China’s advantage erodes in a key area: rare earth minerals
WASHINGTON POST: …Two years after China limited its exports of “rare earth minerals,” unnerving developed countries that depended on them for industrial uses, production is expanding at sites outside China…
Alarmed over Chinese restrictions on rare earth exports, the United States, the European Union and Japan filed a World Trade Organization complaint alleging that China was using its monopoly over the minerals as a political and economic weapon — for instance, to punish Japan over its claims to contested islands in the South China Sea and to entice companies to relocate factories inside China by offering a cheaper supply of rare earth materials.
Even as the United States was pursuing its WTO claim, Colorado-based Molycorp, along with firms in Australia and elsewhere, were reshaping the landscape. Molycorp reopened a rare earth mine in Mountain Pass, Calif., that had been shuttered a decade ago because the supply of the minerals coming from China was so cheap… (more)
