this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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The issue with this is that there's plenty of rare earth minerals (they're not rare) all around the world, it's the refining process that is expensive and extremely polluting.
Doesn't matter if Norway found decades worth of supply, when nobody but China is willing to build the processing plants. And China has more than enough rare earth mineral supplies themselves.
Hard to say. Current political view seem to be that EU wants to get rid of dependancy on china and great way to get free is to start mining our own.
There is pretty large deposits in Sweden, Finland and Norway so one effiecient, central refining plant could be churning virtually limitless amounts of materials, if only there would be enough funding to get the ball rolling. (Before anybody says i know Norway is not part of european union, but it is part of european economic area and part of EFTA) France already has a refining plant so the tech knowledge is already found inside the EU.
The issue is that nobody has found a way to refine it in a way that isn't extremely polluting without the cost being extremely excessive and making it entirely pointless.
We could mine as much as we want, but the only country OK with refining this stuff is China. Unless we solve the issue of refining this in a relatively clean way at a somewhat competitive price, no refining will ever be set up in Europe.
Only sith deal in absolutes.
Caremag/Caresters plant in France is scheduled to open in 2026 and Solvay that is already running in France is trying to hit 30% of EU's demand by 2030.
If we would start building the mines right now it would take close to 10 years to have the mines running. By that time the refining process in France should be pretty well tested and if there would be more minerals produced than they can process, building new facility with the know how they have accumulated and any progress in tech, is not that big of an leap anymore.
By the way this would be pretty close how Norway originally got their economy running with hydropower and later with oil. They waited until there was enough know how to make effective plants. Then they made deals with outside companies where the state would own part of the facilities, but the companies would make enough money to make a profit. After the deals would expire the state would get the now profitable facilities for them self, but the original companies had made enough money for the deal to be good for them.