products that derive more than 0.1% of their value from rare earths. At the same time, the ministry also expanded the list of rare earth elements whose exports are restricted and banned their export for use by foreign militaries.

That’s the problem: REE is heavily used in weapons and military transportation. most critical To the USA. The USA was in search of dominant REE ability, and Albanese needs to convince Trump that allies can play a key role.

Beneath the headline “critical mineral security” lies the disturbing truth that REE extraction is dirty and water use is too high. Rare earth elements are not actually very rare; On the contrary, they are difficult to remove. China has no control over deposits. despite being ranked high in the league chartsIt holds an estimated 44 million metric tons of reserves; This is more than twice that of its closest rival, Brazil, with nearly 21 million tonnes. This is followed by India and Australia with 6.9 million and 5.7 million tons respectively, while Russia and Vietnam also host significant amounts of deposits.

Currently China accounts for approximately 70% of rare earth mining, 90% of separation and processing, and 93% of magnet production. Modern, high-performance magnets are at the heart of the energy transition, defense systems and advanced manufacturing. And almost all of them depend on a small subset of REEs.

China’s rare earth dominance driven by pollution outsourcing

Perhaps most importantly, China has had decades of expertise in the “dirty middle” of the process, with much of it taking place in war-torn neighbor Myanmar. Just as the wealthy West has outsourced toxic industrial processes such as wool scouring and cotton washing to China for decades, it is also happy to outsource to the Middle Kingdom the environmental poisoning processes that come hand in hand with REE. But increasing demand for REE in technology, renewable energy and modern weapons, along with China’s huge influence in the market, means the world is now playing catch-up.

There are 17 rare earth elementsand six are at the heart of modern technology: neodymium (Nd in the periodic table of elements), praseodymium (Pr), dysprosium (Dy), terbium (Tb), samarium (Sm) and yttrium (Y – chemically it behaves like a heavy REE, although it is lighter in atomic number). They are generally rarer, harder to extract, and more geopolitically sensitive because they are concentrated in a few deposits (mostly in southern China, Myanmar, and to a lesser degree Australia).

Nd and Pr drive electric vehicle motors and wind turbines; Dy and Tb give magnets high temperature resistance; Sm and Y are vital for missiles, sensors and lasers. If Beijing cuts supply, these will be the elements that matter, and they will be the most difficult to change.

Problems with heavy rare earth elements

Heavy REEs are the real choke point. It is mined in small volumes but is irreplaceable in magnets and defense systems, and is almost entirely processed in China. Even where this ore is available, the next step, crushing and leaching (C&L), is slow, capital-intensive and toxic, and will be a major test for a government that does not want to talk about such things at this stage.

While Australia’s Mt Weld mine and the Lynas Rare-Earths refinery in Kalgoorlie can produce light rare earth elements such as Nd and Pr, the race to supply Australia’s heavy rare earth elements is accelerating as several projects targeting these elements progress from exploration to early development. Browns Range project The Northern Minerals-operated facility, near Halls Creek in northern Western Australia, is the country’s most advanced heavy-rare earth venture and one of the few Dy and Tb-rich ventures outside China.

After years of pilot production, the company plans to move into full-scale mining later this decade. Further south, Victory Metals’ North Stanmore deposit Some of Australia’s highest grades of heavy rare earths have been reported near Meekatharra. Hastings Technology Metals’ Yangibana project It contains valuable Y as well as the dominant light-rare earth mixture in the Gascoyne region. Exploration work is also expanding New South Waleswhere the state government has identified Dy and Tb potentials in the central and western mining belts. Many of these areas overlap remote rural and Indigenous lands, raising familiar tensions over water use, rehabilitation and consultation rights.

The process uses hundreds of solvent extraction steps and large amounts of acid and water to separate elements that behave almost identically. The waste can contain radioactive thorium and uranium, turning any area into a political minefield. Australian miner Lynas Earths, the largest REE miner outside China, has endured an instructive waste saga in Malaysia. After years of public opposition over tailings storage and environmental risks at Lynas’ Gebeng facility in Pahang, the company was forced to carry C&L of ore containing low levels of radioactive thorium outside of the country. To maintain its export pipeline, Lynas The $730 million Kalgoorlie rare earth processing plant in Western Australia Conducting the C&L phase domestically. The new facility receives and produces concentrate from Lynas’ Mt Weld mine mixed rare earth carbonate (MREC)This allows the company to satisfy Malaysian regulators while keeping the downstream refining running.

Other countries with REE reserves, such as Brazil, and lower environmental protections and bureaucratic red tape (good things that generally protect Australians and their lands) are able to move faster on mining development and production. Proof of this is that Australian miners, including Gina Rinehart, are already piling into Brazil (just as they did in the past with iron ore, gold and copper). In fact, what the government puts forward as a plan is not just a concept at this stage. Floating so far Possible price floors, government-backed loans, sales guarantees and direct investment in Australian projects were made possible to support local producers.

Canberra can probably afford the waste, water and costs of true rare earth independence – but can Australian communities do it? Between the asterisked dollar signs, the dizzying problems with toxic waste that REE miners will face, the long lead times to bring new mines into full production, and Donald Trump, it promises to be pretty epic.