Could not be happening at a better time. Of course, it will be several years before production is ramped up but there is a worldwide need for Rare Earths and China is the only vendor so far. We have huge resources in the USA but the environmentalists will not let us mine them. From Nature:
The tremendous potential of deepsea mud as a source of rare-earth elements
Potential risks of supply shortages for critical metals including rare-earth elements and yttrium (REY) have spurred great interest in commercial mining of deep-sea mineral resources. Deep-sea mud containing over 5,000ppm total REY content was discovered in the western North Pacifc Ocean near Minamitorishima Island, Japan, in 2013. This REY-rich mud has great potential as a rare-earth metal resource because of the enormous amount available and its advantageous mineralogical features. Here, we estimated the resource amount in REY-rich mud with Geographical Information System software and established a mineral processing procedure to greatly enhance its economic value. The resource amount was estimated to be 1.2Mt of rare-earth oxide for the most promising area (105km2×0–10mbsf), which accounts for 62, 47, 32, and 56 years of annual global demand for Y, Eu, Tb, and Dy, respectively. Moreover, using a hydrocyclone separator enabled us to recover selectively biogenic calcium phosphate grains, which have high REY content (up to 22,000ppm) and constitute the coarser domain in the grain-size distribution. The enormous resource amount and the efectiveness of the mineral processing are strong indicators that this new REY resource could be exploited in the near future.
Very cool - 50 years worth of ores. China just lost a major revenue source.
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