In 1886, a French chemist dissolved holmium oxide in acid. Then, he added ammonia. Toiling over the marble slab of his fireplace, he repeated the procedure dozens of times.
Finally, voilà: He’d extracted a new element.
More than a century later, Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran’s painstaking discovery — which he named dysprosium, from the Greek for “hard to get” — is a crucial ingredient in the powerful magnets used in wind turbines and electric vehicle motors.
If the world is to succeed in its efforts to slow global warming, it will need dysprosium. It will also need a suite of other rare earth elements and minerals that many of us first heard about this week when China announced export controls that would effectively cut off the global supply of seven rare earths.
China’s export ban, part of the country’s retaliation for President Trump’s steep new tariffs, has exposed the extent to which the global energy transition depends on raw materials produced by China.
It’s not just rare earths, as my colleague Max Bearak and I reported this week. China supplies more than half of the 50 minerals the U.S. government has deemed critical to national security and the economy.
Among those critical minerals are lithium, cobalt and nickel, components of the rechargeable batteries that power electric vehicles and store energy on the grid when the weather is unfavorable for wind and solar generation. China refines or mines significant portions of the world’s supply of all three, and Chinese companies have acquired major stakes in mineral-rich countries: nickel in Indonesia, cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, lithium in Zimbabwe.
“China’s influence over critical mineral supply chains is far greater than trade data alone suggests,” said Krista Rasmussen, director of natural resource security at C4ADS, a research organization based in Washington that has traced Chinese companies’ hidden ownership of Indonesian nickel refineries. “Chinese firms exert substantial control across nearly every stage of the supply chain.”
Some critical minerals are far more abundant than rare earths, and American mining companies have been engaged for years in extracting them domestically and around the world, though at a fraction of the scale of Chinese companies.
Mr. Trump has sought to increase American access to certain critical minerals through deals with Ukraine and Congo, and there are deposits in Canada and Greenland, two places he has mused about annexing.
Rare earths, on the other hand, have narrower supply chains and are often more difficult to extract, requiring more cumbersome processes to separate them from other minerals (as Lecoq de Boisbaudran learned). The United States has just one operational rare earth mine, in Mountain Pass, Calif., which produces around 15 percent of global rare earths.
China’s rare earths export ban applies to all countries, not just the United States, meaning the U.S. will be unable to acquire the banned commodities through intermediaries. U.S. companies have stockpiled rare earth inventories that can tide them over, but they will not last forever, said Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James who specializes in the mineral trade.
“If we are still having this conversation six-plus months from now, that’s when we would begin to get worried about physical shortages,” Molchanov said, “but not right now.”
A key wildlife protection could soon end
The Trump administration is moving to effectively eliminate a crucial protection in the Endangered Species Act by redefining a single word: harm. A proposed rule issued this week would repeal a longstanding interpretation of what it means to harm imperiled plants and animals, and the destruction of habitat, the single biggest reason that many species face extinction, would no longer count. — Lisa Friedman
